For most of the past two decades, the walk from a Beverly Grove dinner table to LACMA existed mostly in theory. The museum sits right where Mid City meets the Miracle Mile, close enough on a map that visitors assume it's a stroll, but Wilshire Boulevard traffic and a lack of any direct transit connection meant almost everyone drove there anyway. This spring, two separate projects finished within three weeks of each other, and the theoretical walk became a real one.
Two Projects, Nineteen Days Apart
On April 19, LACMA opened its new David Geffen Galleries, the building Peter Zumthor has been designing for the museum for nearly two decades. It's Zumthor's first completed building in the United States, an elevated single-level structure that opens 3.5 acres of new outdoor space along Wilshire. The opening came with a gala on April 16 and a public ribbon-cutting three days later, and by the end of the first week more than 12,000 members had already walked through it.
Tucked into the northeast pavilion on the museum's Keck Plaza, an Erewhon outpost launched the same day the galleries did. A grocery store inside a Zumthor building is an odd pairing on paper, but it tells you something about how thoroughly Mid City's food culture has folded into its cultural institutions. You're not just visiting a museum now. You're visiting a museum with a smoothie counter.
Nineteen days later, on May 8, the Metro D Line's Wilshire/Fairfax station opened directly across from the museum, one of three new subway stops added to the Wilshire corridor. That's the part that actually changes a Tuesday. The galleries are the reason to go. The subway stop is the reason you don't need to drive there.
For a resident who already eats on West Third once a week, the arithmetic is simple now in a way it wasn't a year ago. Dinner reservation, then a walk or a short transit hop to a late gallery visit, no parking search on either end. That's not a claim about how fast the trip is. It's a claim about whether a car has to be part of the plan at all, and for the first time it doesn't.
What's New On West Third While You Wait For The Reservation
The subway stop connects the museum to the neighborhood, but the neighborhood has been changing on its own terms too. A handful of openings landed on or near West Third this year, independent of anything happening at LACMA:
- Régalade, 8136 W. 3rd St. A French bistro from Jocelyn Bulow and Alessandro Iacobelli, the pair behind nearby Oste, with chef James LaLonde running a menu of oysters, escargot, steak frites with bordelaise sauce, croque madame, and buckwheat crepes with smoked salmon and crème fraiche.
- Momo Sake Bar, a strip mall spot whose peach logo has apparently confused more than one regular into assuming a connection to the Momofuku restaurant group. There isn't one. The chef previously cooked at Nobu, and the menu runs Korean-inflected izakaya: galbi-glazed steak, sashimi served with ssam, bibimbap with snow crab and scallops.
- Cartel Coffee Lab, an Arizona-based roaster making its first entry into the corridor. The space reads like a boutique hotel lobby more than a coffee shop, serving Uncle Paulie's sandwiches alongside its espresso list, with one of the more spacious patios on the block.
None of these three openings has anything to do with the museum up the street. They depend on West Third already being a place people choose to walk, not just drive through on the way somewhere else.
The One Thing That Hasn't Changed
Anchoring all of it, the Original Farmers Market at Third and Fairfax has been standing in roughly its current form since 1934. It earned Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument status, designation No. 543, back in 1991, and it remains a permanent installation open seven days a week, which sets it apart from the pop-up rhythm of most farmers markets. More than 100 vendors operate there now, with an electric tram running the short distance over to The Grove.
That kind of continuity is easy to overlook when the story of the moment is a subway stop and a wave of restaurant openings, but it's worth noticing precisely because it hasn't moved. New tenants come and go along West Third. The market at the center of it all has been the fixed point since before most of the surrounding buildings existed.
What This Adds Up To
Taken individually, a new sake bar or a new subway stop is a small fact. Taken together, they describe a corridor where the reasons to walk somewhere have multiplied faster than the neighborhood's physical footprint has changed. The blocks between West Third and LACMA look almost exactly like they did two years ago. What you can do without a car on those blocks looks nothing like it did two years ago.
That's the kind of shift that shows up in daily habits before it shows up in any market report, and it's worth knowing if you already call this neighborhood home, whether or not you ever set foot in the Geffen Galleries.
If the changes along this corridor have you thinking about what they mean for your own address, from a sale timeline to how buyers might read the neighborhood differently now, Jeffrey Sachs has been tracking Mid City block by block for nearly two decades and is glad to talk through specifics. Schedule a consultation whenever the conversation is useful to you.
