An exhibit in front of an East 7th St. business during last weekend’s “Re-Envisioning East 7th Street” event shows an artist’s vision for facade improvements. Photo courtesy of East 7th Street Collaboration.

Many people only see East 7th St. through a car window, as they are zooming through it on their way to either Downtown or Eastside Long Beach. But slow down long enough to walk down 7th Street between Alamitos Ave. and Redondo Ave. and you will witness a diverse mix of residential and business developments, restaurants and clothing boutiques, corner markets and specialty shops, churches and bars. Walk a block in any direction and you are met with historic homes and quaint tree-lined streets that seem miles away from the car-chaos next door.

Once a mellower side street partially lined with old historic homes, this now-bustling cross-town connector is living its contemporary life as more of a freeway, a crucial corridor that, despite the massive car traffic, is teeming with it’s own destination potential—at least that’s how a group of neighborhood associations along the mile-and-a-half stretch see it.

Calling themselves the East 7th Collaboration, members from the Rose Park Neighborhood Association, Craftsman Village Neighborhood Association and North Alamitos Beach Association have banded together over the last few years with a common goal of drawing resident and city attention to this oft-forgotten area.

“Let’s admit it, East 7th Street needs a facelift,” says Aaron Jackson a member of both North Alamitos Beach Association and the East 7th Collaboration. “It is the heart of the city and a major artery leading from Orange County to Downtown. 35,000 cars transit the street on a daily basis, yet none of us pay that much attention to it because it is so utilitarian. If this street is the first thing people see when entering the City, it should be considered ‘the Face of Long Beach.’”

Gretchen Swanson and Emily Stevens of the Rose Park Neighborhood Association first led the charge for a unified group to fight the street’s growing woes, but the formal Collaboration eventually grew more organically, out of conversations between board members of the involved neighborhood associations, all of whom seemed similarly frustrated that their closest major thoroughfare wasn’t an inviting, safe space for the residents living around it.

Michelle Arend-Ekhoff of the Craftsman Village Association remembers being at the Restoration Trade Fair at Burbank Elementary school three years ago when the lightbulb went off in her head.

Swanson organizes the annual event for owners of historic homes and that year, for the first time, she had placed all of the tables for the historic districts and neighborhood associations in the same hallway. Inevitably, the topic of East 7th St. came up.

“Before, all the neighborhood groups worked all in isolation. Fortunately, Gretchen put all of us in the hallway at the Trade Fair and we got to know each other,” Arend-Ekhoff says. “We all had the same issues and we realized we could get a lot more done if we work together. Pairing all three of us together has had a big impact so far and people are listening.”

As a cohesive unit, the disparate association members quickly began to make strides in creating an identity for the corridor. They applied for several grants and obtained light-post banners that identified the stretch for the first time as “East 7th Street” and included different colored ones signifying each of the historic districts.

And shortly after—just as the newly formed East 7th Street Collaboration began meeting monthly—the group helped convince Big Saver to toss out their stucco-filled plans to tear down the old Big Lots at 7th St. and Junipero Ave. and maintain the structure’s original Mid-Century modern exterior for its grocery store instead.

“The effort on 7th St. is not about bringing back a shopping district as much as it is about repurposing an area while recognizing its past, present and future,” says Allene Symons, a third-generation homeowner in North Alamitos Beach who is active in both the neighborhood association and the Collaboration. “This stretch of 7th was annexed to Long Beach over 100 years ago so it’s about old and new. We want to bring 7th Street into the 21st Century.”

With even more momentum for change coming from the recent 7th St. upgrades (the cobblestone crosswalks that help calm traffic and encourage pedestrian traffic? Those were the Collaboration’s idea, too), the group this year decided it was time to reach out to the community itself and get them thinking about what the street could be.

Jackson, a former design producer with Extreme Makeover, came up with the idea of inviting artists to submit renderings of conceptual storefront upgrades that would be voted on by the public.

The concept quickly grew from a simple art competition into a major two-day experience that last weekend took over the entire mile-and-a-half of East 7th St. with outdoor cafes, neighborhood “base camps” (including one for AOC7, the final neighborhood group to join the Collaboration) and a rented bus that shuttled people to and from the nearly 30 art exhibits.

Many of the Collaboration’s members received laughs when they initially began telling people about their event. But the ambitious “Re-Envisioning East 7th Street” weekend was by far the first of its kind and its attendance by a few hundred probably confused residents is considered a success by its organizers.

“I rode the bus a lot during the event and I was looking and watching people and they were stopping at all the exhibits,” says Stevens. “Most people didn’t know an event was going on, they were just stopping and taking pictures. We think it did exactly what we wanted it to do, which is the first step: to get people to rally around the street.”

Unlike 4th Street, Bixby Knolls and Belmont Shore, East 7th St. is in the very early stages of discovering what local flavor it has to offer, but with today’s emphasis on walkable, bike-able communities and a residential swath only recently awakening to the possibilities of their main drag, a unified voice like East 7th Street Collaboration provides hope.

Future physical improvements will continue to bring new energy to the area, from the planned Armory Park across the street from the Museum of Latin American Art on its westernmost tip to the soon-to-be-completed Big Saver, which will anchor the center of East 7th with its largest grocery store yet.

Full street closures and lighting improvements are possible future endeavors for the Collaborative, but for now they are just happy to have started the conversation of what to do with the busy street in their own backyard.

“We want to lift up East 7th St. to a place where it really belongs. It is the welcome mat from the 22 Freeway and it belongs up there with beautiful lighting and trees and clean sidewalks,” says Stevens.  “There’s definitely a light at the end of the tunnel. If Abbot-Kinney [in Venice] can do it, I don’t see why we can’t. We want ideas from everybody and we want the city to help us.”

For more information on “Re-Envisioning East 7th Street” or the East 7th Street Collaboration, visit e7th.org