Westwood Yearns for a Return to Its Glory Days : Neighborhoods: Buffeted by competition from trendier places, merchants plan to reinvent the area.

Rich Carstensen leans back in his battered pedicab, takes a bite of pizza and surveys the Westwood scene around him.

It is 11:15 on a Saturday evening and the street traffic is rapidly thinning. Some of the storekeepers have already bolted their doors. The teen-agers and thirtysomething couples that used to jam the intersection of Broxton and Weyburn avenues have long since departed and instead are thronging trendier places such as the Century City Shopping Center, Universal CityWalk, Old Pasadena, or lately, the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica.

These days, the people Carstensen sees around the village are foreigners and kids from such inland cities as Rancho Cucamonga. “If you’re from L.A., you don’t go to Westwood,” said Carstensen, 27, who has hauled customers through the village for nine years. “Once you get into the habit of not going to Westwood, you just don’t go.”

With its boarded-up stores, plummeting rents and ever-decreasing foot traffic, Westwood Village, once the city’s cynosure of shopping and dining, is a neighborhood in transition.

Buffeted hard by the recession and competition from more fashionable retail and dining areas, Westwood and its merchants are struggling to stay afloat in what are the leanest times ever to descend on the village. Although a major redevelopment waits in the wings, promising a return to better times, the cheek-by-jowl, bumper-to-bumper frenzy that once characterized Westwood’s weekend nights has vanished.

“There are no crowds,” said Laura Lake, president of Friends of Westwood, a community organization. “Only old-time loyalists and out-of-towners who don’t know any better.”

To those who have not prowled Westwood recently, the changes can be seen on every corner. The restaurant Yesterday has left. The Chart House, a fixture since 1973, changed its name to Mangos in an attempt to attract more business, then left the village for good in December. Baxter’s has been gone a couple of years.

“I’ve never seen it so bad,” said Bernard Yudell, manager of Bel-Air Camera and Video, who has been in Westwood for 24 years. “It used to be you’d walk two or three abreast and you’d have to walk in line. You don’t see that any more.”

Though many hesitate to bring it up, the symbolic beginning of Westwood’s downturn can be traced back five years to the shooting death by gang members of bystander Karen Toshima. It was a crime that sullied the village’s image as a haven and gave would-be shoppers pause when they considered visiting Westwood.

The vandalism and looting that followed the premiere of the movie “New Jack City” in March, 1991, further confirmed the fears of many that Westwood was the weekend gathering spot for troublemakers and gangs. Despite the fact that from June, 1992, to June, 1993, the village reported fewer assaults, burglaries and auto break-ins than the business area of Beverly Hills, the perception has been hard to shake.

“Even a single incident is enough to send a message that, ‘maybe I had better think of somewhere else to go,’ ” said Sandy Brown, president of the Holmby Westwood Property Owners Assn. “It could be enough to keep people from coming for years.”

Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, who represents the area, agrees. “Reputation has done more damage than anything,” he said.

But according to critics and longtime observers, perhaps a bigger reason the faithful deserted Westwood had to do with the village itself. As high school and college students began outnumbering older shoppers, merchants and property owners in the mid- to late 1980s replaced high- and middle-end retail stores with bars, frozen yogurt and T-shirt shops, and fast-food outlets.

Not only did the changeover make for what critics say was a more tawdry atmosphere, it hastened the departure of older visitors who felt out of place in the surroundings. Tom Carroll, who as executive director of the Westwood Village Management Corp. is spearheading a drive to revitalize the village, put it bluntly: “The village went to hell when it went for the teen-age market.”

In the midst of this, alternative dining and shopping complexes began appearing on the Westside. Village property owner Elliot Lewis acknowledges that when places such as the Century City Shopping Center and the Third Street Promenade began drawing people away from Westwood, merchants failed to respond to the challenge, unsure of how to win back shoppers.

“Because Westwood drifted, it lost its edge,” Lewis said. “It contributed to the feeling that there were other places to visit.”

The upshot to this bleak picture is that Westwood’s fractious coterie of merchants, and home and property owners, are exhibiting an unusual degree of cooperation to put the village back on its feet. Several ambitious plans have been put forth or are in the works.

For example: a $3.5-million Streetscape Design that will fundamentally make over the look of the village, providing for wider sidewalks, avenues of jacaranda trees and even new garbage cans, got under way recently. On Gayley Avenue, along the village’s southwest corridor, a 26,000-square-foot Circuit City is scheduled to open in February. And, in what boosters term “absolutely essential” to the village’s future, Westwood Management Corp. and the city are finalizing plans for a three-story parking structure on Broxton Avenue.

The most far-reaching effort is the bid by the Santa Monica-based developer Nansay USA Inc. to turn the shuttered northeast corner of the village into a 4.5-acre mixed-use complex. Nansay project manager Paul Brindley said the site eventually will hold a 324-room hotel, 106,000 square feet of retail space, 26,000 square feet of commercial office space, a new movie theater and 24 condominiums. The project, expected to sprawl over Glendon and Weyburn avenues, received final City Council approval in March.

But these initiatives have been dogged by criticism. Sandy Brown, of the property owners association, calls the proposed parking structure “exactly the wrong answer for Broxton Avenue,” saying that what is needed instead in the village’s center is an open-air plaza for pedestrians. “This is the walking street,” she said.

There are questions, too, of how the structure, which will add about 500 slots to Westwood’s pool of 8,000 street and parking lot spaces, is to be funded. In June, $10 million, some of which had been unofficially earmarked for the parking structure, was appropriated by the city to help meet its budgetary problems. More than $2 million still is needed for the Broxton Avenue facility, though Yaroslavsky said emphatically that the money will be raised, possibly through revenue bonds.

Likewise, some call the Nansay project more vision than reality. Though company officials refuse to put a price tag on the project, or even say when ground will be broken, estimates put the land costs at $40 million, and some say the development could exceed $200 million. Project manager Brindley declines to comment specifically on the status of the project’s financing, only saying that Nansay is “reaffirming” commitments with its financial backers. However, sources say that the short-term prospect for financing is not good.

In spite of these portents, there is evidence on a smaller scale that Westwood Village is slowing turning a corner.

In the last two months, Lewis said, about two dozen businesses have either signed new leases or renewed them. Commercial rents, once among the highest in the city at $5 to $6 per square foot, have dropped to $2 to $3 per square foot. Two delicatessens, including Jerry’s Deli, are moving in, as is the pricey Milano restaurant.

Village boosters also cite recent steps that have been taken to make Westwood more visitor-friendly. Coffeehouses and newsstands have replaced some of the fast-food outlets. A new parking program sets a flat rate of $2 after 5 p.m. for 13 village lots, and enables visitors to be reimbursed if they spend money at selected shops. Another program intended to clear the streets of panhandlers distributes leaflets listing organizations that provide services for the homeless. Shoppers are encouraged to give the flyers to panhandlers instead of change.

Merchants, too, are keeping longer hours or adding features to bring in foot traffic. At Butler/Gabriel Books, owner Philip Gabriel provides coffee and chairs for browsers, and stages live music on weekend nights. “We’re trying to do things differently than what you would find at the chain stores,” said Gabriel, who recently moved locations within the village and defied conventional wisdom by buying the site of his present store. “We wouldn’t have if we thought there was no hope for Westwood.”

In what may be the final irony, merchants and others are reporting the factors that drove shoppers away from Westwood are now driving them away from other areas. Some are slipping back into the village for a quiet evening of cappuccino, hassle-free parking and uncrowded streets. “It beats standing in line at Century City to see a movie,” said Yaroslavsky, who says the village is attracting “a different type of customer than in years past” and “is no longer the place it was.”

And therein may lie its appeal, said Rich Carstensen. “A lot of the people I know who go to the Promenade are getting sick of it,” he said as he hopped back into his pedicab and prepared to resume picking up the night’s remaining customers. “They say there’s too many drunks and too many homeless people there.”