Articles
Los Angeles's Food Truck Revolution
A new hub for food trucks expands the offerings beyond tacos. Food trucks are typically pretty hard to pin down. While some may...
03.05.10
While the food vendors and their enthusiastic followers may have been miffed by the harsh realities of zoning, some city planners see it as a broader and potentially city-changing issue. For a city with notoriously sparse streetlife, the food trucks breathe new life into Los Angeles. Otherwise empty, unused, and essentially dead space, the small lot has found new life through these trucks, and helped to revive a small piece of the landscape. Because of its location on private property, Los Angeles city planners told Geller the trucks could do business as they pleased. A few minor health code stipulations were followed, but for the most part, the lot can operate as long as it wants whenever it wants."It's an interesting, fun idea to activate some space that's underused. That's what makes a city," says Simon Pastucha at the L.A. Planning Department's Urban Design Studio.And for police, the steady location off the street makes their jobs a lot easier. Erasing the ambiguity about whether a truck has been in one place too long, or parked illegally, police can essentially cross these food trucks off their list of things to worry about -- at least whatever five are currently parked in this new downtown food lot."It's away from a lot of the local restaurants. So that way they're not competing with the restaurants and we're not getting complaints from the restaurants. Everybody's happy," says Officer Matthew Shafer of the LAPD.As patrons on this first day of the food truck lot sat at the long table next to the trucks, a couple of motorcycle cops drive by. "Everyone enjoying their tacos?" one asks through his bike's megaphone as they pass by.But not all the attention was good attention for this temporary use of empty space in downtown Los Angeles. A young man in his mid-twenties shouts at the truck patrons as he walks by. "Eat Mexican tacos," he yells, presumably turned off by the "gourmet" aspect of the new food truck movement-a sharp tangent from the low-key, low-budget taco trucks that laid the foundation for this surge in mobile food fancy."Shame on you!" he calls out as he walks into the distance. No one seems to notice.The sanctity of traditional taco trucks may be lost on the people out for lunch this day. Any new option for food is one to be thankful for, according to Carlos Menendez, a student at the nearby Southern California Institute of Architecture. The prospect of an ever-changing menu of mobile food on this formerly barren loading dock spurs unabashed excitement."Oh, it would be great," he says. "I'd be here tomorrow."And the trucks will be, too.Guest blogger Nate Berg is a freelance journalist and contributing editor at the urban planning news website Planetizen. He writes about cities and how they are trying to get better. He is also the editor of World Cup Planning, a news blog focusing on urban planning related to the 2010 World Cup and other major international events