An Upscale Street Is Paved With Gold : The Yuppie Charms of Santa Monica’s Montana Avenue Don’t Appeal to All

It was once as orderly and as ordinary as a strand of plastic rosary beads: chiropractor, shoe repair, beauty shop, dry cleaner, market--block after block of mom-and-pop services for the mom-and-pop neighborhoods flanking Montana Avenue in Santa Monica.

In the last half dozen years or so, in the finite press of Westside real estate, something has happened along Montana Avenue. A walk down the street can still be a picket-fence repetition, but more and more these days it reads: cappuccino spot, clothing boutique, gift shop, upscale take-out food.

The fishmonger, the little old trinket store run by little old ladies, the antique china shop, the gas station where the attendant washed windshields unbidden have gradually, or sometimes suddenly, vanished from the face of the street.

In their stead and in the space of 10 blocks, there are still grocers and dry cleaners--and half a dozen places to sip cappuccino and three to buy jogging togs. There is a shop just for socks and stockings, and another devoted to earrings, like the coruscating $200 costume jewelry clip-ons, which would go handsomely with the $425 feather-and-silk collar or the $400 casual cotton jacket from other shops.

You can learn to cook a mussaman curry or a chocolate tiramisu at one enterprise, or you can choose to have one of the new restaurants serve you a pizza crafted “for the contemporary pizza connoisseur.” The pet-theme store does not stock dog food, but it is the place for silver doggie key chains and ceramic feline-form salt-and-pepper shakers. Jane Fonda has a discreet office on Montana.

From pasta to pesto, from baby dill to baby furniture, Montana Avenue has become one of the area’s liveliest strands. Its merchants’ association stages open house promotions and even markets Montana Avenue sweat shirts, a sure sign that the arriviste has in fact arrived.

Its transformation hasn’t pleased everyone, though, and even those who sing its praises aren’t exactly sure what constitutes its peculiar charm. Is it a little Rodeo Drive? A breezy new brother to Melrose Avenue? A casual corner of the megalopolis with an Eastern flavor? Could it be Yuppie Main Street?

“This street has been compared to Rodeo Drive, and I keep fighting that,” said Larry Bergamo, owner of Engle’s Television, which began as Engle’s Radio in 1926. “I don’t think this is at all a fair analysis,” and anyway there are “too many Fords and Chevys driving up and down the street.”

It is a comfortable, eye-level, neighborhood-style street, designed for walking--but paradoxically jammed corner to corner with pricey cars, to the despair of residents who often cannot park their own. A screenwriter who lives off Montana said her car insurance rates are going up--not because the neighborhood is getting bad but because it is filling up with BMWs and Mercedeses.

It is a street flanked on the south by rent-controlled apartments as low as $250 and to the northeast by Brentwood houses with half-million-dollar price tags, and the street is patronized by residents of both: the upscale two-career couples with no time to cook and no affinity for shopping-mall clothes and retired or fixed-income people whose monthly utility bills may equal the cost of a spinach quiche.

“I make a fairly decent living,” said one professional woman who lives nearby, “and I will not shop (for clothes) on Montana. It’s too expensive.” Still, she admits, “it’s great” to have the prepared cuisine just around the corner, for quick dinners and the Hollywood Bowl.

She epitomizes the battle for Montana’s soul, or at least its personality: Is it upscale and trendy or a homey neighborhood-oriented street? Dependent on local patronage or the out-of-town moneyed set? Or can it do it all?

“I tell you, this street’s in a little bit of a Catch-22 right now, because of some of the notoriety it’s gained,” Bergamo said. “We do have some high-rolling shops on Montana, don’t get me wrong, but the majority are family owned” and need to be competitive.

“It’s the ‘in’ street to shop in,” said Federico Jimenez, who recently left his Indian-Southwestern collectors’ item shop on Main Street for Venice, then six months ago had to be persuaded to open up on Montana.

“I was very ambivalent about moving,” but “when he gave me the key and said take three months free, I decided I wasn’t going to lose anything.”

“My merchandise was too good, too expensive for Venice. We’re doing wonderful here, to the point of I am being surprised.” And he’s grateful for a lease: His building has just been sold, he said, for $2.3 million.

Donna Snoke has lived here for nearly nine years and has watched the ebb and flow of change.

“It’s now sort of the Melrose of Santa Monica,” she said, sitting in a Laundromat behind the Cafe Montana. She has shopped for years on the “nice, safe street” and cashed checks at the friendly family owned Fireside Market--”I call it my Bank of Fireside.”

The new shops are “interesting” but in some, “I don’t even feel comfortable walking into those stores, and the atmosphere is they don’t want you if you can’t afford it.”

In the social Darwinism of business, “A lot of shops come in and they’re all glitzy and good for a year or six months--you can almost look at a store and see if it’ll make it,” Snoke said. But for each that closes up, others are ready to take its place, at rates that merchants say have jumped about 100% in the last 10 years.

As for parking, there has been talk of issuing permits to give residents a break. Last year, neighbors successfully opposed one suggested mega-development, in part because of parking concerns.

It is a trade-off: The revived Aero Theatre, which used to show films that had already run on late-night TV, now has fresh double features for $4, a great way to avoid Westwood crowds but hard on local parking: “I try planning my parties around bad movies,” Snoke said.

There are still places like the typewriter repair shop, the travel agency, the hearing aid place, the bakery with potato bread and strudel--right next door to the new and frantically busy patisserie --and Moody’s print shop, which has been doing Brentwood’s invitations and announcements since World War II.

When Jan Brilliot opened her clothing store 12 years ago, “everybody kind of looked at me and told me I was out of my mind.” Even now, the street is still “low key, and I hope we don’t lose it--the fact that there are still shoe repairs and cleaners--I hope those people aren’t driven out.”

But spiraling rents are “what’s scary on the street,” and there is “definitely going to be pressure” from chain-type stores, the last thing merchants want to see on Montana.

Frank Moody says he gets at least one call a week, inquiring if he would like to sell. The venerable Merrihew Nursery closed around Christmas, and construction has already begun for low-profile shops and offices that will replace it, under Santa Monica’s strict codes. Rumor on the tightly knit street is that space--which averages $3.50 to $4.00 per square foot--will soon rent for $4.25.

The rates are already slightly higher than those on Main Street and Melrose Avenue but still considerably less than those on Rodeo Drive, where they begin at about $7 a square foot.

Bergamo said the nursery owner remarked at a Montana merchants’ meeting that “that corner was too valuable for what it was,” and that he “flat lose(s) money every month except for about two out of the year. You hate to see (that),” Bergamo said. “I felt that when the nursery went, a little bit of Montana went, another thing that gave us the diversity we no longer have, but you gotta see his end of it too.”

Not everyone is enamored of the new Montana.

Leonel Caceres tucked his first dollar behind the round mirror of the Esquire Barber Shop 16 years ago and inside, at least, not much is different.

He doesn’t mind change, but “I don’t care for the new look of Montana,” said the Peruvian-born Caceres, a third-generation barber with an easy smile. “All it did is raise the rent. A lot of merchants want to make it look like Rodeo Drive. They want to make this street something it’s not.”

Caceres doesn’t attend the merchants’ meetings or advertise in the monthly neighborhood business newsletter; some of them will be gone anyway, he says, when the shakeout comes.

“If they want to come in like some regular merchants, OK, but they want to charge $2 for a pen you can get for 10 cents down on Wilshire,” he said. “In about two years a lot of these small businesses won’t be here--because they’re not selling.”

A heavyset man waiting his turn in one of the three barber chairs scowled. His favorite beer parlor vanished years ago. “Walk up and down Montana? For what? I used to, a long time ago.” As for these new shops--”it’s all these rich women from Bel-Air got nothing else to do, their husbands get them these bo -tiques,” he said.

There are people who love these changes, and people who hate them--and sometimes they are the same people. The screenwriter recently walked down the street, listing block by sad block what little business had once been here or there but admittedly delighting in an artfully arranged salad at a comfortable restaurant and a pair of silver earrings from a trendy shop.

Becky Blum, a consultant who lives in Brentwood and who whimsically styles herself “a world-class shopper,” finds it “sad in a way” that the old businesses are leaving, some priced out by new rents, “but the area is attracting a lot more interesting, upscale businesses.”

Much of Montana is “Yuppieland--everybody drives a Volvo and has a child under 2 and they all wear baby Guess? clothes,” but that family style, upscale as it is, makes the street “lower key, not flashy.”

“It’s easier, much more comfortable; it doesn’t feel like you have to get gussied up,” she said. “I’d never think of wearing a sweat suit to Beverly Hills, but Montana, I’d go over in a sweat suit and not think anything of it.”

The area draws sufficient nostalgic East Coast expatriates to sell the New York Times on almost every block. For Midwesterners like Blum, it has the appeal of old neighborhood shops with California hygienics: invariably spruce and fresh-looking buildings, from the market where raspberries and avocados are displayed like huge pave jewels to Steven L. Soboroff’s design-award-winning office and building--once a massage parlor--where every day a high school kid is paid to dust off the window sills with a dry paintbrush.

Soboroff, who spends most of his time finding sites for chain stores like Circuit City, said he is committed to preserving Montana’s scale and architecture as “a place to plant roots.”

“It is a totally unique street in Los Angeles, with the low density and a real neighborhood feel to it. It reminds me of the East Coast.” Unlike Main Street, “Montana is not funky, not trendy--an old-fashioned shopping district.”

William El-Nouni bought Sweet Sixteen Grill, for decades the only restaurant on Montana and still the only burger-and-soda-fountain place, but one with autographed photos of Pat Sajak and Lindsay Wagner. “I did my best to make it more beautiful but to keep the same tradition of the place always,” he said.

The jukebox no longer functions--on purpose. Instead of the high schoolers who overran the place years ago, getting into food fights with Sweet Sixteen’s special Suzy-Q potatoes, executives with portable phones sit at tables and schmooze--and make sure they get receipts for the $2.75 Pan San breakfast special.

At the counter, a grandmother in Reeboks and gold nugget jewelry warned her grandson not to finger the ancient gum stuck under the counter.

She pulled her money out of her Louis Vuitton purse. “Oh,” she asks the waitress. “Which way is the Fred Segal store?”