Chalk up another win for the development crazy South Park neighborhood.  Late last year, plans were filed for a mixed-use development at the northwest corner of Pico Boulevard and Grand Avenue.  1249 Grand Avenue's vague case filing provided little in the way of details, betraying only the fact that it would sit above a two-level subterranean parking garage.  However, a permit application submitted to LADBS in late December has since shed some light on what's to come.  What is now a surface parking lot will eventually give way for a seven-story apartment building with ground level commercial space.  1249 Grand joins two other low-rise developments planned along this stretch of Pico Boulevard: Jade Enterprises' Onyx Apartments and Sonny Astani's massive, bike-friendly G12.  Both of the TCA-designed projects feature substantially reduced parking components (less than one space per residential unit), an increasingly common occurrence with Downtown's newer mixed-use developments.  1249 Grand Avenue could take a similarly progressive stance on parking, although that doesn't seem likely given the aforementioned underground garage.  On the bright side, it's encouraging to see the changes that lie ahead for Pico.  Currently an activity dead zone, Pico Boulevard could become a bustling pedestrian corridor in the near future.

UPDATE:  1249 Grand Avenue is the former site of the Ponet Square Hotel.  The four-story structure stood at the corner of Pico and Grand from the early 20th century up until the early 1970's, when a deadly fire gutted the building.  Check out what it looked like in 1924, courtesy of Urban Diachrony.