Walk of Acclaim : Santa Monica’s Thriving Promenade Tries to Maintain Its Shine

Mitch Kato threads his way through the Saturday night crowd on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, past a bare-chested escape artist and a banjo player, past twinkling movie marquees and tinkling wine glasses.

Enticing aromas of pizza and espresso mingle with the sea breeze, but Kato’s attention is on the sound of the place--the happy hum of people at play. As he zigzags down the Promenade, he is hugged and thumped on the back. Everyone is glad to see Mitch.

They are meant to see him, too, for Kato is a Santa Monica cop walking the Promenade beat. His job is to ensure everyone’s safety at the beach city’s outdoor party spot, which attracts crowds of 15,000 on busy weekends to its three-block array of movies, restaurants and shops. His presence illustrates that, although the Promenade seems like an anything-goes kind of place, it is as carefully tended as a yuppie baby.

A web of strategies is at work beneath the hubbub of the night, aimed at keeping this regional rumpus room as full of revelers as it has been since becoming an instant success when it opened in September, 1989. Many of them involve managing too much of a good thing.

“We tried to build a utility vehicle . . . and we got a Ferrari,” said Tom Carroll, who managed the renovation of the Promenade and oversaw its opening. “It goes 140 m.p.h. and you always have to mind the controls.”

The visibility of Kato and as many as seven other officers, some of them on bicycles, is a vital part of minding the controls. Among the other strategies is a new curfew law that police say will help them deal with packs of teen-agers meandering around late at night. Meanwhile, alleys adjacent to the Promenade are lit up like hospital operating rooms so there is no place to hide. Merchants have a special beeper number so they can summon police when trouble strikes.

Two new campaigns discourage panhandling by asking customers to contribute to homeless charities instead. On outdoor dining patios, alcohol is served only with food, so the patios don’t turn into rowdy bars.

The parking structures may soon have attendants instead of meters, adding safety and allowing visitors to linger (and spend money) without suffering “meter anxiety.”

The next push will be to ask the Santa Monica City Council to further regulate the street performers, who give the place pizazz but tend to clog foot traffic and block store entrances. The Bayside District Corp., the quasi-public agency that runs the Promenade, also is seeking a regulation--if it is legal--that would keep panhandlers several feet from diners on restaurant patios.

Merchants say unrelenting panhandling is the No. 1 cause of customer dissatisfaction, and some independent market research by Promenade restaurateurs has pointed toward the same conclusion. But, as legally protected free speech, it is difficult to curb.

The overall strategy at the Promenade is one of constant attention to detail in a tricky, fluid situation--managing a place where people of all ages, ethnicities and income levels will feel comfortable, as long as they behave.

“Everybody’s welcome; it’s an unusual concept,” said Santa Monica Police Sgt. Gary Gallinot, who ran the Promenade detail for several years. “You can be a millionaire and go down there and have a good time or be broke and go down there and have a good time.”

The pride of becoming an “in spot” is, however, dampened by fear that the Promenade might collapse under the weight of its own success, as Westwood Village did several years ago.

“The fragility of that thing out there called the Promenade is very apparent to me,” said Ernie Kaplan, a property owner and key player in the center’s development. “It could come apart faster than it came together.”

That crowd control would become an issue on Third Street “would have seemed a preposterous notion” to the Promenade’s planners, said Dennis Zane, a former Santa Monica councilman and mayor.

Zane is widely credited for his role in turning what was once a sow’s ear into a silk purse bulging with gold for all involved. Last fiscal year, despite the recession, the city pulled in $600,000 in sales tax revenue from the Promenade. The city’s cut from the sales tax is one cent per dollar, which means Promenade businesses had $60 million in taxable sales.

In addition, the city received $3 million from parking lots and leases, and more than $300,000 in business license taxes.

Only a decade ago, Santa Monica was saddled with a woebegone outdoor pedestrian mall, desperately in need of redevelopment. Earlier efforts to rejuvenate the Third Street mall had collapsed in a heap of distrust between the business community and the City Hall crowd.

There were no models in other cities to turn to. Conventional wisdom in the early 1980s held that outdoor shopping areas were dead. Nonetheless, a group representing all segments of the community coalesced around an idea for a multifaceted entertainment, restaurant and shopping district.

It seemed risky. At the time, strolling around streets in the Los Angeles area was, except for aerobic purposes, considered suspicious activity. Outdoor dining patios were few and far between. The shopping spots of choice were climate-controlled indoor malls filled with cookie-cutter chain stores.

Zane remembers wondering: “Would anyone come to our party?”

Well, everyone did--and now Santa Monica is the model for other cities, winning national acclaim and urban design awards and starting an outdoor dining craze that has spread throughout the Los Angeles basin. Pasadena and Long Beach are two cities that have looked to the Promenade for inspiration in redeveloping their downtowns, as has Westwood Village.

In part, the success of the Promenade is a tribute to the lure of the movies. When theater chains evinced a sudden interest in moving to other locations in Santa Monica, Zane swiftly crafted a zoning law that welcomed them--but only at the outdoor mall. With that, the core of the Promenade was in place.

But 4,900 movie seats are not all the Promenade has going for it. “You have a textbook set of components that an urban center needs to succeed,” said Robert Resnick, president of the Bayside District board of directors.

As Resnick sees it, the Promenade’s proximity to other destination points--the beach, Santa Monica Pier and Santa Monica Place shopping mall--made it a natural for locals and tourists. Stretching three blocks from Broadway to Wilshire Boulevard, the Promenade is large enough to hold crowds and small enough to be manageable from a policing standpoint. And it already had parking--about 9,000 spaces.

Also significant, Resnick said, is that the Promenade is in a small, tightly controlled city that can act swiftly when the need arises. Mayor Judy Abdo notes that local decision-makers are frequent visitors who know the Promenade in an organic, rather than a theoretical, way.

Crafting an ambience of safety was always on the minds of its creators. Mindful of how Westwood Village toppled under the weight of an all-youth crowd, they designed the Promenade to have a mix of attractions to serve all ages.

One can have a gourmet dinner at Remi or a fast-food taco, a handful of red licorice or a bottle of wine that costs enough to feed a family of four for a week. There are new and used books, new and used CDs, wares from Africa, South America and Europe.

But Zane said the core customers were always intended to be middle-age, middle-class people. They spend money, provide stability and durability, and keep the intended lighthearted atmosphere from getting out of hand, he said.

As a group, however, middle-age, middle-class people are fussy customers, sensitive to the nuances of safety, comfort and tone. It is easy to lose them.

“They like to see people like them there,” Zane said.

And that’s what worries Promenade watchers. Lately, some count fewer middle-age couples and families, but more teen-agers and aggressive panhandlers. Merchants tend to worry if they don’t see enough police officers around. And some complain that the place is a bit the worse for wear, despite regular cleaning, because of the crowds.

“I, for a fact, know many people who don’t come down here anymore,” Kaplan said. “They are people who can spend money, people who enjoy crowds.”

On the retail front, the recession has hurt. Promenade officials say they hope their popularity holds until the economy recovers and they can offer more.

Cleanliness might seem to be easily achieved, but wear and tear on the Promenade is manifest and unsettling. Besides grime from the sheer size of the crowds, the vicinity’s large number of homeless people add to the problem by using the area as a bathroom.

Merchants and property owners are squawking for more help from the city, which is juggling demands for service because of budget problems. Besides trying new machines to deep-clean concrete, the city has plans to spruce up the parking structures, which create an important first impression for customers.

But neither the trendiest stores nor the spiffiest parking garages will mean a thing if the Promenade isn’t safe.

In fact, the Promenade’s record is pretty good. Police officials say it helped that they were in on the planning and ongoing management of the Promenade. Police recommended the alley lighting and the curfew for teen-agers, for example.

“It’s a model of community policing,” said Sgt. Gallinot.

Statistics for the first six months of 1993 show 45 assaults, 11 of them serious, but police say many of these violent crimes occur late at night when few customers are around.

The biggest crime problem is auto-related theft in the parking structures, police say.

Although proclaiming the area generally safe, police caution that there are no guarantees in the tinderbox of urban America. With luck and pluck, Santa Monica is about to celebrate the Promenade’s fourth anniversary with the party still in full swing.