Romi Cortier has spent more than three decades cutting hair at 425 N. Larchmont Blvd, and for most of those years he's had the same view out his salon window: a strip of two-story storefronts, a parking lot, and beyond it, on a clear evening, the Hollywood Sign sitting just above the rooftops. He's looked at it thousands of times. This September, for the first time, he's decided to do something with it.
On Saturday, September 19, from 4:30 to 8:30 pm, the 500 block of North Larchmont Boulevard closes to traffic for Cars Under the Stars, a Porsche show that will line the street between Rosewood and Clinton with vintage cars, music, food trucks, and information booths. Cortier, who is the volunteer president of the Larchmont Boulevard Association, came up with the idea after three things lined up at once: his decades-long view of the Hollywood Sign, his own love of vintage cars, and the bistro lights the LBA installed along that stretch of the boulevard last December.
"Larchmont was a glamorous place at one time, and we are bringing back the glamour for one really fun evening," Cortier told the Larchmont Buzz.
That sentence is doing more work than it sounds like at first. The lights he's talking about were never just decoration. They were installed with a specific job in mind, and this is the first time in nearly three years that job has actually been given something to do.
The lights were built for exactly this
If you've walked North Larchmont after dark anytime since late 2022, you've been under bistro lights that were never meant to just look nice. The Larchmont Boulevard Association and the Larchmont Village Business Improvement District installed the first strands between Beverly and First that November, an outcome of a 2021 Community Conversation where residents and merchants said plainly that they wanted the street to support more evening interaction, not just daytime shopping and Sunday errands.
The second phase, funded by the Windsor Square Hancock Park Historical Society and a fundraiser at the since-closed Vernetti restaurant, extended the lights over the city parking lot at 209 N. Larchmont specifically so that space could host night markets, movie screenings, or concerts. That was the stated purpose, on record, back in 2023. A third phase arrived this past December, when a Paramount Studios community grant paid to string lights between Beverly and Melrose ahead of the studio's employees returning to the office in January.
So by the start of this year, Larchmont had three separate rounds of lighting infrastructure, installed over three years, each one justified in part by the promise of evening programming that would put the boulevard to use after dark. What it hadn't had, until now, was an actual event that closed a block of the street at night and asked people to come stand under those lights for a reason other than walking to dinner. Cars Under the Stars is the first time the infrastructure gets to do the job it was built for.
Who actually put this together
Cortier didn't build this alone. He brought in Lisa Balazs, a garden designer and owner of Virgo Designs & Landscaping who has spent the past several months helping revamp Larchmont Village's medians, pots, and parking lot plantings as part of the LBA's ongoing beautification push. Balazs owns a vintage Porsche herself, and as a member of the Porsche Club of America Los Angeles, she recently formed the club's Ladies & Porsches chapter. She was introduced to vintage cars through a design client who turned out to be one of the city's premier Porsche restorers, and by her own account, one look at the car and she was hooked.
Balazs is also a co-owner of Chevalier's Books, the boulevard's longtime independent bookstore, which puts her in the same small circle of people who run Larchmont's cultural and civic life on a volunteer basis. That's worth sitting with for a second. The person organizing a Porsche show is also part-owner of the neighborhood's bookstore. The person hosting it has been looking at the Hollywood Sign from his barber chair for thirty years. This isn't an outside promoter renting the street for a night. It's two people who already run parts of the boulevard deciding to use the lighting the LBA spent three years installing.
What the night actually looks like
The mechanics are straightforward. Larchmont Blvd closes between Rosewood and Clinton from 4:30 to 8:30 pm on September 19. Expect a line of vintage cars parked along the block, a food truck lineup, live music, and information booths from local groups, all under the string lights that have been overhead since December. Cortier has described the goal as creating one specific image: cars and bistro lights in the foreground, the Hollywood Sign visible in the background, at twilight. It's a single photograph he's been able to picture from his salon chair for years and is now building an entire evening around.
If you've been to the Larchmont Family Fair, the mechanics will feel familiar. That event, organized annually since 1965 by LBA volunteers, closes the boulevard for an afternoon of rides, booths, and food, and its proceeds fund the association's ongoing security, landscaping, and beautification budget. The LBA's own year-end recap already lists the 61st annual Family Fair as coming up this October, alongside plans for a car show on Upper Larchmont and talk of reviving the Paramount lunchtime trolley. Cars Under the Stars is arriving first, and it's arriving at night, which is the part that's actually new.
Why the timing matters if you live here
There's a reason this kind of event wasn't happening in 2023 or 2024. The lighting wasn't finished, the parking lot section didn't exist yet, and the third phase between Beverly and Melrose didn't go in until this past December. Each round of lights was a bet that the street could support more after-dark activity than it currently had. Cars Under the Stars is the first real test of that bet, on a single closed block, with a specific and photographable payoff in mind.
It also lands at a moment when residents have spent the better part of a year hearing that the boulevard's public infrastructure, specifically the city parking lot at 209 N. Larchmont that doubles as the Farmers Market site, was safe from redevelopment. CD13's planning office confirmed earlier this year that any land lease proposal for that lot had been formally withdrawn, closing out a question that had been hanging over the market and the surrounding beautification work for months. Taken together, the picture is a boulevard whose public spaces, from the parking lot to the overhead lights to the medians Balazs has been replanting, are no longer provisional. They're being used, and Cars Under the Stars is the clearest evidence of that so far this year.
If you live in Hancock Park or Windsor Square and your usual relationship with Larchmont is a Wednesday grocery run or a Sunday coffee, September 19 is worth putting on the calendar, if only to see what your own street looks like when the lights it's had for years finally get pointed at something.
A few practical notes
- When: Saturday, September 19, 4:30 to 8:30 pm
- Where: North Larchmont Blvd, closed between Rosewood and Clinton
- What to expect: vintage cars, live music, food trucks, and community information booths
- Organized by: Romi Cortier, LBA president, with Lisa Balazs of Virgo Designs & Landscaping and the Porsche Club of America LA's Ladies & Porsches chapter
Whether you own a home two blocks off the boulevard or just walk it on weekends, this is the kind of evening where the neighborhood shows you something about itself you hadn't quite pieced together before. That's true of a Porsche show, and it's just as true of the market itself. If you're ever curious what a particular property, block, or moment on the boulevard is actually worth, the team at Barrentine Group has spent years reading Hancock Park at exactly this level of detail. Work With Us.
