With 15 years of community improvements behind it, the La Jolla Community Foundation is amid its most ambitious project yet: the Village Streetscape Project.
The first phase of the Streetscape plans aims to make significant improvements along Girard Avenue from Silverado to Prospect streets, creating “a more pedestrian-friendly experience moving around The Village,” LJCF board member Jack McGrory said.
The Streetscape will extend public plazas into the street and create mini-parks at each intersection, add decorative features to the intersections, enhance a mid-block crossing between Silverado and Wall streets, improve streetlights and add trees and benches throughout the area.
“The Village is tired and La Jolla is one of the oldest communities in San Diego,” McGrory said of the need for improvement.
Changing La Jolla’s walls
The Village Streetscape Plan is just the latest endeavor inspired by LJCF’s mission to inspire philanthropy and private investment to improve infrastructure and enhance public spaces in La Jolla.
Phyllis Pfeiffer, along with Murray Galinson, George Hauer and Andy Nelson, established LJCF in 2008 as an affiliate of the San Diego Foundation.
“A community foundation can change a community,” Pfeiffer, now the foundation’s chair said.
Wanting to clean up rundown spaces of La Jolla, the foundation began planning but quickly realized private institutions cannot work in the public right-of-way.
LJCF’s first project was then to form the Murals of La Jolla in 2010, which installs large-scale artworks on private walls with private donations throughout La Jolla.
Changing La Jolla’s streets
Over time, however, the original foundation goals to improve community infrastructure became more imperative; LJCF gifted the murals program to the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library and began efforts to form a Maintenance Assessment District, which can work in the public right-of-way to maintain and improve community spaces.
Simultaneously, LJCF also established Enhance La Jolla, a 501(c)(3) organization to manage the MAD.
This effort took five years and $300,000 to accomplish, Pfeiffer said, with Enhance La Jolla and the MAD beginning operations in October 2019 including landscape maintenance, street and sidewalk cleaning, litter and graffiti abatement and additional trash collection.
“It’s working,” Pfeiffer said. “It’s made a difference in The Village.”
People may not realize or appreciate all the MAD does, she added, as “you don’t think about what’s not there; you don’t think about the graffiti that’s not there, you don’t think about the trash in the street that’s not there anymore.”
The next step to improving La Jolla’s streets was to grant $75,000 in 2018 to the M.W. Steele Group to bring together a consortium of architects to conceptualize a streetscape plan, Pfeiffer said.
The design team includes architects Jennifer Luce, Jim Alcorn and Paul Buss, and landscape architects Todd Fry and Jennifer Phelps.
“We wanted the experts to design it,” Pfeiffer said, noting more ideas are better.
In 2019, philanthropist Una Davis launched the Village Streetscape Capital Improvement Project fundraising efforts with a lead gift of $1 million.
Fundraising for the $6.5 million needed for the first phase of the Streetscape Project took a pause during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, but LJCF, as of now has received state grants and private donations totaling half that cost.
Changing La Jolla’s future
Raising a substantial amount of money and leading the Streetscape plans meant hiring an executive director and separating from the San Diego Foundation, so LJCF reorganized as an independent 501(c)(3) in 2022.
“It’s been great,” Pfeiffer said, adding LJCF is now poised to raise the rest of the money in order to start breaking ground “hopefully in September 2024.”
McGrory estimated the first phase will take 12 to 18 months after groundbreaking.
“We’re hoping that it will make such a huge impact that the community will be excited about it and get behind it” with contributions, Pfeiffer said.
“It’s going to take a village to fix The Village.”
Beyond the streets and walls, LJCF has a record of giving back to the community, with about $113,000 in grants awarded to local organizations for arts, science and La Jolla beautification projects from 2013 to 2017.
Grantees included the La Jolla Playhouse, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla Parks & Beaches, UC San Diego, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla YMCA, La Jolla/Riford Library and more.
The foundation’s value is cemented in “community ownership, community pride, getting people involved back in the community,” McGrory said, to “really improve the quality of life … and take on projects that will benefit the overall community” of La Jolla.
