Our Fave Things at ROW DTLA

ROW DTLA is our amazing, outdoor market venue, and a destination itself worth visiting. The unique mixed-use space in downtown Los Angeles encompasses 32 acres of restaurants and cafes, shops, offices, and loads of Instagrammable photo moments. Plus it’s a great outdoor place to bring the kids and dogs.

We’ve put together a list of some of our favorite places to go and things to do while you’re there! And remember, your first two hours of parking are free during our pop-up market. See you soon!

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Cafe and Dining

With some great options to choose from, ROW dining has you covered all day long. You can start with breakfast at Cafe Dulce, grab a quick lunch at Pikunico and do cocktails and dinner at Rappahannock Oyster Bar. Here are some drool worthy highlights of some of our tops picks!

go get em tiger

Hayato

Rappahannock Oyster Bar

Shopping

In between meals, spend your time in ROW DTLA’s globally recognized shops. You can pretty much find anything you’re looking for here. Here’s a little peak into shops that have our homes, kitchens, and bodies covered.

Flask & Field

Poketo

Still Life Ceramics

Play

There are artful walls, installations, and the beautiful shop fronts themselves that give ROW DTLA so many photo opportunities. This beauty, coupled with the amazing architecture that is the DNA in this historic district, has photographers from all over flocking to shoot here. So take your time, wander thoroughly, find all the hidden gems, but don’t leave this place without capturing it on camera.

I'm a Cover Girl!

You know those crazy items people add to their Bucket Lists, like "swim with sharks" or "make a million dollars" or "meet the President of the United States"? Things they aspire to but most likely will never actually accomplish? For me, "grace the cover of a magazine" was one of those things. I mean, at some point during childhood every girl probably dreams of being on the cover of a magazine - even the tomboys, trust me, I was one of them. While I think I fantasized about being on the cover of Seventeen or Vogue or the now defunct Sassy, I knew that in reality my chances were very slim. Don't get me wrong, I'm a Dreamer, so think that if I put my mind to it I can accomplish anything! But I'm not a model or an actress or a musician, I'm 5 foot 4 inches tall, and I'm half-Chinese/half-Finnish... Normally people like me are not on the covers of magazines. So imagine my FREAKING EXCITEMENT when I saw the cover of this month's Southwest Airlines in-flight magazine, Spirit!

I cannot thank Southwest and the editors at Spirit enough for choosing to dedicate the cover and 20 pages (yes, twenty!) to The New American Dream and creative entrepreneurship! Small businesses across the country are what fuel the American economy and create jobs - creative, arts-based businesses also help to grow creative-thinking (which leads to enhanced problem-solving skills), encourage a love for art and design, can help people express themselves through tough times, aid in depression and more. I am honored to be included in the issue at all, let alone be on the cover. The lesson here is dream big, involve yourself in community and keep doing what you love to do... You never know where it might lead!

What Lies Beneath

As I walked the first few hours of Stair Trek last weekend (the “Toughest Urban Walk on Any Planet”) I realized while talking to some of my fellow walkers that stairwalkers fall into one of two camps: Those who look up, and those who look down. The people who look up get to see trees and architecture. The people who look down are rewarded with views of trash and infrastructure (and sometimes they’re literally rewarded… they find money!). Both methods are interesting, and there’s no right way, so I challenged myself as an “up-looker” to shift my eyes down for a few miles. And when I looked down I saw these…

I can’t believe in all my years of walking that I never noticed how beautiful LA’s manhole covers are! Such beautiful type, patterned according to what’s below, inevitably straddling a massive crack in the concrete. I may never look up again.

More photos from Stair Trek. And if you’d like to join a future Big Parade stairwalk, go here.

Alissa Walker is a writer, a gelato-eater, and a walker in LA. Follow her at @gelatobaby and read more at gelatobaby.com

The Original LA Street View

Before Google’s camera-cars crawled our streets like a fleet of curious robots, photographers used their two feet to capture what our cities looked like. And today I discovered a new one, William Reagh, in a story by the always-excellent KCET Artbound. I was totally captivated by Reagh, who would visit the same neighborhoods over and over to document the story of a quickly changing LA. As his son tells the author, Lynell George: “He loved Cartier-Bresson and the concept of photographer as stroller. But, I think he thought of himself as a preservationist; someone who just needed to be doing this. He seemed to feel somebody had to.”

It made me think about the photos I take while I’m walking around LA today. Like Reagh, I hope to bear witness to a transforming city. When I lived in Hollywood the urban landscape was changing so quickly that it was one of the reasons I started my own blog. But in 50 years will anyone care? Will anyone even want to go through—the over 14,000 (and counting!)—images I’ve shot of LA? And what will set mine apart from the millions of other Angelenos who are doing the same thing? What can make our photos of LA mean something a half century from now?

Something to think about as you post your Instagrams this week.

Beating the Heat

A little over two years ago, I wrote a post about a downtown fountain on a 96-degree day:

In two years, this fountain will sit like a crown on a ribbon of green that reaches from here to City Hall, the white building you can see in the distance. There will be a real public park for downtown LA. And a new museum with great architecture sure to make it a worthy foil to Disney Hall. Which means—and we hope—thousands of people will be crawling these blocks at all hours of the day and night.

That means you’ve got two years to enjoy the silent canyons of Grand Avenue. Two years to experience the vacant plazas, the empty benches, the quiet sidewalks. Especially on this scorcher of an afternoon, I highly recommend paying a visit to these lonely urban geysers for one of their last private performances.

Last week, that park finally opened. As my review in the LA Weekly notes, it’s well-designed, but it will need one crucial element—those people—to make it a truly transcendent public space. Luckily, one part of it has already become one of the most dynamic new places in downtown. And yes, it’s a fountain:

The plaza below a restored 46-year-old Arthur J. Will Memorial Fountain, once obscured by the ramps of a parking garage, has been transformed into a vast “membrane pool.” An inch of water creates a rippling canvas for a field of choreographed geysers where kids, dozens of kids, in swimsuits and Crocs and sunblock, squeal as they weave between the columns of water. Nearby, fluorescent pink chairs are occupied by smiling, towel-holding parents and buttoned-up city employees, more than a few of whom kick off their shoes and wade into the pool themselves. The whole scene looks even prettier at night.

The fountain plaza — which I’ve dubbed Toddler Beach — is the very best part of Grand Park (formerly Civic Park), a new 12-acre strip of public space that cascades down Bunker Hill from the Music Center to the steps of City Hall. Although sections have been functional since July, the fully-operational park officially opens this Saturday, creating a nice outdoor area in the center of the city and bringing some much-needed amenities like a dog run to the neighborhood. It’s definitely not “our Central Park,” as some have hyped (maybe Bryant Park?), but Grand Park accomplishes a lot, and with very little to work with in this small, park-starved sliver of downtown.

Oddly enough, I wrote about this fountain on a 96-degree day as well. (EXCEPT IT WAS IN OCTOBER.) And wouldn’t you just know it, it’s breaking 90 again today. Most public pools are closed in the fall and the beach is often out of reach, but two of the city’s most incredible, wade-able water features are now spraying within a block of each other in downtown.

I think you know what I’m trying to say here. It’s hot. These fountains are cool.

I did not take the photo of Grand Park, Jim Simmons did, because on the day I went to photograph it, there were dancers rehearsing in the fountain. Which was still cool to see.

Take Back Tuesday

My friends at GOOD are up to something great... They want us to celebrate voting. In fact, they want us to make Election Day a holiday! And I'm all for it. I'd like to take the day to go vote, BBQ in my yard and hangout with friends and family as we talk about the election and wait for the results. What do you think, will you join us in taking the day off? Or do you think it's a ridiculous idea? Share your comments below!

Riding the Rails

Last week I was very, very lucky to be invited on a preview ride of the new Expo Line that runs from downtown to Culver City. The line opens April 28 and I almost can’t believe it’s happening—I’ve been writing about this for about six years. More stories and photos coming soon, but here was one of my favorite shots: From the La Cienega station, which is one of the elevated ones, there are some pretty incredible views, including the smudge of downtown’s skyline you can see at the center of the photo. When I moved to LA I never imagined I’d see a train this far west.

Martini, With a Sidecar of History

We all know why we go to Musso & Frank, the oldest restaurant in Hollywood: The room (charmingly old-school), the stories (Bukowski drank here), the martinis (always gin, served with a sidecar), the bartenders (ask for Ruben). But for the most part, even the most dedicated Musso’s fans have been left to their own devices to piece together its raucous history—and then separate the truths from the urban legends. All that changed a few weeks ago with the launch of a new salon series by the Los Angeles Visionaries Association (LAVA) that hopes to “celebrate, but also set straight” the details about who actually sat on Hollywood’s most famous barstools.

I was lucky enough to attend and write about the extraordinary evening for KCET Food. You can read the piece, “A Literary Salon at Musso & Frank,” and be sure to admire the amazing photos by Hagop Kalaidjian, who also took the one above.

UNIQUE Jewelry Line

It's Here... Our UNIQUE Jewelry! I am super-super-super excited to announce that I have started to design a line of housewares, jewelry and clothing. Yipee! I used to design a lot, especially as an interior designer on TV, so have missed that creative aspect since starting UNIQUE LA three years ago. But now that my "baby" is growing up and I am surrounded by great people who help me nurture it, I can start to design again. #SoFab

This special sneak preview pic doesn't do the line justice but will hopefully get you excited to stop by the UNIQUE LA booth this weekend to check the full line out. Special thanks to our great friend Jen at Plastique* who made my designs right here in LA!

You're Giving Me Chills

This past weekend over 22,000 people packed into the California Market Center's penthouse for our annual Holiday Show. WHOA. As usual people shopped until they dropped, they ate in our cafe areas, many enjoyed free drinks and some sat down to make crafts. But what you all don't see or hear is the magical stuff that gives me chills... You see, while everyone who visits the show can literally feel the positive energy and the amazing camaraderie that takes place during UNIQUE LA, only a few of us here at the office get to truly feel the love and appreciation from the community. What does that mean exactly? Well after every show I get loads of emails, Facebook messages and direct tweets thanking me for creating UNIQUE LA. They make me smile, some make me tear-up (in a good way), others make me laugh - ALL of them make me extremely proud and make me feel blessed. When I started the show I knew it would be a "big deal" and have a huge impact on the community but I never actually thought about just how much the show would change vendors lives. If I didn't create UNIQUE LA they might not be thriving as much, but it is truly the support that YOU the shoppers give them by spending money that creates the impact. We estimate that almost $2 million was spent during the two days - all of which goes back into the local economy!

THANK YOU.

I've gathered a few bits and pieces from emails to share with you. Thank you for supporting local design...