On a recent Friday, the wait outside Vandell stretched past the awning and into the flow of people walking north toward Franklin. Nobody seemed to mind. The bar on Hillhurst runs mostly on walk-ins, and the hosts at the door do something unusual for a room this busy: they tell you to go take a lap. Grab a slice at Old Gold. Peek into Skylight Books. Come back in twenty minutes.
That single detail says more about what is happening on Vermont Avenue this year than any single opening could on its own. Three separate projects are landing on the same half-mile of street within the same twelve months: a bar, a building, and a bus line. None of the people behind them coordinated with each other. But all three are built on the same bet, that the fewer reasons you have to get in a car once you are here, the better the block works.
Three unrelated projects, one shared logic
Vandell is a hospitality bet. The mixed-use building rising at the Village's southern corner is a real estate bet. The construction crews now working the intersection at Hollywood and Vermont are a transit agency's bet. Different money, different timelines, different regulatory paths. What ties them together is that each one only makes sense if you assume people are already moving through this corridor on foot, and each one is designed to make that assumption a little more true.
Here is what is actually happening, and why it matters more as a pattern than as three disconnected headlines.
A bar built for a five-minute walk
Vandell opened this past December in the Hillhurst Avenue space that had been home to Nossa Caipirinha Bar until it closed at the end of 2024. The team behind it is Park Hospitality, the same operators, Michael Francesconi and Matthew Glaser, who run the perpetually packed Donna's in Echo Park. For Los Feliz, they brought on Republique cocktail alums Vay Su and Shawn Lickliter and built a room around a tightly edited menu of about a dozen shareable dishes designed to support the drinking, not compete with it.
The operational choice is the interesting part. Vandell is largely walk-in, with some reservations available but a waitlist for everyone else, managed by three hosts at the door including a maître d'. That model only works in a place where a twenty-minute wait feels like an invitation rather than a punishment, because there is somewhere worth wandering to. A walk-in bar in a strip mall sends people back to their cars to circle the block. A walk-in bar on Hillhurst sends people into Squaresville Vintage or down to the Vista Theatre marquee to see what's playing. Vandell isn't just a new bar. It's a bet that the surrounding blocks can hold someone's attention, and so far the lines suggest that bet is paying off.
The grocery gap at the Village's south gate
At the opposite end of the same corridor, the car wash that has occupied the corner of Hollywood Boulevard, Vermont Avenue, and Prospect Avenue for decades is set to become something else. The Los Angeles City Council has upheld approval of a seven-story building at 1666 North Vermont Avenue, developed by Benny Pirian of Vermont Real Estate LLC and designed by architect Daryoush Safai. The plans call for 139 studio, one-, and two-bedroom apartments over a ground-floor grocery store, with parking for 145 vehicles. Sixteen of those units will be set aside as extremely low-income affordable housing under the project's Transit Oriented Communities incentives, which is what allowed a building this size on a corner otherwise zoned for something smaller.
The location is the part worth paying attention to. This corner sits at the Village's southern gate, the point where Hollywood Boulevard traffic and foot traffic both funnel into the walkable core running up Vermont. A grocery anchor here closes a specific and long-standing gap: right now, a full weekly shop from most points in the Village means getting in a car. A market at the same corner where people already enter the corridor on foot removes that one remaining errand that couldn't be done without driving.
The construction that's actually about fewer cars
The most visible change on the street right now is also the one most likely to be misread as pure disruption. Metro has begun preconstruction work on the long-planned Vermont Avenue bus rapid transit line, with crews starting exploratory utility digs as early as May 11 of this year to locate existing pipes and cables ahead of heavier excavation and roadway construction later in 2026. The project covers roughly 12 miles of Vermont Avenue, from Hollywood Boulevard here in Los Feliz down to 120th Street in unincorporated Athens, and this stretch already carries about 36,000 transit trips a day, making it the busiest bus route in Metro's entire network. The plan dates back to 2016, funded through the county's Measure M sales tax, and is only now reaching the ground.
The digging is happening at the exact intersection where the future grocery building will rise and two blocks from Vandell's door. In the short term, that means orange cones and lane shifts at a corner locals already cross on foot multiple times a week. In the longer term, it means the corridor's busiest bus line gets dedicated lanes, which turns a slow, traffic-snarled ride into something closer to a real alternative to driving the length of Vermont toward Koreatown and South LA. The inconvenience now is the price of one more reason not to own a second car later.
Here is the same information side by side, for anyone tracking what to expect on the ground this year:
| What's changing | Where | Status as of August 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Vandell cocktail bar | Hillhurst Avenue, former Nossa Caipirinha space | Open since December, walk-in only with a waitlist |
| 1666 N. Vermont Ave. mixed-use building | Hollywood Blvd. / Vermont Ave. / Prospect Ave. corner | City Council approval upheld, construction underway |
| Vermont Ave. bus rapid transit | Hollywood Blvd. in Los Feliz south to 120th St. | Utility digs started May 2026, heavier roadwork later this year |
Why the block absorbs this without losing itself
None of this is new territory for Vermont Avenue. The stretch between Hollywood Boulevard and Franklin Avenue has been designated the neighborhood's historic business district for decades, and many of the buildings that still define its character were constructed between 1922 and 1940. The Vista Theatre reopened under new ownership on November 17, 2023, after Quentin Tarantino bought the 1923 movie palace in 2021, and it still screens film only, never digital. The Dresden has been a fixture on the same block for generations. The street has taken on new tenants inside old storefronts for a century without changing its scale.
What makes this particular year unusual isn't the fact of change. It's that three completely different kinds of actors, a small hospitality group, a private developer, and a public transit agency, are all pulling in the same direction inside the same twelve months. Usually it's one or the other. Right now it's all three, and every one of them is betting that the less you need a car to live here, the more the street is worth investing in.
For anyone who already calls Los Feliz home, that's the actual story behind the cones and the construction fencing this summer. It isn't disruption for its own sake. It's the same neighborhood doing the thing it has always done, just three times over in one calendar year.
If you're weighing a move within Los Feliz, or wondering what a corner like this one does to a home's long-term value, Alyssa Valentine + Anselm Clinard spend their days tracking exactly this kind of change on the ground in Northeast LA and the foothills. Contact Us to talk through what it means for your street.
