Vendors Troubled at Paradise Market : New Venture in Riot Area Gets Off to a Slow Start

Five days a week, Caroline Adewole displays her boxes of beauty supplies and West African outfits in the small booth she rents at the Paradise Market. And each day, she waits hours for a customer and grows discouraged by the few sales she makes.

“Business is very slow, and I’m thinking that if it doesn’t pick up by the end of this month I’m going to have to leave,” Adewole said of Paradise Market, an open-air center in South-Central that includes a free mobile health clinic and a computer-learning center.

Paradise Market, the first project approved under the city’s post-riot ordinance to streamline the rebuilding process, was created as a one-stop center providing goods and services in a community where much was lost during the April-May civil unrest.

But five months after the market opened, several of its 15 retail vendors are struggling, though the free clinic and learning center attract a steady flow of people to the one-acre lot at 52nd Street and Broadway.

“I hope something happens to bring those people over here (from the clinic and center) to spend money instead of going to those swap meets miles away,” said Adewole.

Paradise Market, named after the Paradise Baptist Church that owns the market’s site, is a $1-million collaborative effort of a number of architects and lawyer-businessman Richard Riordan, the multimillionaire who entered the Los Angeles mayoral race last week.

Several architects from the National Organization of Minority Architects helped to put together the concept for the market. Riordan put up more than $300,000 to finance it and also enlisted Rebuild L.A.’s help in the venture. The Riordan Foundation, his philanthropic organization, also made a donation, as did the Weingart Foundation and 100 Black Men of Los Angeles.

Neither Riordan nor architect Stephen Woolley, who serves as executive director of the market, expected Paradise to be a moneymaker. But they hoped it would break even. So far, it hasn’t.

“No one expected it to be quite this difficult. I think it’s symptomatic of this area,” Woolley said. He noted that the market is located in an economically depressed area where the 1990 U.S. Census showed the median household income ranging from $18,267 to $19,318.

City Councilwoman Rita Walters--whose 9th District includes the market site--said she is not surprised Paradise is having difficulties. The market is “just another swap meet in a district proliferated with swap meets,” Walters said.

Vendors and service providers say Paradise is better than a swap meet but needs better advertising.

Coronado Communications, an advertising firm working for the market, has conducted several surveys of area residents about the market and printed flyers about Paradise, but it has done little else, some vendors complain. Fernando Oaxaca, president of Coronado, said his firm will be expanding advertising for the market.

Vendors, service providers and market officials believe Paradise can prosper with time and more publicity.

“Anything worthwhile takes longer than you think. It’s a good project; it’s just having growing pains,” said Elaine Gaspard, a member of the market’s board of directors, also known as Citizens United in Community Action. “Setbacks do not equal failure.”

Woolley and market board members are talking with city officials for permission to open on Sundays (the market is now open Tuesday through Saturday), to stay open past 4 p.m. during the week and to have food vendors at the site. Woolley is also talking with area churches in hopes they might hold events at the market occasionally.

“If we can make it work, then it’ll really be something,” Woolley said of the market.

At Paradise, brightly colored flags wave from the top of a chain-link fence and from green tented tarps that shelter the 25 orange-and-yellow painted booths. Graffiti-art murals encouraging youths to keep off drugs and away from gangs have been painted on large canvases that lean against one of three trailers at the site.

One trailer is used for administrative offices, and the other two house the Mattel Learning Center and a free health clinic run by the Watts Health Foundation. The vending booths are at the center of the site, surrounding a 1,500-square-foot Food 4 Less mini-mart. Rebuild L.A. encouraged the La Habra-based company to open a store at the site.

The small market is a godsend for Mary Ann Mendez, a 21-year-old mother of two who lives around the corner. It’s the only reason she shops at Paradise.

“This is good because I come here when I need baby food or diapers at the last minute,” Mendez said. The supermarket at 53rd and Main Street where Mendez used to shop burned down during the riots.

Alton Smith, manager of the mini-mart, said the market only receives a few customers each day, far fewer than the company expected in light of a shortage of markets in the area.

At the Mattel Learning Center and the Watts Health Foundation’s mobile clinic, the number of clients and students is constant, although officials say they expect an increase when more people discover the market.

The clinic’s six-person staff treats up to 25 people a day, including many without health insurance and many children who have never visited a doctor. The learning center’s preschool classes have a waiting list of about 20 parents eager to enroll their children.

More than 30 students are enrolled in the learning center’s three-hour bilingual sessions, where preschool and kindergarten children learn their ABCs on computers donated by IBM. In the adult section, students ranging from teen-agers to retirees use computers to work on individualized lessons.

“I like working here on the computers better than at school because you can do more things on these,” said 13-year-old Erwin Barillas, a Carver Middle School student who comes to the learning center every day after school.

Outside those trailers, vendors look hopefully at passersby or rearrange their merchandise, including clothing for children and adults, shoes, hosiery, underwear, vitamins, knickknacks and toys.

Most of the 15 vendors at the site are African-American, though about 60% of the surrounding community is Latino. However, Oaxaca said more Latino vendors will be moving in during the next few months.

Leona Culton has been a vendor at Paradise since August and says business there is like business anywhere--some days are good and some are bad. Culton, whose women’s shoe and hosiery booth has been successful, said Paradise is the only “positive thing they got going in this community.”

“This is a depressed and bleak area and this (Paradise Market) is sort of a ray of sunlight for the community,” said Culton, president of the vendors’ association at the market.

Annette Williams often visits with another vendor to pass the time between customers. Williams, whose booth has sold children’s clothes and nurse’s uniforms for three months, predicted that business will turn around once word of the market reaches people.

“We’re all willing to try and make this work. It’s the only thing that we have as vendors and the community has for different places to shop,” Williams said. “For all of us, it’s about our livelihoods, so we have to make it work.”