[The kickoff post's here]

The northern part of Santa Monica’s pretty much all a well-maintained residential area lined with trees, making it a pretty place to walk or run or bike, as evidenced by this fam I saw on 18th. (The rest of the pics are houses on 19th)

I prefer running on the east-west streets than the north-south ones though, as the latter often break and restart, interrupted by schools, hospitals, and parks.

In fact the streets sometimes get confusing — I ran up 21st, then ran east a block — to find myself at 21st again. Above Montana, I now know, there’s both a 21st St. and 21st Pl.

The top block of 26th is commercial, but then it quickly turns into a large residential road — with roundabouts! The street gets bigger and more trafficked as it goes south, then dumps into Cloverfield just before Olympic.

For most of Santa Monica, numbered streets – interrupted by a few errant streets like Euclid, Cloverfield, Chelsea — tell you how many blocks you are from the beach (17th, for ex, is roughly 17 blocks from the beach). But at 26th the “college” roads start up — Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Berkeley — before we get to the edge of the city at Centinela.

Moving south: Once you hit Wilshire, you start to cross the big, traffic-heavy roads — Wilshire and Santa Monica especially. And by the time you get to Colorado, the side streets get rather unpleasant and industrial-ish because the big buildings on Colorado dot all the smaller streets with the backs of warehouses and dingy open parking lots. 18th, for ex, dead-ends at what looks like a large cement factory,

Near the 10 a few roads just a couple blocks long running east-west pop up — but these’re all, in general, not pedestrian friendly; some don’t even have sidewalks.

Basically, Santa Monica’s ugliest near the 10 — perhaps a lesson as to what a freeway can do to a pretty city.

[dark red lines mark the streets I've walked so far]

Update, 8/15/07: Main Street is here.

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