On a Sunday morning at Santa Monica Boulevard and Purdue Avenue, produce stalls set up a short walk from the old bandshell. The courthouse ledges that skaters have used for three decades now share the plaza with four new obstacles and a set of murals that went up this year. The City classifies the new skate features as temporary, and everything else here sits on land that has been slated for redevelopment for years.
Six years ago the City and County picked a plan that would have cleared the whole civic center for something new. It hasn't been built. In the meantime, the plaza kept improving, one interim project at a time, and most of the work came from people outside City Hall.
The project that never broke ground
West LA Commons was the joint City of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County plan for the civic center. Its last published program called for 926 homes, 495 at market rate and 431 income-restricted. It also included 36,569 square feet of retail and restaurant space, 76,341 square feet of municipal offices, a replacement Felicia Mahood center and 118,000 square feet of public open space. AvalonBay Communities and Abode Communities were the selected developers, as Urbanize LA reported in November 2023. A 2023 City Administrative Officer report put the combined City and County site at 7.6 acres, covering the municipal building, the senior center, the courthouse and their parking lots.
The paper trail stops after that. The City Clerk's record for Council File 19-0987 shows its last action on June 25, 2024. Urbanize's project profile still calls it "Proposed." A 2026 history of the plaza published by Docomomo US goes further and says rising financing and construction costs forced the project to be abandoned.
None of these sources gives a new schedule. Because no timeline exists, every recent improvement to the plaza has been planned, paid for and approved as an interim measure.
Every upgrade here has been labeled temporary
For decades, the prospect of redevelopment made officials reluctant to spend on routine repairs. Docomomo's history traces that reluctance back to parking garage proposals in the 1990s. So the plaza's improvements have come in short, outside-funded steps:
- 2004. The West L.A. Chamber of Commerce held a ribbon cutting and rededication on May 21. Two months later, Dan Meyer and Nathalie Deschatres opened the West Los Angeles Farmers Market and Community Fair in the refreshed space.
- 2014. Nike Skateboarding held Go Skateboarding Day at the courthouse. With City approval, Nike removed the skatestopper brackets, repaired the walls and ledges, and had Geoff McFetridge paint a mural inside the bandshell. Skate advocates Alec Beck and Aaron Snyder then negotiated a five-year, $50,000 maintenance pledge from Nike SB so the anti-skate hardware would stay off.
- 2015. The City Council voted 12 to 1 to make the courthouse a legal skate spot, and a grand opening followed on July 25.
- 2026. On February 3, the Council accepted a $70,000 donation from The Skatepark Project, under a motion from Councilmember Traci Park, to add skate features at the plaza, Westside Current reported.
That 2026 scope added four skate obstacles, handrails, ledges, a wedge spine, signage and replicas of the courthouse monuments. The donation paid for the labor, materials and equipment. Westside Current noted that City records frame the features as temporary improvements "while redevelopment of the municipal complex remains on the horizon." Converse and the It Gets Better nonprofit also partnered with Park's office and the West Los Angeles Sawtelle Neighborhood Council on the update.
The new features opened on Saturday, February 7, at "Courthouse In Session." According to TransWorld Skateboarding's announcement, the event included a ribbon cutting, live murals, a Converse CONS rider demo and cash-for-tricks. In a post quoted by Westside Current, Park wrote that "for more than 50 years, skaters have made the West LA Courthouse their own."
The courthouse's standing in skating goes back to the early 1990s. Girl Skateboards' video Goldfish, directed by Spike Jonze, showed off the space with skaters including Eric Koston, Rudy Johnson and Javontae Turner. Jonah Hill, who grew up in the area and skated the courthouse as a teenager, brought that era to the screen in his 2018 film Mid90s.
Reading the walls
The murals are the newest layer, and they have a shared theme. Docomomo US's article quotes The Skatepark Project's 2025 design brief, which calls the plaza "a local 'watering hole'" and ties it to water. The brief links the site to the Gabrielino-Tongva Kuruvungna Springs, half a mile to the west, and from there to the Ballona Wetland and the Pacific.
The 2026 works, by title:
- "Dead Man West," Geoff McFetridge, the same artist who painted the bandshell for Nike in 2014
- "Moomat," Monica Zavala and Saint
- "Waterfront Dinning," Doré Kittrell
- "Water Skate," Little Ricky
- "Scale of Justice," April Jones
- "The Good Life," Braulio Beltran
The neighborhood council has kept the walls in the conversation all year. Its June post introduced a panel with Doré Kittrell, who also works as Gooddess Grafx, and April Jones, and called it part of a yearlong celebration of skateboarding and activism. A July post featured a conversation with Little Ricky. A mural on a skate ledge gets seen up close, and often, by the people who use it, which suits the water brief's idea of a gathering place.
The Sunday market is the plaza's longest-running interim use
The farmers market is 22 years old, which makes it the oldest of the plaza's provisional uses. California's list of certified markets, dated October 1, 2026, shows the West LA Farmers Market open Sundays from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., year-round, at 1635 Purdue Ave. at Santa Monica Boulevard. Docomomo's history says the weekly event has long included outdoor concerts, art activities, book sales and pet adoptions.
A profile in The Argonaut described live music and a children's play area. It named Chaupain Bakery, Pedro's Organic Ranch, Art House Bakery, The Original Tamale Co., Nan Yang Delight and Pupusas Yeni among the vendors. The same article reported free parking in four lots along Santa Monica Boulevard and Purdue Avenue, about 300 spaces, plus free Sunday parking on Santa Monica Street. Vendor lineups and parking rules change, so treat that roster as a starting point.
This is also the part of the plaza the stalled redevelopment would have affected first. The market's plaza and the surface lots around it are the ground the 2023 plan would have rebuilt.
A Sunday morning route
This weekend runs from Halloween on Saturday, October 31, into the Sunday, November 1, market.
- Saturday, if you have kids in costume. Stoner Recreation Center at 1835 Stoner Ave. lists a Halloween Festival among its annual events, and its September advisory board agenda puts this year's Halloween carnival on October 31.
- Sunday, 9 a.m. Get to the market early, before the stalls along Purdue get crowded.
- Walk the murals. Start with McFetridge's "Dead Man West" and work around to Beltran's "The Good Life." Watch the skaters while you walk, since the ledges are in active use.
- Bandshell break. On music days, the bandshell is where the market's live music happens.
- Onigiri on the way home. The Infatuation's October 15 list of new openings includes Onigiri by Hyuga, a permanent takeout window at 11270 La Grange Ave. in Sawtelle.
What would actually change the plaza
The neighborhood council has already said what it wants if the site reopens for planning. Its Planning and Land Use Management committee passed a resolution on May 21, 2025. It recommended a public park, ideally on the Iowa Avenue side. It also called for apartments and townhouses with a large affordable share, adaptive reuse of the courthouse and municipal buildings, and interim park and plaza improvements until then.
The skate features and murals fit that interim category. The courthouse building and the plaza's open space would both stay under that vision, and the 2023 plan would have rebuilt the entire site.
The council's next in-person board meeting is Wednesday, November 25, at 7 p.m. in Room 200 of the WLA Municipal Building, 1645 Corinth Ave. That building sits on the same block, and the meetings are open to the public. Any new plan for the civic center would come up there before it reached a construction fence.
Big public sites like this one can sit unresolved for years, and what happens on them in the meantime affects every block between Santa Monica Boulevard and Iowa Avenue. If you live near Purdue or Corinth and want to know how the civic center's future might bear on your home's value, the team at Zack Grakal follows sites like this one closely. Get Your Instant Home Valuation, and we'll walk you through what we see.
