HOT STREETS : Eclectic Blends of Restaurants and Retail Put Popular Southland Avenues on the Map : La Brea, Ventura, Pacific--Bustling Thoroughfares in Los Angeles, the Valley and Huntington Park--Give Even the Most Successful Malls a Run for the Money

It all started, as often happens, with a restaurant.

Having helped turn Melrose Avenue from a lackluster strip of boarded-up storefronts and furniture refinishers into a funky, neon-lit retailing mecca, the co-owners of City Cafe set their sights on unproven territory on nearby La Brea. They chose the wide, well-traveled artery, even though its curious mix of auto dealerships, photo labs, studio prop houses, cement plants and wallpaper stores scarcely seemed to hold the ingredients for attracting a chi-chi restaurant clientele.

But the gamble paid off. In large part thanks to City Restaurant, other retailing pioneers and gallery owners carved out turf on La Brea. And thus did another storefront street come to life in Los Angeles.

Who says nobody walks in Los Angeles? Tell that to the merchants of Melrose, Westwood Boulevard, Broadway in downtown Los Angeles, Seventh and Alvarado on the western edge of the city’s downtown, La Brea Avenue, Santa Monica’s Main Street and Montana Avenue, Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks, Second Street in Long Beach, Pacific Boulevard in Huntington Park, Bolsa Avenue’s Little Saigon in Westminster, Lake Avenue in Pasadena, Brand Boulevard in Glendale, Sepulveda Boulevard’s discount row in West Los Angeles, Larchmont Boulevard, Fairfax Avenue, Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles, Garfield Avenue in Monterey Park, Whittier Boulevard in Pico Rivera, Koreatown at Olympic and Vermont or swank Rodeo Drive.

These are the hot pedestrian streets--with their own personality (sometimes a split personality)--that manage to compete with the Southland’s abundant collection of mini-malls and mega-malls.

“Most people would be surprised to know that some of these streets have more successful trade than malls because of sheer shopper density,” said Rocky Tarantello, a USC professor of real estate and urban economics.

Developers, real estate brokers and retailers agree on factors that can spell success for retailing streets: convenience, ample parking, shops that cater to an ethnic group or neighborhood residents, a steady flow of cars going through.

But to become a true shoppers’ district, a street--or something on it--must become a destination for those outside the immediate area. In some cases, a single business or two can form the foundation. Much of Melrose’s early growth, for example, stemmed from City Cafe; Flip, a clothing store that served as a magnet for seekers of used bowling shirts inscribed with the names of places like Melba’s Body Shop and other retro or punk clothing, and, farther west, Fred Segal’s complex of clothing and accessory shops.

Developers can’t create a hot street at their whim, noted Terri Powers, a leasing specialist with Hahn Co., a shopping center developer. “You might have 30 different landlords and leases,” she said. “There’s no synergy or strategy, not a united goal where landlords say, ‘We want to think about the tenant mix.’ ”

Expansion for expansion’s sake doesn’t necessarily promote success, either. “There has to be a sense of style, community,” said Ron Goldman, a Malibu architect who recently designed a retail complex at Seventh Street and Montana Avenue in Santa Monica. “People aren’t satisfied with just another strip commercial street.”

And hot streets can create hot neighborhood controversies over traffic tie-ups, parking horrors and escalating rents that squeeze out favorite local shops.

Still, pockets of what real estate brokers call “incubator retail” are sprouting in Los Angeles. They include the corner of Melrose and Heliotrope, between Vermont and the Hollywood Freeway, where Cafe Mambo’s lively Caribbean-influenced cuisine draws diners for breakfast, lunch and dinner who browse in a handful of avant-garde shops featuring used clothing and jewelry made of safety pins and keys. Another booming spot, developers and brokers say, is the

heavily Latino area of Brooklyn and Soto in Boyle Heights.

Here are sketches of three more established streets in various stages of transition: eclectic La Brea; Pacific Boulevard in Huntington Park, a strip with a distinctive Latino flavor that is largely the product of redevelopment, and Ventura Boulevard between Cedros and Van Nuys in Sherman Oaks, a once sleepy stretch that has been steadily building for years until, as one broker put it, “it’s so hot the pavement boils at night.”

La Brea

Ian Arthur, owner of the sleek new Fabby custom lighting store on La Brea near Sixth Street, lights up when he talks about traffic counts.

“On La Brea there are six lanes of traffic in rush hour morning and night,” said the slight, Scottish-born designer and merchant. “It was pure accident that I moved here from Venice, but the location was worth $2,000 a month minimum in advertising alone. People drive by at 3 or 4 a.m. and stop to get the telephone number. It’s a really happening area.”

By Los Angeles Department of Transportation estimates, 40,000 cars and trucks barrel up and down La Brea each day. That’s a lot of exposure for the increasingly diverse mishmash of businesses that now call the street home.

They include a score of understated art galleries, a handful of one-of-a-kind clothing and furniture shops and spiffy restaurants--interspersed with the likes of Ellis Mercantile, which for years has leased deer heads, dummies and other props to the entertainment industry; synagogues (the area has a large Orthodox Jewish population); graphics businesses; camera repair spots; wallpaper shops; rundown Chinese hand laundries; a concrete mixing plant; car dealerships; banks and savings and loans; art supply stores, and aging Art Deco apartment houses. This is a 100-foot-wide major highway, a brawny street with big shoulders and seemingly limitless possibilities for those who would spend, dine or browse.

“La Brea is big and split up, with a sense of elbow room,” said Michael J. Bennett, a retail leasing and sales specialist with Coldwell Banker who deals exclusively with La Brea properties. “It will not be a boutique street. It will be a larger, destination-store street.”

One of the prime innovators is Harry Segil, a South African by birth who now calls Los Angeles home. His 2 1/2-year-old shop, HaRry, features wacky, whimsical furniture that is simultaneously retro and avant garde--at space-age prices. It is housed in a rehabbed building that was once part of the Acme hardware store, a longtime landmark.

With more than a hint of snobbery, Segil sniffs: “We don’t want this to be another Melrose. I’m pleased I’m not on Melrose with a million tourists coming in and licking ice cream.

“La Brea is becoming the more serious place. It’s the SoHo of Los Angeles. Little dress shops aren’t going to succeed here. A shop has to have an integrity that people are willing to travel for.”

Indeed, HaRry and its neighbor, American Rag Cie, a store selling vintage and new clothing, have become ports of call for foreign visitors and even for a less likely shopper--a resident of San Bernardino who visits HaRry occasionally to get ideas for furnishing his ‘50s home.

“Here’s someone who drives . . . from the Inland Empire to spectate,” said Philip Goldstein, referring to himself. “I like to turn back the clock. These shops are like a museum.”

Julie Koppel, who lives in the Hollywood Hills about a mile away, was shopping at American Rag and HaRry recently for clothing and props to decorate a bowling alley in Japan.

“I like what’s happening on La Brea,” she said. “I think they’re doing some interesting things.” She does note, however, that parking is starting to be a problem.

Whereas many of the nearby Melrose businesses seem squeezed and compact, the stores on La Brea get to spread out. Indeed, a Melrose could not accommodate the likes of the Richelieu Collection, a 10,000-square-foot store featuring high-end traditional furniture crafted in a French village in the Loire Valley that recently signed a 25-year lease on La Brea.

“My basic feeling was that Melrose was so filled up that there was no way to extend,” said owner Jacques Wayser. “For a furniture store you need a lot of space and a lot of parking space.” Business has been building since the store opened in October. To date, Wayser’s biggest problem has been with thieves. After the fifth break-in, he installed metal, accordion-like grates that are pulled across the display windows at night.

Across the street is Jerry Rapport’s contemporary furniture store, built around a core that was once a food market owned by USC. Rapport bought the grocery in 1947 for $65,000 and gradually expanded into neighboring sites. His annual volume is now an estimated $10 million to $12 million, real estate sources say.

City Restaurant, housed in a former carpet warehouse, can seat four times as many patrons at one time as the old City Cafe (repackaged by the same owners and still jumping as the Border Grill) on Melrose. Since opening in August, 1985, it has “brought a lot of people to the area who wouldn’t normally come to La Brea,” said Mary Sue Milliken, co-chef and co-owner of City Restaurant and the Border Grill.

When City Cafe opened in 1981, she said, “Melrose was really not much of a street at all. There was nothing there.” In moving to La Brea, “what we talked about and sort of hoped for was that (the street) would attract the kinds of businesses that could afford bigger spaces. We liked it because it was different.”

Different is also the word for nearby 10,000-square-foot American Rag, which boasts on tags on its recycled clothing that “This is a SANITIZED, previously owned garment.”

When owner Mark Werts went looking for a location in 1985, La Brea “to me clearly was the upcoming area.” His instincts paid off. In mid-November, he plans to open a 3,500-square-foot American Rag Kids shop. He has also bought two other buildings on the street for a large restaurant, Cafe des Fleurs, to open next summer.

His one concern is that soaring property values will lead to rents that will be beyond the type of innovative business that has given La Brea its cachet. Some tenants are still paying as little as 30 cents a square foot per month, said Bennett of Coldwell Banker. But he acknowledges that “some rents are really outrageous” at $1.50 to $1.75, with $2 deals around the corner.

Werts would like to see the rent hikes reined in. “As soon as some of these people sitting on Yukon gold discover that they’ll have to move the prices down to realistic levels, new businesses will flourish,” he said. “It’ll go slowly. It’ll just putt along.”

Pacific Blvd

It’s a long leap from the one-of-a-kind sophistication of La Brea’s new wave of businesses to the bustle of Pacific Boulevard in Huntington Park, a street capable of supporting four identical discount shoe stores within the space of a few blocks.

“Weekends here it’s phenomenal,” said Rigo Galvan, manager of one of the four Payless Shoe Source stores. When he recently had an offer to transfer to one of the chain’s Maywood stores, nearer to where he lives, he decided to stick with Pacific, even though he has to compete with his own chain as well as a myriad of other shoe stores. “I like the people here.”

If Broadway is the focus of Latino activity in downtown Los Angeles, it faces heated competition from Pacific Boulevard between Florence and Slauson avenues, a thriving stretch that boasts 100% occupancy, a waiting list of would-be tenants and droves of strolling shoppers.

Every day, 20,000 people who live or work nearby get on and off buses along this strip of street. On weekends, teen-agers and families, primarily blue-collar Latinos and blacks, converge on the area, enjoying the occasional mariachi band, the colorful street vendors, the impromptu sidewalk sales and an abundance of moderate-price chain stores such as J. C. Penney, F. W. Woolworth, Thrifty drugs, Fayva and Thom McAn shoes, Lerner Shops, Petries and J. J. Newberry.

Many shop signs are in Spanish, and much of the trade is conducted the same way--a strong indication that Pacific is succeeding by identifying and catering to its customer base.

The atmosphere contrasts sharply with that of the mid-1950s to the late 1970s, when 25% to 40% of the shops stood vacant and Pacific was flanked by streets lined with dilapidated buildings. Faced with declining land values and a plummeting sales tax base, the city’s redevelopment agency went into action.

To date, it has spent more than $400 million in an ambitious campaign to redevelop businesses, buy and clear space for parking lots behind the boulevard (at a cost of $12,000 to $16,000 per parking space) to augment the slant parking along the street and build moderately priced housing nearby. The big spending put the city into a cash crunch late last year.

Another phenomenon helped turn the tide, also.

“Six years ago, we had trouble getting the major retailers to locate in Hispanic areas,” said James R. Watson, a Seal Beach developer who is behind several shopping center projects fanning out from Pacific on adjoining streets. “They didn’t know how to market to them. In the past three years, they have realized the change in Los Angeles and recognized that they need to get into these areas.”

Now, he said, Pacific Boulevard “has become Southeast L.A.’s regional shopping center. It’s like it was 40 years ago.” Rents, he noted, have risen sharply. Six years ago, space on Pacific went for 75 cents to $1 a square foot per month, “if you could get it rented,” said Watson, 48, who as a child rode the Red Car with his parents to shop in Huntington Park.

Now tenants are paying $1.50 to more than $2 (compared to $5 and up on Broadway in downtown Los Angeles). Buildings that might have sold for $75,000 to $150,000 in the early 1980s today fetch more than $500,000.

Jacob Givertz, vice president of Buy Rite Stores, opened the discount clothing shop on Pacific in 1974, when there were numerous vacancies and the area was starting to lose its higher income population. “The area was on the downgrade,” said his partner, Charles Reiff. “We knew a little about the area but felt it was going to be all right anyhow.” Now, Givertz said, business in their Pacific store is “much better” than at another location on Broadway in Lincoln Heights.

New centers blooming along Pacific to the north of the storefront strip are attracting such stores as Vons’ Tianguis supermarket, Pep Boys and Viva! (a market chain owned by Boys Markets). The hot part of the street keeps stretching out, and the dynamism is palpable.

Terrill Barber, a 17-year-old from Inglewood, said he does most of his shopping in malls but occasionally finds bargains in the storefronts of Pacific Boulevard. “I like the atmosphere and the selection,” he said.

The city of Huntington Park keeps pressure on shopkeepers to maintain their stores and replace gaudy or crude signs. It has outlawed swap meets selling used merchandise and also prohibited, except for existing facilities that were grandfathered in, medical offices in ground-floor locations that would be used more profitably as retail space.

Still, James B. Bolton, who recently resigned as the city’s senior planner to go into the private sector, said the street “could use a little more imagination. I’d like to see a good, good restaurant.”

But pricey eateries and clothing shops are clearly not in Pacific Boulevard’s future. “I don’t think it will ever be upscale,” said developer Watson. “But that doesn’t mean there’s not a tremendous amount of business to be done.”

Ventura Blvd

When Dale Jaffe was 11, 22 years ago, his parents bought a home in Sherman Oaks. He and his friends would hang out at the La Reina movie theater on nearby Ventura Boulevard. They would play stickball on Cedros, a narrow street with little traffic.

The La Reina now houses a Gap and a Banana Republic, and nobody thinks about playing in the street. “Now, you walk across the street and you’re risking your life,” Jaffe said. His once quiet neighborhood has become the Westwood Boulevard or Melrose Avenue of the San Fernando Valley, and he has mixed emotions about it, even though he and his family own a restaurant on Ventura and stand to benefit from the surge in activity.

A few years back, the stretch of Ventura between Cedros and Van Nuys contained rundown stores and suffered a frequent turnover of businesses. Jaffe’s family opened Le Cafe nine years ago. Then came the bistro L’Express.

Four years later, the Tower record shop moved in where a drugstore used to be; the Factory, a flashy clothing store, took over a large space from a Sears appliance store. Aahs, a gift and card shop, replaced a neighborhood toy store, and Bongo, a funky jeans boutique, bounced onto the street.

The upgrading of Ventura was in full swing.

These days, older businesses such as Bill White’s Foods for Health, owned by choreographer Hermes Pan, are being bookended by sleek stores such as the Sharper Image, a store selling pricey gadgets, and private developments, including the Ventura Collection, a recently renovated Art Deco space that is not fully leased but boasts several small boutiques paying as much as $2.75 to $3 a square foot per month. That’s double or triple some of the older rents on the boulevard.

“We created one of the few areas in the Valley where people feel comfortable to come out at night,” said Tony Pann, executive vice president of Beitler Commercial Realty Services, which is the broker for the Ventura Collection at the corner of Van Nuys, developed by R. J. Group.

The merchants of Ventura Boulevard seem determined to complement one another. Many clothing stores keep late hours to accommodate moviegoers and late-evening diners. Tower stays open until midnight every day.

Johnny Rockets, which owner Ronn Teitelbaum describes as a ‘40s-style malt shop, opened in January at the corner of Ventura and Vesper and attracts crowds of neighborhood patrons studded with celebrities (including Mel Harris, who plays Hope on “thirtysome-thing,” one recent Sunday evening). Business, Teitelbaum said, is “wonderful.”

A devotee of hot streets, Teitelbaum opened his first restaurant on Melrose in 1986. “The reason I picked Melrose is I loved the mix,” he said. “I loved being across the street from an old-age home, seeing people with purple hair and mohawks.” He acknowledges that he can’t always predict where the next hot area will be, but “I definitely felt it on Ventura. The timing is perfect. It could go on for 20 years.”

Restaurateurs like Teitelbaum and Jaffe fear that landlords might price themselves out of business trying to capitalize too quickly on the new-found Ventura ambiance. Noting that the glitzy, two-story La Reina project at Cedros--which houses Benetton, Gymboree, Penguins yogurt and other well-known chain stores--has already experienced some turnover, Teitelbaum predicts that a fair number of stores won’t earn enough to pay their bills.

“Strip centers are getting in a lot of people at first shot who are finding they just cannot make it at those rents,” he said. “Too much profit is going to the landlords and not enough is left over (for the businesses). There will be a real shakeout in the next three years.”