Jet Lagged : Business: Downtown Westchester is a dated retail zone whose decline began when LAX expanded in the 1960s, claiming nearly 3,000 area homes. Planners envision a revitalized shopping oasis, but it may be too late.

A vision of the future: A sleek tram zips quietly out of Los Angeles International Airport and arrives minutes later at an oasis of specialty shops, restaurants and outdoor cafes.

The 75 passengers--LAX employees on their lunch break, hotel guests and travelers awaiting connections between planes--mix with hundreds of local residents as they shop and stroll along a three-block stretch of Sepulveda Boulevard, elegantly refurbished in the style of a European street.

Resplendent and revitalized, the Westchester Business District throbs with commercial vitality, a glistening gateway to the Los Angeles Basin.

So goes the dream. Today, however, downtown Westchester is a dated retail zone struggling to define itself in the teeth of a recession--and perhaps running out of time.

“I think Westchester is on the verge of going either way,” said Lynette Campbell, owner of a toy and crafts store in the 87th Street Triangle, a commercial sector just east of Sepulveda. “If something isn’t done, the nicer businesses will pull out.”

A lot of businesses already have. Jeanne Breunig, past president of the Westchester/LAX Chamber of Commerce, said the U.S. Postal Service-based list she uses for business mailings contains 427 fewer Westchester business addresses than it did a year earlier--2,018 for 1991, down from 2,445 in 1990.

Although a breakdown for the central business district was not available, the signs of decline are as clear as the “For Lease” banners draped across vacant buildings.

A recent letter to the editor in a local weekly newspaper implored residents to shop in the business district. “Without customers, stores and services close,” the writer said. “It’s that simple.”

Even merchants who say that they’re muddling through the recession worry about rising crime in the area, which was rocked in November by the fatal shooting of a businessman shortly after he left the Wells Fargo Bank branch on Sepulveda. Police said the shooting occurred during a robbery attempt planned by a security agency guard who worked at the bank.

Bank robberies are up too. There were 22 in the area in 1991, double the number in 1990.

“We have a serious bank robbery problem in Westchester,” said Sgt. Ron Hanson of the Los Angeles Police Department’s robbery-homicide division. He blamed the trend almost exclusively on increased activity in the area by gang members from South-Central Los Angeles.

Smaller businesses have been hit too. Thieves recently made off with $50,000 worth of equipment belonging to the Westchester Bakery, prompting owner Walter Herbeck to install a metal grille over his facade.

“We’re living behind bars--in a bakery, “ he said incredulously.

In another sign of the area’s difficulties, the Westchester Chamber of Commerce itself has only recently paid off a debt of approximately $20,000 arising from unpaid dues. Its former executive director, Lukman Clark, left the chamber in August, criticized by some in the community for mismanagement and hailed by others as a visionary who saw great things for downtown Westchester and its businesses.

“I think he brought them closer to actually getting something done than they had been in years,” said Judy Nutter, an aide to Los Angeles City Councilwoman Ruth Galanter.

Clark, now the transportation director for the Inland Empire Economic Council in Ontario, said the financial troubles were primarily a result of widespread business closings in Westchester. He said he did the best he could to stop the “hemorrhaging,” but added, “I felt I had done pretty much all I could there.”

Renata Hild, the chamber’s president, declined to discuss Clark’s performance and said his paid position will be filled soon. “We try to focus on the future and not something that was in the past,” she said.

But it is precisely Westchester’s ability to focus on its future that concerns many in the community.

The 51-year-old commercial zone bore the brunt of an airport expansion that claimed 2,834 homes in Westchester and Playa del Rey beginning in the mid-1960s.

“That started the decline,” Nutter said. “Those families moved, and they weren’t shopping anymore.”

A quarter of a century later, it remains unclear whether the district possesses the expertise, the vision, the community support or the will to jettison its reputation as a hodgepodge of office buildings and mom-and-pop businesses in order to mount a serious comeback.

“This is a city of volunteers,” said toy store owner Campbell. “They let the airport get the best of them. We get all the noise, we get all the soot, but we don’t get any of the benefits because we’re not organized.”

Located literally within walking distance of the nation’s third-busiest airport--a facility that serves 60 million travelers annually and employs 40,000 people--downtown Westchester would appear ideally placed to reverse its fortunes by tapping into some of that traffic.

By Los Angeles standards, the central business district is fairly defined, even intimate in places. It could almost pass for the heart of a small Midwestern city, at least until a jetliner crosses overhead at an altitude of about 200 feet.

Moreover, the 50,000 or so residents of Westchester and Playa del Rey form a middle-class community stable enough to support a children’s story hour at the branch library and local fund-raisers such as the annual “Pumpkin Festival” and “The Country Faire,” a carnival and crafts show last spring that benefited both public and private schools.

There’s even a new Mervyn’s department store that opened in October, filling a traumatic yearlong vacancy on Sepulveda Boulevard created when the Broadway store closed.

Mervyn’s manager Blondell Jones declined to disclose sales figures but said the response from the community has been “fantastic.”

Some area business people say that if the Southern California economy regains its health, the redevelopment of Westchester as a gateway would be very achievable.

“To me, the potential is so exciting, so ripe,” said John Ruhlen, president of the nonprofit Westchester Vitalization Corp., conjuring a personal vision of a “glorified Disneyland Main Street” at the 87th Street Triangle, plus an underground parking facility.

Established early in the Reagan Administration under a federal program aimed at providing loans to retailers, the corporation has survived as a nonprofit planning organization, despite the drying up of federal money.

Ruhlen said the next big step for the corporation would be to prepare a master plan for the business district, but support is weak in the business community for the estimated $150,000 price tag.

“It’s a major hurdle, and we haven’t gotten very far,” he said.

The recession, meanwhile, is aggravating the business district’s problems by bottling up projects vital to renewal.

Howard Drollinger, easily the district’s biggest property owner and manager with a half-million square feet of office and retail space, said he is eager to renovate three blocks of his property on the west side of Sepulveda Boulevard between La Tijera and Lincoln boulevards.

A schematic plan for the project shows a European-style facade of retail shops at street level and residential units above.

But unless banks loosen their grip on financing, the plan seems likely to remain just that--a plan.

“They just don’t want to loan,” Drollinger said.

A glut of office space and slow times in the hotel industry have also put on hold the LAX Northside development, a proposed complex of restaurants, retail stores, offices and hotels on approximately 400 acres of city-owned airport property. It is considered crucial to improving the Westchester area.

Drollinger said he originally hoped to develop his buildings in concert with the airport’s project, but he now has embarked alone on the planning phase.

“We can’t wait,” he said. “We’re going to go ahead with ours, and we’ll try to integrate as best we can.”

One component of a redevelopment plan that Westchester business people regard as essential is a mass-transit link to the airport. But a much-desired Metro Green Line extension from the airport stalled on the drawing board when the Federal Aviation Administration warned the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission that electrical interference from the rail line’s overhead cables could affect aircraft landing equipment.

More recently, the commission downgraded the proposed Green Line extension, which would run north into Westchester from Imperial Boulevard and Aviation Way, to “candidate” status, meaning it will now have to compete with six other projects if and when funding becomes available.

At a meeting of the Westchester Chamber of Commerce’s Transportation Committee earlier this month, attorney and past chamber president Terry Marcellus described Westchester as trapped between two huge public agencies--the transportation commission and the Department of Airports--both of which he said are trying to cut costs during tough times.

“If this (Green Line extension) project goes down because two agencies can’t get their act together . . . it’s going to be an angry community,” he said.

At minimum, airport and county officials say it will be at least six years before LAX and downtown Westchester are connected by mass transit.

Also behind schedule is the airport-financed Westchester Parkway, deemed essential to relieving traffic congestion in the zone. It was originally scheduled to be in use by now but is now expected to take another year to complete. Dust and heavy equipment from the project continue to inundate the district.

On top of an uncertain tax and transportation picture, add the fact that Drollinger, while clearly the most influential property owner in the district, is hardly the only one. Without a sustained, communitywide effort, he said, there’s only so much he can do.

Councilwoman Galanter agrees.

“The danger with all this revitalization stuff,” she said, “is that everybody points the finger at the next guy and says, ‘Why don’t you do it?’ ”

Meanwhile, Westchester resident John Elford, manager of the 1,279-room Hilton on Century Boulevard, estimates that 7,500 hotel rooms lie minutes away from the Westchester Business District. He says he’d love to see all those tourists, business travelers, flight crews and other guests do their shopping there. In fact, he notes, the Hilton already offers a free shuttle service to guests looking for a place to shop.

But the shuttle’s destination is not Westchester. It is the Manhattan Village Mall, four miles south in Manhattan Beach. Guests have made it clear that they prefer the mix of stores there.