In 2009, the state of California put up a blockade of barricades around a chunk of sidewalk outside the Ronald Reagan State Building in Downtown Los Angeles. Today it is still there, messing with everyone's walk down Main Street. The barricades have even become kind of a joke—the artists Wild Life and Calder Greenwood put up a giant barricade in the middle of all the barricades back in 2013. Downtown resident Will Wright (who's also the government and public affairs director for the LA chapter of the American Institute of Architects) has made it his personal mission to tear down the barricades—he first asked California's Department of General Services to deal with them five years ago and renewed his campaign last month, reports the Downtown News.
The DSG told Wright that the barricades were to protect against dangerous sidewalk cracks, but that the state didn't have the money for repairs. (The DN says there's a 20-foot-long/half-inch-wide crack and a visible tree root past the barricades.) Flash-forward to June, when a rep for the agency finally said that money to fix the sidewalk would "be approved this year." Still, another rep says it's "premature to speculate on a timetable or costs." Meanwhile, she says it is of course essential that the barricades stay where they are.
· Main Street Barricades Become a City-State Battle Point [DN]