Will This Time Be Different?

Deborah Racine has lived in downtown Los Angeles for five years, and she calls it home. Nearly every morning, about 9 a.m., she leaves her residential tower near Grand Avenue and 2nd Street for a stroll into the city -- past parking lots, hotels and office buildings, past the public library, past Grand Central Market.

But when she need groceries, Racine, 48, a charity-events coordinator, often gets into her car and drives either north into Pasadena or west to the shopping district around Farmers Market.

Racine’s routine is familiar to many of the thousands of residents who have moved into apartments, condos and lofts around downtown in recent years. Even as they praise the vertical living and urban feel, Racine and others say they’ve had to get used to living in an area without the chain bookstores, supermarkets and other shopping spots found in suburbia and other parts of L.A.

City and county officials signed off Monday on a massive retail, office and residential complex along Grand Avenue that backers say would fill the void.

The project is the most ambitious of several efforts in the last three decades to bring upscale neighborhood services to downtown.

The others -- including the 1970s-era Macy’s Plaza enclosed mall on 7th Street and the 1980s-era 7th & Fig shopping center -- largely attract office workers, and some merchants there say business has been slow.

What has changed now?

Downtown boosters say the area finally has the residential population needed to support such businesses.

The population in the Central City has risen from an estimated 18,652 residents in 1998 to about 24,604 today, according to the Los Angeles Downtown Business Improvement District. Based on developments in the pipeline or under construction, the organization estimates that the population could grow to 48,000 in the next decade. (Census data for downtown since 2000 are unavailable).

Even before ground is broken on the Grand Avenue project, other developments catering to the new residents are moving forward rapidly.

Near 4th and Main streets, a sprinkling of restaurants and other businesses cater to a burgeoning population of loft-dwellers, who have settled into painstakingly restored old buildings.

Southwest of there, near Staples Center, a 50,000-square-foot Ralphs is under construction -- the first chain supermarket in downtown in decades. That project will also have 267 condominiums and a series of small restaurants and services -- including a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, a UPS store and a Coldstone Creamery -- and is slated to open late next year.

The Grand Avenue project is still in the planning stages, and its first phase would not open for at least four years.

Backed by a cadre of power players including Eli Broad, county Supervisor Gloria Molina and Mayor-elect Antonio Villaraigosa, the project would add a cluster of high-rise buildings around Walt Disney Concert Hall, including a shopping center with a multiplex theater, a bookstore, upscale supermarket and other retail businesses.

The $1.8-billion plan calls for five new skyscrapers, one of them a 45- to 50-story building that would house a boutique hotel and condominiums. Also included are 400,000 square feet of retail shops and a terraced park connecting Bunker Hill with the Civic Center. Officials say the project will be privately financed. *

This is not downtown’s first attempt at revitalization.

In the decades before World War II, the area was a destination point for people across Southern California -- what Ken Bernstein, director of preservation for the Los Angeles Conservancy, calls “Third Street Promenade, Old Town Pasadena plus CityWalk all rolled into one.”

People would travel for miles -- many via streetcar -- to shop at downtown’s grand department stores: Bullock’s at 7th and Broadway; Robinsons at 7th and Hope Street; the Broadway at 4th and Broadway; and May Co. at Broadway and 8th Street. They would find entertainment at a profusion of lavish movie palaces, restaurants and nightclubs nearby.

But after World War II the rise of the suburbs -- and the shopping malls that came with them -- began the steep decline of downtown’s retail core.

Most of the big old free-standing department stores eventually closed down. While Broadway’s dense assortment of shops emerged as a popular shopping district among Latino immigrants, 7th Street’s department store row slowly died over several decades.

Starting in the 1960s, city leaders had begun to reconsider downtown. On Bunker Hill, old Victorian mansions had been razed, and a new cultural center -- with the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Mark Taper Forum and Ahmanson Theatre -- erected in their place. To the south, high-rise office buildings began to dot the downtown skyline.

“Downtown Los Angeles really built an entire second downtown through redevelopment in the 1960s and ‘70s,” Bernstein said, “and essentially abandoned its historic core -- which laid the seed for the current revival.”

Macy’s Plaza -- known for years as Broadway Plaza before the department store it was named after was sold -- was a product of this earlier effort to remake downtown. The shopping center is anchored by Macy’s department store and includes other shops and a hotel.

7th & Fig, a block away, was built at the bottom of a skyscraper during the office tower boom of the 1980s. It retains Robinsons-May as its anchor, along with other shops and restaurants.

Joe Ohannessian, 43, opened Multi Camera Photo Lab at 7th & Fig in 1988. The mall thrived for a while, he said, but by 1995, “everybody started closing down.”

Business, he said, is still poor, and he’s thinking of selling.

“Night life is dead,” Ohannessian said, adding that the lack of such chain retailers as the Gap made it harder to attract shoppers downtown. “They have to have sidewalk cafes. Things that bring people here.”

He said he’s often asked by shoppers where to buy produce.

“There’s nothing,” he said.

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Carol Schatz, head of the Central City Assn., says the current revitalization effort is different from previous attempts because downtown is different. Not only are there more residents, but downtown also has more cultural amenities, notably Disney Hall and the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.

“What we needed to make this downtown come back -- and grow, thrive and stay alive -- was a multiuse downtown,” she said, “so that you had offices, but now you have sports and entertainment like you didn’t before ... and creating a critical mass of residences and providing the infrastructure to grow so much more.”

Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, chairwoman of UCLA’s urban planning department and author of “Urban Design Downtown: Poetics and Politics of Form,” says downtown’s prospects are clearly looking up.

But even with more residents and new developments, she says, city planners still must find a way to connect the new developments into a cohesive whole.

“What is missing is a much larger framework. You see isolated monuments which are very self-contained,” Loukaitou-Sideris said. “They do not link to one another well.... If we do want to rejuvenate downtown, we need to start from the street network, the alley network.”

The Grand Avenue project would include street improvements and a 16-acre park aimed at creating a more pedestrian-oriented feel along the stretch of Grand between the cathedral and the Museum of Contemporary Art. But critics have said the early plans for the retail developments are too focused inward rather than oriented toward the street.

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Despite the development boom, some downtown dwellers are skeptical about the prospect of change any time soon.

On the second floor of the Grand Tower Apartments, near the outdoor pool shared by residents, Cal State L.A. business professor Steve McGuire, 45, said he probably would not wait for the revitalization project to be finished.

He’s about to give up on his urban living experiment.

McGuire said he felt stranded in downtown Los Angeles. “There’s less stuff to do here than you’d think,” he said.

He will walk to the nearby Omni Hotel to read and have a drink. But he says the downtown area lacks a thriving nightlife. He finds it difficult to find small ethnic restaurants.

And so McGuire is contemplating a move to Pasadena.

“I want to be where college people are: jazz clubs, nice bars, restaurants,” he said.

“What do you have here -- Koo Koo Roo?”