City Streets, Shops Twinkle for Strollers

‘Tis the strolling season in Los Angeles; a time to park the car and saunter along select shopping streets and through scattered malls to view holiday displays.

And thanks to the creative energies of imaginative window dressers and store designers, each year at this time it seems the city sparkles a little more for the pedestrian.

The latest attraction in the seasonal pedestrian scene is a twinkling Seventh Market Place, at Figueroa and 7th streets downtown, featuring a spectacular 70-foot fir tree. It was lit Tuesday.

And this coming Tuesday at the Music Center Plaza, at 135 N. Grand St., scheduled to be lit with 17,000 tiny white lights is a 60-foot fir and no fewer than 200 20-foot cottonwood trees. The flourish is the center’s now annual Winterfest.

Similar seasonal displays dot the Southern California cityscape, including many along Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles, Brand Boulevard in Glendale, Larchmont Boulevard in Hollywood, Montana Avenue in Santa Monica, and sections of Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley.

While all are diverting and enticing, the most dazzling display of the seasonal spirit can be seen in Beverly Hills. Whatever one might think of the community’s convoluted politics and self-conscious life styles, its holiday window displays and street decorations are a delight.

This year the city is featuring a new series of 60-by-20-foot murals that etch in white tracer lights traditional Currier & Ives holiday scenes. Among them is Santa Claus and his gift-laden sled, heading north, naturally, toward the city’s more affluent neighborhoods.

The 40 murals spanning Wilshire Boulevard and the city’s other major shopping streets are quite festive. Also adding to the sprightly scene are about 450 oversized decorative cards adorning select lamp posts.

But it is the many bright, imaginative window displays that really make Beverly Hills dazzle every evening until Christmas, turning Rodeo Drive and adjoining streets into a promenader’s paradise that attracts thousands of visitors, including my family.

I love the dressed windows for their creativity and for reminding me of my own extended childhood. One of my joys growing up in New York City was the pilgrimage each year down Fifth and Madison avenues to view the window displays there and the tree in Rockefeller Center.

It was with this in mind that I accepted an invitation to serve as a juror in a window display contest last weekend sponsored by the Beverly Hills Chamber of Commerce and Visitors Bureau.

The contest, with categories based on the varying widths of the street facades of stores, was great fun, encouraged by a bevy of spirited fellow jurors and a chorus of sidewalk kibitzers.

Winning in the 16-to-30-foot category, in which I served as one of four jurors, was Teuscher Chocolates, 9548 Brighton Way; Tallairico Precious Jewels, 188 N. Canon Drive, and Optica, 327 N. Rodeo Drive.

With a profusion of brightly lit Santas and angel dolls, the Teuscher display was a favorite. Catching the eye and favor of the jury also was the large, delicate silver bow on the facade of Tallairico and the stylized star in the window of Optica.

Among the many others, I especially liked the old-fashioned flavor of the decorations in the window of Beverly Canon Flowers, 267 N. Canon Drive, and the use of lights in the display of Diamonds on Rodeo, 332 N. Rodeo Drive.

And one could not overlook that the jewelry store was in the Anderton Court, an angled and ramped exercise by Frank Lloyd Wright built in 1954, which hinted at his design a few years later for the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Catching my eye also on North Rodeo Drive were the glittering displays of Giorgio, at 273, David Orgell, at 320, and Jerry Magnin, at 323--all winners in other categories. Particularly imaginative was the Magnin window, featuring stylized giant polar bears planted in snowflakes.

Other winners included the window displays on Wilshire Boulevard of Danica, at 9244, Kensington Garden, at 9355, and Neiman-Marcus, at 9700. Honored also was Ziba, 199 S. Beverly Drive; Somper Furs, 150 S. Rodeo Drive; Petals, 143 S. Doheny Drive, and Flower Fashion, 9960 Santa Monica Blvd.

And always a winner, even if not entered in a contest, is the Rodeo Collection, at 421, a collection of well-detailed shops catering to the well-heeled and focusing on an internal mall designed in 1982 with a flair by Olivier Vidal. Its outdoor restaurants are a nice place to rest one’s tired feet while still indulging in people watching, a favorite sport in Beverly Hills.

Stately as ever, anchoring Rodeo Drive at Wilshire Boulevard, is the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, an Italian Renaissance-styled extravagance built in 1926. Garlands of holiday lights draped from the eight-story structure make a festive focal point.

Eye-catching also, with its sleek 1930s Zigzag Moderne-styled facade accented by lights, is the Beverly Theatre at the foot of Canon Drive at Wilshire Boulevard. It, too, is a fine focal point.

For something special, in the garden patio behind JW Robinson’s at 9900 Wilshire Blvd., is an authentic two-story Lapland log cabin. Reportedly the original home of Santa Claus, it was shipped with love and affection from Scandinavia and constructed here by the Finnish-based Honka Rakenne Co.

The impressive if incongruous cabin will be on view throughout the month, as will Santa on weekends when he is not out window shopping in the neighborhood.

Rodeo Drive and environs might be a long way from midtown Manhattan, or for that matter the rue du Faubourg-St.-Honore in Paris, but from a window shopping point of view it is, in my studied opinion, getting closer.