Montrose Merchants Created the Montrose We Know Today

The Montrose Shopping Park is a true gem. Its winding streets and mature shade trees make it a joyful place to dine out, shop and stroll. People absolutely love the look of Montrose! But it didn’t always look this nice. So who was responsible for making Montrose one of the most beautiful shopping areas in the Los Angeles area? It was not the city nor county. It was the merchants and store owners themselves who brought their vision to reality. Here’s that story.

Montrose was laid out by developers over a century ago, in the teens. In the 1920s, businesses boomed on the wide main street of Honolulu Avenue. As the buildings went up in the decades after, the street took on a look that resembled a main street in a small Midwest town. One- and two-story brick buildings fronted the long straight sidewalks with angled parking on the street. There were no trees and the only shade on hot summer days were canvas canopies that extended out from a few stores. 

In the post-war period the booming population of the valley, now mobile via increasing car ownership, began to shop farther afield. The Midwest look of the Montrose storefronts was aging poorly compared to sparkling new shopping areas opening in other parts of LA. By the 1950s business along Honolulu began to decline.

Fortunately for modern-day Montrose, a group of visionary Montrose merchants began to talk about what would reinvigorate the shopping district. They looked at other cities that had faced the same sort of “aging problems” and had redeveloped their main streets into desirable shopping areas. A group of Montrose merchants even took a road trip to Grand Junction, Colorado in 1963 to see how its downtown had reinvented itself. The group was impressed with what it saw there and decided to emulate their work. (Looking at modern photos of downtown Grand Junction, parts of it look remarkably like Montrose.)

These bold Montrose merchants envisioned a winding street with bump-outs containing benches and drinking fountains covered in lush landscaping and overhanging trees. This was a huge change from the boring standard straight avenue with sidewalks covered in concrete, baking in the hot sun. 

A major problem to overcome was parking. The landscaped sidewalks would eliminate over half of the parking on Honolulu in front of stores. It was a heavy lift to convince store owners to give up convenient parking. They would also have to create new parking lots by purchasing property behind the stores and installing rear store entrances. The cost of buying property for parking fell to the City of Glendale while creating rear entrances fell to the store owners. But the cost of tearing out the old sidewalks, creating new curbs and seating areas and planting trees and plants was going to be mainly on the shoulders of the store owners to be shared out to the tune of several thousand dollars each – a huge sum in the mid-’60s. But the change was existential to the survival of Montrose. A vote of the store owners was taken and the bold but expensive project was approved by a slim margin of 62%.

The Montrose Shopping Park concept was approved at the beginning of 1967 and work began almost immediately in March. Demolition started at the west end of Honolulu and moved east. Construction of new curbs started in May. With what today we would call blinding speed, the entire project was completed by the end of that summer. The construction came to a total cost of $300,000. A grand dedication ceremony was held on Friday Sept. 1, 1967.

It was the completion of a wild dream envisioned by a few very forward-thinking store owners. It was a radical change, unique among other shopping districts. What had been a somewhat dowdy main street had been transformed into what we have today, a “shopping park” where shoppers stroll and shop in a park-like environment. Montrose Shopping Park is a beautiful place. We are lucky to have it. And we can thank the very merchants whose stores line the street.