Tide Turning for Parts of Long Beach

A decade ago, news that the Queen Mary had filed for bankruptcy protection might have triggered anxiety in downtown Long Beach, which for two generations has banked on the historic vessel as its civic trademark.

But these days, the once moribund downtown is on a roll, and even the Queen Mary’s recent financial woes don’t appear to threaten the revival.

Across the harbor from the ship, visitors are finally starting to fill the new Pike entertainment and restaurant center on land vacated decades ago by the original Pike amusement park. A towering Ferris wheel and vintage merry-go-round that were idle now work. Next door are the Long Beach Convention Center and the Aquarium of the Pacific. Along Ocean Boulevard, a canyon is forming amid new high-rise condos and apartments.

A few blocks inland, the historic downtown core is also hopping. Deserted by department stores and other retailers by the late 1980s and later depleted by the closing of the nearby Long Beach Naval Shipyard, the area is now dotted with restaurants, nightclubs and galleries. Blue Line trains glide down Long Beach Boulevard. Some of the old department stores have been converted into high-end loft spaces.

“We could have opened a pub anywhere, and we looked, but nothing beat this location,” said David Copley as he surveyed the crowds at the Irish pub he opened not quite a year ago. “What’s not to like?”

That’s a question asked by some urban planners, who point to Long Beach as one of the most dramatic examples in Southern California of creating a pedestrian-friendly, mass-transit-oriented urban center.

In a port city that has long stood in the shadow of Los Angeles, the revival is for many the source of great pride.

But it has also come at a steep price. The city has spent $459 million in redevelopment money, coupled with an estimated $1.5 billion in private funds. Some community activists have long complained that the city is spending too much on glitzy new developments while neglecting other parts of California’s fifth-largest city.

Although some boosters like to compare Long Beach’s resurgent downtown with Old Town Pasadena or Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade, there are some major differences. Downtown Long Beach is surrounded by working-class neighborhoods where poverty and crime persist. The city has struggled to create a retail district that balances the needs of lower-income residents who live around downtown and the more affluent professionals moving into the condos and lofts.

Despite the successes, many businesses -- both chains and independents -- have come and gone over the years.

More recently, attracting retail tenants to the Pike has been a slower process than expected, said Otis Ginoza, Long Beach redevelopment administrator.

Some wonder whom the new downtown really serves.

“Redevelopment tends to built edifices for people who don’t live here: tourists,” said Jane Kelleher, who owns industrial property west of downtown. “We’d like to see the city fix existing neighborhoods that are blighted instead of spending it to build money-sucking buildings to attract people from Nebraska.”

Still, even critics acknowledge that Long Beach has come a long way.

After decades of decline, by the late 1970s the area had hit rock bottom. Downtown was dotted with dive bars, tattoo parlors and abandoned storefronts.

The city had brought the Queen Mary to its harbor in 1967, hoping the ocean liner would draw tourists to town. The results have been mixed. The company that operates the Queen Mary filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in early March, capping a protracted battle with the city over back rent. (The city owns the Queen Mary and leases it to the operator.) But with other attractions now downtown, the Queen Mary’s financial struggles have generated surprisingly little angst.

“No one attraction makes or breaks a city,” said John Shirey, executive director of the California Redevelopment Assn. and former Long Beach assistant city manager. “It is not just the Queen Mary or the Aquarium of the Pacific that makes a city, it is a composite of places and attractions. Long Beach has the Grand Prix, it’s got Carnival Cruises. There is a lot to offer there.”

Skeptics are quick to point out that the city itself continues to exert a strong hand in downtown’s operations, using its powers of eminent domain to buy some of the property for the new developments, making street improvements and paying businesses financial incentives to move in. But in a sign of growing confidence from builders, the Camden complex of high-rise condos, apartments and retail shops recently went up with no public funding.

Joel Kotkin, a senior fellow at the Davenport Institute at Pepperdine University, said he visits Long Beach regularly and is a member of the Aquarium of the Pacific with his family. He said they often hop the city’s red transit bus -- free to ride downtown -- to grab a bite on Pine Avenue, and they sometimes take a harbor cruise.

“Long Beach is a place you can live a coastal urban lifestyle and it’s still affordable,” said Kotkin. “Coastal and affordable -- that’s a powerful combination. And it has a very, very strong economic base: the Port of Long Beach.”

The substantially bigger Los Angeles has a poorly thought-out downtown, Kotkin said, that has improved but can leave visitors marooned by blocks or miles between destinations.

“Long Beach has done a much better job. It has coherence. It is organically connected to its place,” he said. “Long Beach is a nice scale. It’s not really small, but it’s not too big. It’s not just someplace in the vast sprawl of Southern California; it really is a place with its own identity now.”

Many consider the city’s golden age to have been the 1930s and ‘40s, when the Pacific Electric streetcar network whisked visitors to the city’s famed seaside resort attractions, such as the Pike amusement park, Rainbow Pier and numerous hotels and movie palaces. Downtown began to suffer economically after World War II as new suburbs exploded around it.

Perhaps the biggest blow occurred in the 1950s and ‘60s, when a series of port expansion projects pushed the shoreline out by as much as a mile, literally robbing downtown of its coastline.

“It has not returned to those glory days when it was a seaside resort destination, but it has instead taken on a new business and entertainment feel that is much better suited for this time,” Shirey said.

Some residents, however, question whether the millions of dollars the city has spent to attract businesses would have been better used for hiring more police officers or improving other services.

Carol McCafferty, a retired schoolteacher, lives in the city’s oldest neighborhood just northwest of downtown. While she was growing up, her father worked at the downtown Sears, which long ago closed. She has seen chains such as California Pizza Kitchen and P.F. Chang’s reel in customers in the new shoreline developments but wonders whether it’s at the expense of smaller businesses.

“The problem I see with the downtown is there doesn’t seem to be room for the small-business owner,” she said.

As for all the new high-rise towers -- with some units selling for well over $1 million -- McCafferty isn’t sure how much they benefit the city, either.

“A lot of the new places will bring up the income demographic and that’s good, but those same places also block the ocean view,” she said. “I’ve lived in Long Beach since the 1930s. I’m 71 now, and I remember when there was an ocean view.”

For the revival to sustain itself in the long term, some believe Long Beach will need to figure out how to serve both the working-class shoppers who live around downtown and the tourists and urban professionals moving into the new housing.

Kotkin said the prevailing redevelopment model for some time was that cities needed to lure high-income people to shop and dine at hip, expensive places. But another viewpoint is that cities need a mix of services and attractions for people of varied income levels living in urban centers.

Long Beach Director of Finance Michael Killebrew said the city has been trying to cater to a range of income levels. He points to the new City Place development in the heart of downtown, which features discount retailers such as Wal-Mart, Nordstrom Rack and the Hometown Buffet restaurant. City Place rose on the ground of one of downtown’s notorious redevelopment failures: the enclosed Long Beach Plaza shopping mall, which opened in 1982 but was demolished two decades later.

Meanwhile, the city is attracting the interest of investors. On a recent Sunday at a closed Italian eatery on Long Beach’s Naples Island, real estate agent and 30-year Long Beach resident Marna Brennan gathered 47 current clients who were looking for investment properties and sat them down with a city redevelopment agency staffer. They went over the comp listings for Santa Monica south to Corona del Mar and concluded that Long Beach was the last affordable beach property around.

“From that meeting, those guys bought $4 million in property. There were people from Manhattan Beach and Santa Monica looking for investment property. Ten or 15 years ago, you would not have had investment buyers from Manhattan Beach looking at downtown.”

Bullish on Long Beach, were they?

“Oh,” she said, steering her 2004 bronze Cadillac CTS through the streets of Long Beach, “big time.”

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Times staff writer Roger Vincent contributed to this report.