by Mark McDermott
The Manhattan Beach City Council last week approved a six hour closure of Highland Avenue at the request of the North Manhattan Beach Business Improvement District, which is planning to expand its annual holiday stroll in December into a festival that includes artisan booths and live music.
The council overcame some initial reluctance, largely over concerns regarding the street closure, which will be from 3 p.m. to 9 p.m. and span Highland from 33rd Street to Rosecrans Avenue.
City traffic engineer Erik Zandvliet told the council that moving the holiday stroll from its traditional Thursday night to a Sunday greatly reduces the traffic impact of the street closure.
“Sunday is a very light day. It’s actually the lightest day of the week for Highland Avenue,” Zandvliet said. “So that’s why we’re not opposing a Sunday. We would oppose a Thursday [closure], because there’s 25,000 cars a day on Highland Avenue on a weekday. On this Sunday, during this time period, we’re probably talking about 5,000 cars. It’s a diversion that we would take — both directions of traffic would go down Manhattan Avenue between Rosecrans Avenue and 33rd.”
The North Manhattan Beach BID requested a street closure for its holiday stroll in 2024 and was rejected by the Parks and Recreation Commission. That request, however, was for a Thursday night closure. This time around, both the commission and the City’s Special Events Committee approved the event on the condition it occur on a Sunday.
Jill Lamkin, the MB Chamber of Commerce CEO, said the NMBBID is basically approaching this year as an experiment in order to see if the event can bring more people out and generate some revenue for the BID, which is an organization of local businesses tasked with creating a more vibrant business district. In a BID, local businesses agree to tax themselves to create a budget to pay for improvements to their district. But given the smallness of the North MB business community, its BID does not generate much revenue with which to make improvements.
“They only get about $30,000 a year,” Lamkin said. “And so one of their ideas was to open [the holiday stroll] up to paying vendors and see what we can do in terms of creating some foot traffic. Because unlike downtown Manhattan Beach, they don’t have a lot of retailers, and so they don’t mind the idea of bringing in [vendors]. Something that might be competitive with downtown is not competitive in the North End, and so they’re evaluating a lot of vendors that have been at the Hometown Fair, that have been down in Riviera Village and that were at Fiesta Hermosa.”
Lamkin said the event is envisioned to still mostly attract people from the surrounding neighborhood, but opening up the street and adding attractions gives it the potential to be more of a signature event. She noted, for example, that even having music on the sidewalks along Highland has been problematic in the past, due to safety concerns with crowds being so close to traffic. This was a concern expressed by the Parks and Rec commission as well.
“Anywhere that there was entertainment, it was spilling over into the streets, and they felt like that was creating a safety hazard,” she said. “And so I actually think this is a much safer option.”
Lamkin said the street closure is not likely to create parking problems.
“This is a hyper-localized event,” she said. “The people that come here are not driving in from other places, and parking. They’re walking from their homes.”
Councilperson Nina Tarnay, a North Manhattan Beach resident, expressed concern over both the traffic diversion and parking.
“I really enjoy the stroll, but I’m really concerned with whether we can truly accommodate the diversion of traffic,” she said. “Maybe even encouraging people to take Rosecrans and Valley, and that’s going to boil down to getting that information out there…I know that ideally it’s going to be a localized event, and in my experience, it has been. But if this is something that we’re going to try to bring more people in to really support the businesses, are we considering how we’re going to deal with parking?”
Zandvliet said the City has experience with closing Highland on Sundays from the annual 10k, and that ample parking should be available.
“The idea we will be pushing is that we will have the entire El Porto parking lot available on a Sunday evening, which doesn’t get a lot of use in the wintertime,” Zandvliet said. “And so we’ll have a lot of parking available.”
The Council eventually voted 4-1 in favor of allowing the street closure. Mayor Pro Tem David Lesser voted against it, citing traffic and parking concerns, and the fact that the $30,000 allocation for City fee waivers and associated third party comes after the adoption of the city budget.
“This is an extremely difficult matter for me,” Lesser said. “I have been the council delegate to the North End Business Improvement District. I used to live three blocks from where the holiday stroll is conducted. But I’m a no….Highland is an artery, even with reduced traffic flow on a Sunday afternoon and evening. It still is a major artery in and out of the city.”
The council debated the $30,000 allocation, particularly the $10,000 third party costs. The City waives such fees for other events, such as the Hometown Fair, and the open house that occurs the night of the annual tree lighting — which also involves street closures, and is organized by the Downtown Business and Professional Association. Ultimately they arrived at a compromise, brokered by Councilperson Joe Franklin, in which the North MB BID would try to raise money to help cover third party costs.
Councilperson Steve Charelian said benefits outweigh the costs to the City.
He said residents should look at it as a pilot program.
“This has been a long time coming for the North End,” Charelian said. “We tried, over the years, to have these side areas on these streets with slope….I understand this is going to be impactful, but it is a community based event. I’m sure we’re going to get some blowback from residents that didn’t hear about this, no matter how much communication we do. But, this is for a very short period of time, and I think it’s strategic.”
Mayor Amy Howorth initially expressed reservations regarding traffic as well as the size of the event, due to the vendors, but then came to support it when she envisioned the type of holiday fair it could be — less like Fiesta Hermosa, she said, and more like a European holiday fair.
“There’s crafts, there’s vendors, it’s cute local stuff…like the Christmas markets in Vienna and Budapest,” she said. “I’ve talked myself into it.”
Tarnay said that the North MB business community needs the event to bring more attention to itself.
“I do have some serious reservations about the impact on traffic and neighbors, but I also know that we on the North side are always so envious of the downtown holiday stroll,” she said. “…I know that it’s really tough for the businesses on the north end of town because we don’t have parking. This is hopefully an opportunity to support those businesses, so that more people will recognize that it’s just not downtown that has businesses that need our support, but also the North side of town.”
“I am approaching this with great trepidation, because I can see it’s going to be my head,” she said. “Because it’s going to be all my neighbors who live on my side of town, if they hate the event. But I also think if we don’t do it, we’ll never know.” ER
