Sunday Funday Ride: Murals of L.A.

One of my favorite perks of being a dues-paying member of the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition is the monthly Sunday Funday ride series. The first Sunday of each month, they organize and lead a themed social ride, exploring different parts of the Los Angeles area. So far, I have done the Tour of Historic Street Lights ride, part of a Culver City/West L.A. ride, the Northeast L.A. ride, the Exploring Faith Diversity ride, and just this month, the Street Art Ride. Even when we ride through areas with which I’m quite familiar, I end up discovering delightful new things about my city – treats that were sitting there all along; I just hadn’t known about them.

This ride started from The Crafty Pedal, conveniently only a couple miles from my house. I had no idea this little gem was there, on Valencia, just off of the 7th Street bike lane in the MacArthur Park area. The Crafty Pedal describes itself as “friendly, crafty, cozy and contagious. We are craft, art and pedal pedaler,” and as an “Urbanic” craft boutique that shares an adjacent 1,400 Square foot art gallery where they showcase local emerging artists and host monthly speak easy poetry and comedy nights. I will definitely need to return so I can spend some more time checking this place out.

We rode the 7th Street bike lane into downtown, headed northeast on Main, and followed that all the way through Chinatown. We were a good-sized group, and it was fun to ride though downtown L.A. with so many fellow bicyclists.

We checked out a wall that depicted “painters painting painters”, a mural near the Spring Street Bridge, that is best described here.

We then worked our way into the Arts District via Little Tokyo, stopping by this recent creation by @colossalmedia:

We then headed into the garment district to check out the building most of us immediately recognized as the American Apparel factory. Although I’ve passed this building many times, I never noticed the artwork on this side:

Riding back into downtown, we were treated to the recently-restored “Pope of Broadway” mural at the Victor Clothing Building, as well as more mural action on the building’s other side:

We then took the Spring Street bike lane back to 7th Street, seemingly headed back to the start. I thought the art show was over, but I was mistaken.

We continued to ride on to the west side of MacArthur Park and north a wee bit on Carondelet Street, stopping across the street from Charles White Elementary School. There we were treated to this big mural by Kent Twitchell, a graduate of Otis Art Institute:

And that was the last stop on the mural ride. Another Sunday Funday indeed.