Seeing Granite as a Paving Grace

Want your road to riches to remain paved with gold? Then you’d better pave your sidewalks with granite.

That’s the view of Beverly Hills administrators who fear the community’s famously opulent shopping district is on the verge of losing its elite shopping base to luxurious competitors.

City Manager Roderick Wood wants to start jack-hammering the dull concrete sidewalks along Rodeo Drive and surrounding streets -- home to some of the world’s fanciest boutiques including Prada, Gucci, Cartier and Tiffany -- and replace them with glimmering Kenoran Sage granite pavers.

Never mind that the city just wrapped up a $16-million, two-year streetscape makeover that included new concrete sidewalks.

“Places like Las Vegas and Dubai and enclaves like Vail and Martha’s Vineyard and developments like the Grove, Century City and South Coast Plaza are eroding the base of the long-established markets and specifically in Beverly Hills,” Wood counseled the City Council this week.

“The greatest peril in today’s luxury market is for one to rely on history only to become history.”

Rodeo Drive’s new concrete walkways would be “a very nice addition in Riverside or Indio,” Wood said. But “even in places like Fresno,” far-sighted officials have begun jazzing up their city streets.

But the proposal has received a rocky reception -- especially when city officials showed samples of the granite to shop owners.

“The tile looks like something from a shower stall. It is very ugly, “ said Manijeh Messa, manager of the Bijan designer men’s store. “I told the gentleman from City Hall I wasn’t in favor of it.”

Messa and other merchants catering to celebrities, splurging tourists and the wealthy also cringe at the thought of another round of sidewalk barricades, construction dust and noise in front of their fancy restaurants and expensive boutiques.

During the recent sidewalk redo, Rodeo Drive “looked like a war zone; there were piles of dirt for six months,” said Bijan’s assistant manager, Marjan Townsend. “People were cutting themselves” on construction debris as they walked.

Then there is the price. The city wants merchants to pay the $850-per-linear-foot cost of the granite.

Property owners would be required to install granite sidewalks when any reconstruction or tenant improvement costing $250,000 or more was undertaken.

That means sidewalks could have a patchwork look to them for years -- another thing that worries the aesthetically minded along Rodeo Drive.

“We don’t find that Rodeo Drive looks shabby the way it is now,” said Karl Schurz III, whose family owns property on the thoroughfare.

City officials have spent months coming up with just the right color and texture.

Three different shades of mottled granite have been proposed. The greenish Kenoran Sage seems to blend in better with most storefront facades than its grayish and beige-tinted counterparts, according to city staffer Daniel Cartagena.

Unlike the polished granite countertops now popular in high-end kitchens, the sidewalk pavers would have a rough surface less likely to cause pedestrians to slip and fall in wet weather.

Despite the reaction of merchants, Wood believes Beverly Hills needs the granite to burnish its reputation as the ultimate posh shopping district. He said the competition for business is fierce, noting that nearby shopping areas such as Century City, West Hollywood and L.A.’s Robertson Boulevard and Melrose Avenue are hot on Beverly Hills’ heels.

“To be the elite of the elite does not mean flat, white concrete and ho-hum green bushes for landscaping with no focus on a unique and exceptional quality of experience,” Wood wrote in a memo this week to the City Council.

On Rodeo Drive, however, pedestrians were puzzled Thursday over why anyone would want to change the look -- or feel -- of the palm-shaded street.

“That’s so silly, thinking you need granite to save Beverly Hills,” laughed tourist Marjorie Kaplan, visiting from Boston with husband Dan and daughters Jenna, 11, and Sophie, 6. “It doesn’t look bad the way it is.”

Dan Kaplan shook his head as he and his daughters posed for a snapshot next to a bright yellow Ferrari.

“In Boston they’d spiff things up by putting a few little rows of bricks in the sidewalk and installing some old-fashioned lampposts,” he said.

The sidewalk controversy ultimately will be decided by the City Council, which so far has not taken a formal position.

For now they’re stonewalling on granite.