Shot in the mid-1960s, the photograph at right shows the harsh urbanscape greeting westbound motorists as they drove through the Pacific Palisades business district. We are guessing 1964 because of the American Airlines billboard (back before billboards were banned in town!) advertising a trip to the World’s Fair, which that year was in New York. Below right, a photograph from the same vantage point this June shows how the sign clutter has been largely eliminated, ficus trees have grown up along Sunset, and a landscaped mini-green has softened the triangle at Monument and Sunset. Looking at the old photo from left to right, notice Jack Sauer’s old Union 76 station at the corner of La Cruz, behind which was Del Wright’s auto repair garage. That property is now the two-story Washington Mutual professional and retail business building. Next came Fire Station 69 (now located at the corner of Carey and Sunset) and the Palisades Meat Mart, where a young butcher named Mort Farberow worked until he bought the business and renamed it Mort’s Palisades Deli. Moving up the street, there was Woodbury’s 5-and-10 Cents store, Pacific Palisades Florist, the Town Talk Caf’ (now Kay ‘n’ Dave’s Cantina), Harrington’s Camera Corner and the notorious Standard Oil gas station, which was purchased by local citizens in 1973 and transformed into the Village Green. Across the street, and out of sight in this photo, was Rocco’s Mobil Station (owned by Rocco Ross, father of Palisadian-Post Publisher Roberta Donohue), Art Poole’s restaurant (now a green belt), Santa Monica Bank (now U.S. Bank), Denton Jewelers, the House of Lee, Glendale Federal Savings (with a sign that was visible from all corners of town), and the Richfield station, featuring gas for 33.9-cents a gallon. ‘This is exactly what prompted me to get involved in eliminating the blight in the business district,’ said Wally Miller last week as he studied the old photograph at right. ‘Sunset looked like Pico Boulevard.’ Miller, who had owned Denton Jewelers since 1960, recalled that he could see ‘a lot of things that weren’t getting done’by the landlords, merchants or the city. The Standard station, for example, had their trashcans on Antioch and they would put oil in there that would run down the street. It was awful.’ So Miller got involved, eventually serving as Chamber of Commerce president and chair of the Palisades Design Review Board and the committee that created the Brentwood-Palisades Specific Plan, while also founding the Standardization committee (which was responsible for overhead sign removal and control) and prompting the Village Green campaign. ‘We created a village,’ said Miller, who also founded Palisades PRIDE to pursue and maintain beautification projects in the community. Miller has passed the baton to people like Mark Singleton, former president of the Palisades Garden Club, who maintains the mini-green at Monument and Sunset and is custodian of the landscaped hillside along Swarthmore adjacent to Palisades Elementary. The Garden Club and the Village Green Committee created the 50-ft-long Monument triangle in 1979, adding low-growing junipers, a circular brick flower basin with rose bushes, and two benches for bus riders or pedestrians and shoppers who simply want to relax beneath the Aleppo pine tree. Singleton, a retired Rockwell engineer who has lived here with his wife, Marilyn, since 1955, lives just two blocks away and enjoys maintaining the flowerbed throughout the year. ‘I like to plant annuals so that it’s eye-catching and colorful throughout the year,’ Singleton said. At Christmas, he plants pointsettias and hangs large wreaths, and he hopes that the firemen from Station 69 will once again string lights in the pine tree. ‘That garden is Mark’s labor of love,’ said local resident Susan Oakley. ‘He’s very clever and creative. This summer I saw him planting marvelous purple cabbages in between the roses.’ ‘I bought a six-pack of cabbage at Home Depot,’ Singleton said with a laugh, ‘because I wanted color in the garden’-not cole slaw.’
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