Major Supermarket in Store for Area Without One Since Watts Riot
It took a petition drive, a letter-writing campaign and at least one heated phone call from a local politician to deliver to Crenshaw community residents something they haven’t had since the devastating economic fallout following the 1965 Watts riot--a major new supermarket.
On Friday, more than 100 people turned out to celebrate the victory at the groundbreaking of the Lucky Food Center at Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza. Among them were corporate and elected officials and residents who had pushed for the store to be built in the predominantly African-American community. The middle- and upper-middle-class area is not near Watts but suffered severely from white flight after the riot.
“You asked for it, you got it,” Mayor Tom Bradley told the gathering. “This new store can only enhance the quality of service customers receive and ensure lower prices for all.”
The market, scheduled to be finished in December, will be 43,000 square feet, containing a pharmacy, bakery, a seafood counter and florist.
The store will provide more than 100 jobs, boosting the total at the plaza to more than 3,000, said Alexander Haagen, who developed the $120-million shopping area with the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency.
Haagen said the supermarket will attract customers who have been traveling long distances to lower-priced markets outside the area.
The store is expected to strengthen Haagen’s mall, which has been struggling to attract national retail stores and customers.
“We have not had as many customers as we had anticipated,” Haagen said.
To residents, the Lucky supermarket will also bring some welcome competition into an area dominated by Quality Foods International, a chain that operates Boys Market in many inner-city areas. Quality Foods has drawn praise from minority communities for its willingness to do business where other chains would not, and criticism for higher prices it tends to charge.
Quality Foods wanted to build a store at the Crenshaw Plaza site but its proposal was rejected by residents because the company already owns four stores in a two-square-mile radius of the mall and no other markets competed against them.
“There is nothing wrong with Boys. We just wanted an alternative,” said Barbara Jenkins, one of a number of residents who took part in a letter-writing campaign to persuade Lucky to come to Crenshaw. “It took a whole lot of pressure and a whole lot of organization. We wrote letters to the market and said we want you to come.”
The letter-writing campaign and petition drive were organized more than two years ago by Councilwoman Ruth Galanter, who said that at one point she got into a shouting match over the phone trying to persuade Lucky executives to visit the proposed site on the plaza grounds.
“I think we all know that Lucky isn’t doing this as a charitable contribution or a tax writeoff,” Galanter said. “This was a hard-boiled business decision. They looked at the bottom line and they decided the Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw community is a market that they want to be a part of.”
Chris Huss, vice president of Lucky Stores Inc., credited “strong encouragement from the community” for persuading corporate officials to build. Even though there are Lucky stores in several inner-city locations, he said, “it is the first time in many years that we decided to build a new store in this area.”
After the Watts riot many major supermarkets and other national store chains abandoned inner-city areas, citing the high cost of insurance, security problems and outmoded stores. The scarcity of large sites needed for today’s larger markets has also been blamed.
In the Crenshaw area, the effort to reverse this trend began more than a decade ago with plans to refurbish the old Crenshaw shopping center, which in 1948 was the first regional shopping center built in the country anchored by more than one department store--the Broadway and May Co.
Once a shopping hub, the old center ran into difficulty in the late 1960s when whites abandoned the neighborhood and store owners began slashing services and selection. Even though black professionals replaced the departing whites, the reputation of the community’s business district continued to suffer, in part because of its proximity to crime-ridden, poor areas of the inner city.
Two years ago, the center was renovated and converted into an 850,000-square-foot mall with the Broadway, May Co. and Sears as anchors and space for more than 100 shops. But from the day it opened, the plaza has had difficulty attracting tenants--especially national chains. As a result, shoppers from prosperous black neighborhoods nearby never came. The mall ranks 67th in retail sales among the 70 malls in the region, according to the Los Angeles Times Marketing Research Department. Only 60 of 100 stores are open.
Officials say the new supermarket will make things better.
“Supermarket chains like Lucky will give residents the same kind of opportunities in terms of shopping as those in neighborhoods that are blessed with more markets,” said Jim Wood, chairman of the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency. “Our plan is to have residents have the same shopping opportunities as those who are blessed with more markets.
“One of the goals is to assure that communities like Crenshaw do not see a deterioration of standards because of the flight of stores.”
