A Boulevard on the Road to Recovery : Gardena: The symbolic heart of the city will get only cosmetic surgery, but merchants and residents hope the planned improvements signal the beginning of a turnaround.

Gardena Boulevard, the symbolic heart of its namesake, is trying to reclaim its glory. And some say it’s about time.

From the Looney Bin gift shop on the western end to Nicolas Garcia’s furniture store half a mile away, Gardena shopkeepers are bracing for the most extensive capital improvements on the street in years: the planting of palm trees and new, stylish sidewalks.

Such improvements may seem modest--too modest, some say--but to the merchants and others who have watched the boulevard fade, it is a sign that one of the city’s oldest streets, and the centerpiece of commerce decades ago, is finally getting its due.

In times past, the boulevard was a place where everybody seemed to know everybody else, where worshipers filed out of nearby St. Anthony’s Church and headed for the boulevard to shop and stroll.

“It was the only game in town,” recalled Tom Parks, the town’s unofficial historian.

“Lot of people say it’s something out of Norman Rockwell, which in a lot of ways it was,” said Rick Guliano, manager of his family’s Italian deli and bakery, a mainstay on the boulevard for 40 years.

“But now,” he added, “it’s not as pretty as it was. They tore down houses up the street and the other end is a lot scarier looking.”

True, change has visited the boulevard in subtle and obvious ways.

On the western end, office and apartment buildings have replaced the vintage homes. Although it has brought new business, some wonder if the boulevard has lost part of its charm.

“They should have converted them into restaurants or stores or something,” said Carol Luna of the Looney Bin, who was drawn to the area because she thought the mix of houses and businesses was quaint.

On the eastern end, graffiti still pops up on buildings, but the city has been more aggressive in painting over the scribblings and chasing off drug dealers. Just over the city limits into Harbor Gateway, graffiti overwhelms the handful of stores.

Merchants said there is no trouble, as long you stay on the Gardena side. And jeweler Oscar Medrano Jr. said he has found a solution to persistent graffiti on the side of his family’s business: a mural, painted by four taggers, that depicts an urban skyline with a bunny floating in the clouds firing a spray can.

The title: “Happy Feelings”

The reaction: Mixed feelings.

“I would have preferred a French Impressionist painting,” said Guliano, the Italian deli owner.

“It concerns me if (the area) begins to look like Tijuana or East L.A.,” Councilman James W. Cragin, who chairs the city’s Beautification Committee, told the weekly Gardena Valley News when the mural went up in December.

He still thinks that way, he said this week, adding that his remark should not be taken as a slur against the increasingly Latino businesses popping up in the area.

“I did say that and I talked to Latino friends and they said, ‘For God’s sake we don’t want that here.’ ”

Medrano said people who don’t like the mural’s presence are not in tune with the changes on his end of the boulevard. Besides, he said, nobody has tagged the mural since it has been there, and neighboring shopkeepers suspect that it has lead to a decrease in graffiti on their buildings too.

Medrano, president of the loosely organized Downtown Merchants Assn., is one of the loudest complainers about the decline of the boulevard.

For him, change has come too slowly. He has heard the talk of installing 19th Century-style gas lamps, repaving the streets and expanding the sidewalks. But he wonders when it will all come.

Over the past seven years, the city has split the cost with merchants of facade improvements, mainly fresh paint, awnings and new signs for those storefronts most in need. About 25 of nearly 100 merchants on the street have participated in the city program.

The city knows improvements have come piecemeal--the new palm trees and sidewalks were due last year--but it has done what it could, according to Gail Doi, the city official overseeing the Gardena Boulevard Downtown Revitalization Program.

Most of the commercial growth in the city has occurred on Redondo Beach Boulevard.

Long ago notable for its nurseries, in the 1970s and ‘80s Redondo Beach Boulevard blossomed into a thriving business center, bursting with fast-food outlets, office buildings and mini-malls.

Over on Gardena Boulevard, sidewalks cracked, storefronts faded and drug dealing and graffiti afflicted the street, principally on the eastern end.

But the boulevard did not completely die. “The boulevard held up over the years,” said Betty Gray, owner of the Desert Room saloon, housed in one of the street’s oldest buildings.

Business stayed on, relying on steady customers, but merchants gained a sense that the street had never reached its potential.

So it is with caution that owners greet the latest dose of hope.

Garcia, the furniture store owner, is one of those awaiting improvements. He typifies a more subtle change in the boulevard, the increasing number of Latino businesses on the eastern end, capitalizing on spillover traffic from the Latino neighborhood just over the city line in Harbor Gateway.

“We need the improvements to make this place more lively,” Garcia said. “Five years ago it was dead. But now it is coming up again. We still need more businesses, banks and restaurants and things like that. But it is coming up. I just hope it continues that way.”

Improvements on Gardena Boulevard City officials have ordered capital improvements-the planting of palm trees and building of stylish sidewalks-along the stretch of Gardena Boulevard.