L.A.'s Three Newest Open-Air, Pedestrian Malls

For all its drive-by reputation, Los Angeles has become a runway of pedestrians. Somewhere between the creation of the Century City Mall and the refurbs of Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica and Pasadena's Old Town, urban planners and merchants realized that people like to see the sky as they duck in and out of doorways, that they prefer the breezy noise of the open street to the trapped cacophony of the average indoor mall. Many argue that a true street scene can never emerge from some prefab Main-Street-in-a-Box. And it's true that within the frescoed and fountained faux-ness of the three new marketplaces many of the stores are redundant."

Thanks to Laura Kranz