Setting Up Shop : Fillmore Merchants Reopen Their Businesses Under the Big Top
For the first time since Jan. 17, Shirley Wright’s Mirage dress shop opened for business in Fillmore on Monday.
“It’s amazing what you can do with a little bit of space and a lot of help from your friends,” said Wright, 55, surveying her 800-square-foot corner near the front entrance of the city’s new makeshift shopping center.
Looking like a billowy metal tent, the kind of contraption a traveling circus might set up, Fillmore’s new Central Park Plaza I is the temporary home for many businesses damaged in the quake that ravaged the city’s historic downtown.
Next week, a row of trailers will open across the street as Central Park Plaza II, joining the tent-like structure that merchants call “the pavilion.” While the pavilion houses 10 retail stores and the Fillmore Chamber of Commerce office, the trailers will be home to 10 more diverse businesses, including hair and nail salons, an accounting firm, a chiropractic office and one of the town’s two hometown newspapers, the Fillmore Gazette.
The plazas will have a grand opening in two weeks. But with phone lines going in, the partitions standing and the sea-colored carpeting on the floor, pavilion store owners eager to jump-start their dormant businesses opened shop immediately after breakfast Monday.
“This is wonderful--till I can get back to the old place,” Wright said, wearing a determined smile as she surveyed her new digs, decorated in forest green and florals.
In the six weeks since the quake, Wright has just thanked her lucky stars for strong fall and Christmas sales that allowed her to pay off all her bills before the earthquake hit. Since then, she said, there’s been no money coming in, and she has had little to do but think and worry.
“I was kind of a lost person,” Wright said. “I didn’t really know what to do, because I’m the sort of person who’s always in a hurry.”
When the chance to move into the pavilion came a few weeks ago, Wright leaped at it. Last week, before the structure’s floor was finished and long before other merchants had even loaded a moving van, Wright planned how to make her temporary cubbyhole as pretty as her 1,750-square-foot store on Central Avenue was.
“I just worked with the color of the carpet,” she said.
The pavilion is about 9,500 square feet, erected on the parking lot of a city park at Central Avenue and Main Street just south of downtown. The city has already poured about $135,000 into the structure, City Manager Roy Payne said--$60,000 for the rent and $75,000 to make it inhabitable for the merchants.
The money came from federal Community Block Grants, funds that the city receives annually and usually distributes to local public service organizations. But in this year of crisis, it is targeted for earthquake relief. To help troubled tenants regain their financial footing, pavilion rent for at least the first six months will be $1 per month.
The trailers and the money to refurbish them, on the other hand, were donated to the city by former Los Angeles Laker star A. C. Green and G. E. Capital Modular Space of Pennsylvania. Bad weather has delayed work on the trailers, but city officials say they hope to have them in working order by next week.
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With hammering and equipment-moving still going on inside the pavilion Monday, only a smattering of customers showed up to shop. But merchants said they were confident that when the remaining stores finish moving in this week, business would return to pre-earthquake levels.
“It feels good to be back in business,” Steve Topping, owner of Topping’s Shoes, said after selling about half a dozen pairs in the first few hours of business. “Being out of business . . . is about as hard as you can get.”
Two of the pavilion’s first customers were Bob Fowler, 65, and L. D. Scott, 72, retired Fillmore residents who stopped by to see what they could purchase.
“I just came by to see what’s here,” Fowler said. “I’m glad to see them up like this.”
As merchants move out of the plazas, city officials say other merchants not displaced by the quake will be allowed to move in while their buildings are retrofitted to comply with quake standards.
That rotation, however, remains months away. Many store owners say they have no idea when or even if they will be able to reoccupy their former buildings.
“A lot of my building’s in the street up there,” said a sober Ron Stewart, squeezing his business, Ballard Furniture, into 1,800 square feet of tent space from its 11,000-square-foot site on Central Avenue. “We’re waiting to see what our costs are to rebuild.”
The store, which Stewart’s grandfather opened 57 years ago, saw rough times even before the earthquake. Stewart, 44, hung on through at least two draining years of recession, letting employee after employee go until it was just he, his wife and his stepdaughter selling wing chairs and ordering canopy beds.
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Since the earthquake, however, Stewart has been especially exhausted, what with dealing with the city, applying for his now-approved federal Small Business Administration loan (“And that’s not a grant--it is a loan,” he said, rolling his eyes) and worrying about his store’s survival.
“I wouldn’t say I’m nervous about my business,” he said. “I’m nervous about my life, about losing virtually everything I’ve worked for in my adult life.”
He rubbed his forearms and sighed.
“Twenty-five years of your life--gone in 30 seconds.”
