New Life for an Unusual Bazaar : Shopping: Owners of the Indoor Swapmeet of Stanton promise to boost business after failing to make it a card club.

The cloud that has been hanging over the Indoor Swapmeet of Stanton is finally beginning to dissipate.

Cars are parking regularly in the lot on Beach Boulevard just north of Cerritos Avenue. Most days, customers can be seen sauntering among the airy structure’s 200 booths, where offerings range from religious icons to colorful silk shirts. And amid the smell of fresh leather mingled with that of tacos and falafel, customers can be heard haggling in a smorgasbord of languages, including English, Spanish and Vietnamese.

Until last month, though, the future of the international bazaar had been uncertain. That’s when Stanton voters overwhelmingly defeated a measure that would have allowed the swap meet owners to turn their two-story building into a card club, which they contended would have been more profitable. The battle was so pitched that its political fallout includes a recall drive against two city councilmen who supported the measure. Now that gambling has been ruled out, however, the mall’s owners say they are redoubling their efforts to make the swap meet succeed.

“If you try something new and it doesn’t work,” said manager Hratch Derderian, “you go back to the old thing and put all your energy into it.”

Jill Walsh, a visitor from New Zealand, probably would be glad to hear that.

“It’s an interesting place to shop,” she said during a recent break from a three-month motorcycle tour of America. “We have nothing like this in New Zealand.”

Indeed, there isn’t much like it in the United States.

Commonly seen in Mexico and Central America, indoor swap meets--in contrast to the outdoor variety usually held at drive-in theaters--consist of permanent buildings housing hundreds of small, colorful booths leased at relatively low rates by independent vendors. Because of the low overhead, the vendors are then able to offer their products at prices that, in some cases, undercut more traditional competitors by 20% to 50%.

While such malls have been cropping up in the United States at least since the early 1980s, Ard Keuilian, the local developer who opened the Stanton swap meet five years ago, didn’t think of it until visiting one in the San Fernando Valley in 1986.

“I had no idea what I was doing,” said Keuilian, 53, who has developed several auto centers along Beach Boulevard. The indoor swap meet, he said, was something he “just had the feeling that the city needed.”

Early reactions seemed to prove him right. For at least two years after the swap meet opened on 2 1/2 acres at the corner of Beach Boulevard and First Street, Derderian said, the place was 100% occupied, and Derderian had a long waiting list of merchants. And even with an admission price of $1 a head, he said, people literally lined up around the block to get in.

“We used to rent every corner,” the manager recalled. “Every single booth was filled, and everybody was doing great.”

Then came disaster in the form of an economic recession. By 1992 vendor occupancy had dropped to 65%, most of it on the bottom floor. And despite elimination of the admission charge, Derderian said, the number of customers shopping at the mall decreased from 4,000 a day at its height in 1990 to about 1,000 daily last year.

“The novelty wore off,” Keuilian said. “Then the economy went bad, and we were just breaking even.”

His proposed solution: Transform the ailing swap meet into a glittering card club that would generate $2 million to $3 million in annual income for the city. “I thought we could use one,” he said of the would-be gambling club.

Election returns indicated that Stanton voters disagreed with him 4 to 1, but not before a bruising battle. Keuilian and his partners spent more than $75,000 in promoting Measure A, which would have legalized gambling in the city. But the Stanton City Council passed a resolution opposing the measure. And other opponents distributed leaflets raising the specter, among other things, of gambling-induced prostitution along Beach Boulevard.

“Do we want this on Beach Boulevard?” one leaflet asked on the flip side of a photograph, apparently staged, depicting provocatively dressed young women soliciting business on the street.

With gambling now ruled out, Keuilian and his partners say they are working on other ways to bolster business on the swap meet’s still sparsely populated upper floor. Ideas under consideration, they say, include turning the floor into a country-Western dance hall, youth club, aerobics studio, penny arcade, restaurant, bingo parlor, nightclub, billiard hall or senior center.

But whatever the decision, they say, the swap meet will remain on the lower floor. “Right now we want to concentrate on keeping it open as a swap meet,” said Derderian, adding that the number of vendors and customers already has increased somewhat since June 8, when the gambling measure was defeated.

That burgeoning enthusiasm seemed evident on a recent weekday as customers, some of them pushing baby carriages, wandered among booths comparing prices. Among the mall’s offerings are women’s and men’s clothing, cosmetics, luggage, a travel agency, television and stereo equipment, jewelry, shoes, toys, Spanish guitars, flowers and movie posters. A snack bar centrally located on the main stairway features hot dogs, hamburgers, tacos, falafels and Greek gyros.

“They have great deals,” said Ella Maciol, 18, a recent Stanton high school graduate who said she visits the swap meet regularly. “I don’t buy clothes here, just small stuff like pictures and stuff.”

Said Walsh, the visitor from New Zealand: “It’s like shopping in Tijuana, but without the hassle.”

Not all the vendors--who rent booths for $200 to $600 a month--are enthralled with the situation, however. John Shammas, a 68-year-old Palestinian immigrant who has been selling imported religious items from an upstairs space almost since the mall began, says he will have to close shop soon if business doesn’t improve significantly.

“I blame management,” said the shopkeeper, whose sales have dropped 50% in the past three years. “They spent $75,000 to (try to) pass Measure A,” the card club proposal. “If they’d spent half that on advertising, we’d have this place full.”

Others blame their woes primarily on economic conditions. “You can’t expect too much in this situation,” said Tony Araeipour, 30, who runs an electronics shop on the lower floor.

Managers, meanwhile, say they are doing everything they can to restore success.

“We are trying our very best,” Derderian said. “We leave the rest to God.”