MAIN STREET L.A. / MELROSE AVENUE : Fame Has Dulled the Cutting Edge

The assignment is to find Main Street. We’re not talking Thomas Bros. here, but a journalistic concept--a sense of place, mood, texture. Maybe even substance. There are a million main streets in the naked county . . . dozens, anyway.

And Melrose Avenue seems an obvious place to start.

“Yeah,” sneers Billy Shire, a Melrose original. “A little too obvious, don’t you think?”

Well, thank you, Billy, but maybe that’s the point. Now that Fox TV is spooning out the hip hard bodies of “Melrose Place” to a gullible nation, now that Johnny Rockets can be found serving burgers and malts in London and Tokyo, now that your cousin from Kansas has posed for a snapshot outside Retail Slut, isn’t it about time to let the rest of the world in on a dirty little L.A. secret?

The bloom is off Melrose.

This neon-lit avenue of the hip, quasi-hip, faux hip and too hip--once so happening, so ahead-of-the-curve--is past its prime, a facsimile of its former self, a place that has become . . . too obvious.

Shire is in a position to know. The 41-year-old Berkeley-type (actually, he’s an Echo Park native, but nonetheless a Berkeley-type) presides over a little empire of stores--the Soap Plant, Wacko, Zulu, La Luz de Jesus. Little did anyone know that when Shire created the Wacko sign it would become a celebrated icon for weird L.A.

Shire is not exactly sure when the decline of Melrose began. He mentions the “jobbers,” peddling factory seconds at Melrose prices. He mentions the opening of that mall store--the Gap--and that was five years ago.

Shire isn’t alone in his distress. Too obvious is what Klaus Wille of Neo 80, a fashion boutique, thinks when he walks past new shops peddling factory seconds at Melrose prices. Too obvious is fashion designer Lisa Elliot’s critique of the hamburger-chomps-City-Hall architecture of The Burger That Ate L.A. And too obvious may serve as the epitaph for Ecru, a posh men’s store established with such bravado that they built the name right into the design--a monstrously impressionistic E-C-R-U, each letter about 13 feet tall. Now it’s vacant, a glaring, gaping failure.

“Who’s going to rent something that’s got somebody’s name on it?” Shire mutters.

Shire, Wille and Elliot all qualify as Melrose originals; they were there at the creation, when low rents of the late 1970s and early ‘80s attracted the artiste crowd. There remain relatively few trendsetters who helped transform Melrose Avenue from a tired street lined with tailors, artisans and antique shops into a phenomenon of L.A. style.

At its peak, Melrose was a gathering spot where yuppies could see the occasional celebrity along with purple-Mohawked punks strolling past the blue-haired women of the perfectly out-of-place Golden Age Retirement Home. But in the old days, Wille says, the punks seemed to be Beverly Hills kids with money to spend. Now they tend to be scruffy Hollywooders who look but don’t buy.

Some see “Melrose Place,” the TV spinoff of “Beverly Hills, 90210,” as just the latest milestone in the street’s degradation.

“My feeling on that is, by the time TV gets to anything it’s got to be dead,” says Gai Gherardi, a co-owner of the designer eye wear shop L.A. Eyeworks.

Then she catches herself, softening her tone: “But that isn’t to say the street is dead. It continues to be vital in this place in time.”

What others see as decline, Gherardi prefers to see as a “phase” in the constant metamorphosis of the street. Even the schlocky stores, she says, add to the diversity. But mention the Gap--”well, I wish that hadn’t happened,” Gherardi admits.

Even resident critics such as Gherardi and Wille close ranks at hints that stretches of La Brea Avenue or Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade have eclipsed the vibrancy of Melrose. With the 14 blocks between La Brea and Fairfax Avenue as its heart, Melrose remains a prime destination, offering fine restaurants and friendly cafes, three live theaters, intriguing shops and colorful denizens.

Unabashed Melrose boosters still abound. Born 50 years ago on Martel just two houses from Melrose, Richard Jebejian is both the proprietor of the family upholstery shop (founded 1936) and a landlord. As president of Merchants on Melrose (MOM), Jebejian believes that the street is as groovy as ever and says he is excited about the reflected glory of “Melrose Place.”

“There’s nothing wrong with people from Iowa and Kansas City and wherever patronizing the street. We get a lot of Japanese,” Jebejian says. “Our map is at the concierge desk at the hotels. They ask for Disneyland, Universal Studios and Melrose, in that order. We’re getting more queries than Rodeo!”

Restaurateur Ronn Teitelbaum defends the street that launched Johnny Rockets, his astronomically successful chain of 1940s-theme malt shops. He opened the first here on Melrose in 1986; now Teitelbaum has exported the idea to 27 other locations, with several more in planning. (Coming soon: Johnny Rockets of Melbourne, Australia.)

“Would it have happened if I’d opened in the Valley or Westwood? I don’t know,” Teitelbaum says. “We got a tremendous amount of publicity because we were on Melrose.”

Reports of Melrose’s decline are greatly exaggerated, Teitelbaum says: “We’re about 18% ahead of last year.”

But the bottom line is a crude measure. The originals lament something more elusive--an erosion of creative spirit. They see themselves as artists at heart and Melrose is their medium.

Melrose has always had its phases. Wille and Elliot, who are husband and wife, have witnessed the changes as business people and as residents. Their apartment is a few blocks east of the boutique they dubbed Neo 80 because it opened in 1980 and, Elliot says, “we didn’t think it would last the year.” But 12 years later, apparel sold up front is still designed by Elliott in the studio out back.

Wille declares, flatly, that the creative peak of Melrose was in 1983 and that the financial zenith was 1987. Over the years, Melrose became too successful for its own good, he says. Merchants and residents battled over parking regulations. Rents got too high for new artists to stake a claim.

Then there are the survivors, alternately criticizing, promoting and protecting a street that was very much their creation, now wary of those who would exploit it.

If “Melrose Place” wants to use the Wacko sign, they better be prepared to pay for it, Shire says. The man who got his start designing studded belts and other leather goods used to be happy to see his sign appear as a scene-setter on TV and in the movies. He used to like the free publicity; now he talks about copyright infringement. It seems like everybody wants a piece of Melrose.

Shire walks barefoot out Wacko’s fun-house entrance and pauses outside a window display at the Soap Plant, promoting a book of photographic art. On its cover is the ghoulish image of a nude woman drenched in red liquid. Shire designed the display himself, streaking the window in vivid red.

“That’s my blood,” he says.