Escondido Merchants Ponder How to Cope With Competition

The future of this city’s traditional downtown business district is a sort of bad-news, good-news story.

On the one hand, a recent marketing survey of shoppers along Grand Avenue indicated that as soon as the gargantuan North County Fair shopping center opens in four months, they’ll forsake the downtown stores in favor of the flashy new enclosed mall with its six department stores and 180--count ‘em, 180!--mall stores.

But on the other hand, the city is building a new, $52-million civic center and cultural arts complex downtown; a financial district is taking form on the west side of downtown; the Palomar Memorial Hospital neighborhood on the east side of downtown is turning into a full-fledged private medical community, and the city has promised to pump millions of dollars of redevelopment assistance into Grand’s business district to spruce the place up.

For their part, merchants and property owners will be expected to sink thousands of dollars of their own money into their businesses and, perhaps more painfully, readjust their thinking of how to merchandise the downtown area in the face of Ernest Hahn’s behemoth retail center.

“There’s no way you can go head-to-head with Nordstrom’s or May Co. and hope to come out first,” acknowledges John Armstrong, chairman of the citizen’s downtown revitalization committee and publisher of the Times-Advocate newspaper.

“Downtown won’t have the promotion dollars, the magnetism and the synergism of that shopping mall,” he said.

So the city’s business community is thinking of turning Grand into a boulevard for browsing and dining, with the intent of luring as customers the doctors, the bankers, the arts patrons and the others who will find downtown attractive because it is not a shopping mall.

It is a notion that has received widespread support among the business community. But it has not been without its infighting.

Perhaps the most controversial question--one that divided the merchants until a compromise was reached--was how to provide parking for shoppers.

One school of thought suggested that the four-lane Grand be reduced to two lanes, but with as much on-street parking as possible to give the illusion, if not the fact, of convenience. Some pedestrian amenities would be offered--benches, landscaping and the like.

Others argued that there should be no parking at all along a six-block stretch of Grand between Maple and Juniper streets. Instead, shoppers should be encouraged to park in new public parking lots behind the stores, and Grand should be virtually turned over to pedestrian shoppers. The alleys behind the stores would be turned into pedestrian walkways; retail buildings would be partially reconstructed to allow mid-block walkways between the parking lots and the street, and the sidewalks would be wide and attractive with fountains, trellises, benches and trees. Grand would carry just two lanes of slow-moving traffic, but there would be mid-block crosswalks to encourage browsing and meandering.

While virtually every merchant endorses the idea of a pedestrian-oriented Grand Avenue, many balked at the idea that parking would be prohibited along the street. Even though there are now only 88 parking places along the stretch, the mere offering of street parking encourages shoppers into the downtown area--even if they still end up in off-street parking lots, some merchants argued.

A compromise of sorts was reached: The city should move ahead with plans to construct new parking lots behind the retail stores, and a decision on whether to allow or ban parking along Grand would be postponed until it was learned whether shoppers were satisfied by the off-street parking lots.

“So, for the time being, we’re looking at Grand offering some parking and some pedestrian amenities,” Armstrong said.

For revitalization role models, Armstrong points to downtown shopping districts in Santa Barbara, where parking has been banned and pedestrian traffic has been encouraged along its downtown State Street, and old Pasadena, where parking is limited along the main street but building reconstruction has improved pedestrian access to stores.

No one is ignoring the fact that downtown property owners will have to further invest in their businesses if they are going to survive downtown’s latest transition. To help them, a subcommittee of the revitalization committee is looking for financial assistance that might be tapped.

Terry Jackson, manager of the John Burnham & Co. commercial real estate office in Escondido, said the establishment of a downtown improvement assessment district might be created to establish a pool of money in which to buy down interest rates or finance common improvements along the street.

The revitalization committee might also seek federal development grants through the city for downtown public improvements and also lobby the City Council to further invest in downtown with public capital improvement projects, Jackson speculated.

“Spending a dollar of public funds creates an atmosphere that encourages the private sector to spend another $5,” he said. “That’s the classic example of public-private partnership.”

Ed Lyon, whose family has owned The Wardrobe clothing store at the same location on Grand for 80 years, said he is excited rather than nervous about downtown’s future, given the revitalization plans.

“All downtowns in Southern California towns which have experienced rapid growth also experience growing pains,” he said. “Some downtowns have been destroyed, others have survived, and others have not only survived but prospered.

“It is certainly possible that we can prosper, but it’s going to take convenient parking, a pleasing shopping atmosphere for our shoppers and good merchants with good products,” he said.

Both he and Armstrong suggest, however, that given North County Fair and the remodeling of the older Escondido Village Mall just up the street a mile, downtown merchants are going to have to take a different approach in their merchandising.

“We have to look very carefully at what we can do to end the traditional conservatism in this city, and encourage the kinds of change in downtown Escondido we must see to maintain it as an important part of the city,” Armstrong said.