"The Hollywood Sign at dusk, the bistro lights coming on, and these beautiful Porsches lining Larchmont Boulevard." That's how Larchmont Boulevard Association president Romi Cortier described the picture he'd been chasing when he pitched Cars Under the Stars, the first car show the LBA has ever staged. It ran the evening of September 19, from 4:30 to 8:30, on the 500 block of North Larchmont between Clinton Street and Rosewood Avenue, in partnership with the Porsche Club of America-Los Angeles. Dozens of vintage and exotic Porsches lined a closed street. DJ music and food trucks filled in the gaps. Proceeds went back into the same beautification fund that has been quietly reshaping the boulevard for the better part of four years.
What's easy to miss is the timing. Exactly one week earlier, on September 14, the boulevard hosted the 34th annual Taste of Larchmont, a food-tasting fundraiser that has been running since long before anyone was talking about bistro lights or French blue benches. Two events, one seven-day stretch, one stretch of street. One tradition older than most residents' time in the neighborhood, one brand new. Neither happened by accident, and the second one only makes sense once you understand what built the stage for it.
An Old Fundraiser, Freshly Attended
Taste of Larchmont has been a fixture of the neighborhood's early fall calendar for over three decades. This year's edition raised money for Hope-Net, which runs 12 food pantries across the Mid City area, through a lineup of local eateries offering tastings up and down the boulevard. Participating spots included El Cholo at the Beverly and Larchmont corner, La Bettola Di Terroni, Louise's Trattoria, Sweetfin Poke, Sweet Lady Jane, Kiku Sushi, and several vendors inside the Pavilion, from Levain Bakery to Go Greek Yogurt.
Longtime volunteer Patti Carroll, who organizes the annual raffle, said this year felt different because of who showed up. Mayor Karen Bass, whose official residence sits nearby in Windsor Square, attended alongside CD13 Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez, taking photos with residents and pulling the winning raffle tickets themselves. Steve Tator, a 30-year veteran of organizing the participating restaurants, noticed something else: more strollers than he could remember seeing before, which he read as a new generation of residents discovering an event their neighbors have been running for 34 years.
That's the baseline. A 34-year institution, still drawing elected officials and still raising real money for a concrete cause, still built entirely around the same four or five blocks of Larchmont Boulevard.
The Part Nobody Was Tracking
Here's what most people walking past never quite registered as a single project. Starting in 2022, the LBA and the Larchmont Village Business Improvement District strung overhead bistro lights from Beverly to Melrose, and extended another stretch of them last December. Around the same time, Cortier began replacing the boulevard's aging wooden benches, some of which had been bolted to the sidewalk since 1976, with French Blue Legacy Benches manufactured by DuMor Site Furnishings, the same company that supplies a well-known Beverly Hills park. Each bench runs about $3,200, a figure that covers the bench itself, a personalized plaque, shipping, and installation. By September 2025 there were eight of them installed, sponsored by a mix of individuals and institutions:
- The Hancock Park Garden Club, established in 1963, which also underwrote a new shade tree near the Rotary Clock
- The family of the late Tucker Carney, a longtime local resident memorialized on one of the benches
- Windsor Square resident Sheila Tepper, whose bench is inscribed as donated by the daughter of immigrants
- Tailwaggers owner Todd Warner, who sponsored a bench near his shop and said simply that the benches give people a reason to slow down and enjoy the community
CD13 kicked in $10,000 toward the project, and the BID matched that with roughly $10,000 for new cornflower blue trash cans to go with the benches. None of this made headlines on its own. A bench here, a can there, a string of lights extended by another block. But add it up over four years and you get a boulevard that looks, at dusk, like something built for exactly the kind of photograph Cortier described when he pitched Cars Under the Stars to the Porsche club. The car show didn't create the atmosphere. It cashed in on one that had already been paid for, one sponsorship at a time.
Cortier told the Larchmont Chronicle in 2025 that he already had two or three more parties lined up wanting to sponsor future benches, and that he was working on getting the same treatment installed on the east side of the boulevard, which currently has none. The project isn't finished. It's still being built one purchase at a time, which is the same way it got built the first time.
Where to Eat If You Went to Either Event
If either evening sent you looking for dinner afterward, the boulevard has more options than it did at the start of the year. Max & Helen's, the diner Phil Rosenthal built with fellow Hancock Park resident and chef Nancy Silverton, opened at 127 N. Larchmont in the space that sat empty after Le Petit Greek closed in December 2023. Rosenthal has described the project less as a restaurant launch and more as an extension of a neighborhood he already considers his own.
A few blocks over, The Pawn Shop opened June 26 inside a restored 1930s masonry building at Melrose and Cahuenga that spent more than 40 years as Brothers Collateral Pawn Shop. The kitchen is run by James Beard Award winner Tony Messina, and the timing was built around the World Cup, with general manager David Evers describing the intent as a restaurant first and a sports bar second.
And on September 15, the operators behind Cobi's, the Michelin Bib Gourmand Southeast Asian spot currently on Main Street in Santa Monica, filed for a Restaurant Beverage Program clearance at 5750 W. Melrose Ave, a two-story Craftsman space straddling the Larchmont Village and Hancock Park border that has cycled through The Larchmont, FIN Asian Tapas Bar, and most recently The Residency. The filing doesn't confirm an opening date or a menu, but it puts another name on the list of operators choosing this stretch of the neighborhood over other parts of the city.
What This Actually Tells You
A car show is a small thing on its own. So is a bench. So is a string of lights extended by one more block. What September showed is that a national car club looked at Larchmont Boulevard and saw a backdrop worth building an entire event around, on the first try, with no track record to point to. That doesn't happen on a street that hasn't been maintained on purpose. It happens on one where a Garden Club buys a shade tree, a family memorializes a father on a bench plaque, and a council district matches a business improvement district dollar for dollar on new trash cans, none of it coordinated by any single authority, all of it adding up anyway.
The 34-year food festival and the brand new car show didn't compete for attention this September. They shared it, on the same blocks, seven days apart. That's a boulevard that keeps its oldest traditions and still has room to try something it's never done before.
If you're the kind of Hancock Park or Larchmont Village resident who wants to know what's changing on your own street before it shows up in a headline, Keyholder Estates keeps a close eye on this stretch of the neighborhood, benches, restaurants, and all.
