BALDWIN HILLS : Robinsons-May Gets Repairs, New Stock
The Robinsons-May in the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza is celebrating its 46th anniversary in June with a splashier event than any store officials had in mind, but one they say is long overdue.
The store had sustained extensive damage during the Jan. 17 earthquake and was forced to close its doors. Recently, a Robinsons-May official announced plans to reopen June 6 not only with structural improvements, but with new merchandise.
“We took the opportunity to paint the whole store, put in new flooring and replace all of our merchandise,” said Robinsons-May spokesman Jim Watterson. “It was time to improve the store anyway. This is something the community has wanted for years.”
Watterson said that heavy water damage and extensive structural cracks forced the store to remain closed longer than expected. But the closure afforded officials the chance to spruce up the store.
Along with the new paint and flooring will be a new mix of merchandise, said Watterson. The store was a May Co. until last year, when Robinsons and May Co. merged.
“We had to take everything out of the store anyway, so this was a perfect time to do what we had intended to do for a while,” Watterson said.
Two community-based operations that had operated out of the store--the Museum of African-American Art and the OASIS senior center--will also reopen June 6. In the meantime, OASIS classes are held throughout the Crenshaw area, including Christ the Good Shepherd Church, Crossroads Arts Academy and the Delta Sigma Theta Life Development Center.
For merchants with businesses on the mall’s upper level next to the Robinsons-May entrance, the reopening won’t come a moment too soon. Since the closure, they said, foot traffic dried up and sales, which had been sluggish anyway, plummeted.
“Things have really slacked off,” said Ruby Innis, who moved her Radiance Boutique across the mall last July in the hopes of improving business.
“I don’t think that a lot of people know that even though the Robinsons-May closed, other stores are open for business. We closed for a few weeks, like a lot of other stores, but when we reopened, people who came to Robinsons-May didn’t automatically come back.”
Sam X, a salesman at McClendon’s Hats, blamed the mall management for not getting the word out that his and other stores recovered quickly from the quake. “There’s been a total lack of communication,” he said, adding that sales dropped more than 50% after the quake.
Fred Bruning, vice president of mall developer and owner Alexander Haagen Co., said that the plaza advertised heavily after the quake, even erecting a billboard on Crenshaw Boulevard to let customers know that the mall was open.
“We appreciate the tenants’ frustration, but we think that the business generated after the reopening will more than make up for the problems now,” he said. Bruning said that the mall’s other two anchor stores, Sears and the Broadway, will also remodel by the end of the year.
“Robinsons-May gave the other stores the impetus to improve too,” he said. “If there’s a silver lining to the devastation of the earthquake, this is it.”
Bruning said that new tenants coming aboard will nearly fill the mall by December. Occupancy now stands at 68%. “The prognosis for the plaza right now is very good,” he said. Bruning declined to say which stores will be moving in.
Innis shared some of Bruning’s optimism that the plaza will recapture some of its glory of the 1940s, when it opened as the nation’s first shopping center with two anchor stores.
“Getting new merchandise in the Robinsons-May will be a real plus. People have been complaining about that stock for a long time,” she said, referring to criticism in the Crenshaw community that the mall lacks top-quality goods. “The earthquake has been rough on us, but we just have to wait it out.”
