Laguna Beach Working to Get Back in Business : Retail: After long recession, things were just looking up when rains came. Now still-soggy shops fear damage to city’s image will be almost as bad as flooding itself.
The torrential rains are over, but the horizon hardly seems brighter to Alan Pecherer.
On a balmy afternoon, Pecherer slogged through the mud inside his home-furnishings store, now stripped of the plush carpet, elegant furniture and artwork he had collected from around the world. “Welcome to our beautiful showroom,” he quipped to a visitor.
Pecherer, 40, used $210,000 of his savings to start Peter J’s on Ocean Avenue in Laguna Beach, and the store had been open only three months when the city’s 10-foot-deep storm viaduct overflowed after heavy rains, first on Jan. 4 and again six days later.
Muddy waters gushed into the building, and Pecherer recalls watching helplessly as a black leather sofa from Italy floated across the showroom and glass sculptures tipped over and sank.
Pecherer figures he had at least $35,000 in damage, but he vowed Monday, as clean-up crews tackled the mess, that he will reopen.
“It’s just a matter of trying to do what you can without going totally insane,” he said. “The worst part of it is that you’re in here, shoveling mud, getting slimy, and you go outside and it’s a gorgeous, sunny day.”
Laguna Beach’s downtown merchants, especially those on Ocean Avenue, were pounded by the recent floods. Though there has been no official damage tally yet, the local Chamber of Commerce estimates that nearly half of the 250 businesses in the downtown district sustained some damage.
Most of it was minor--soaked carpets, cracked wooden floors and tainted inventory, much of which can now be found on racks along with other marked-down goods left over from Christmas. Jan Jurcisin, office manager for the Chamber of Commerce, said practically all of the merchants have reopened already.
Still, it is far from business as usual.
The movies were playing at Edward’s Cinema on Coast Highway near Ocean Avenue, which faces the beach and is said to be the lowest point in Laguna Beach. But people couldn’t sit in the first 15 rows because those seats were still soaked.
Behind Bombay Duck restaurant on Ocean Avenue, there was a thick cake of mud in the parking lot. Chef Ajay Prakash, 28, who had seen a flood or two in his native India, was still awe-struck.
“It looked like the ocean was here,” he said, recounting how the rushing waters carried away some of the restaurant’s patio chairs.
Piles of sandbags remained strewn everywhere too--in the narrow streets, inside and outside storefront doorways, even on top of window ledges where poinsettia plants had perched just weeks before.
Jonathan Thomas, 28, said he isn’t about to take down the three-foot barricade of sandbags, stone garbage cans and benches that he erected to protect his own shop, Ocean Avenue Brewery, and some of his neighbors’. “I’m not going to move it until the rains are done,” he said, eyeing a few gray clouds overhead Monday.
Across Ocean Avenue, Shin Kim stood behind the counter of his father’s dry-cleaning shop, wearing a green Army jacket and prepared for the worst. Kim too had sandbags outside his doorway, and for good measure he had duct tape on hand to seal the doors and windows, where water had seeped in during the floods and nipped the bottom of clothes hanging on the racks.
“No water allowed in this store anymore,” Kim said as if issuing an order.
But the biggest worry among the merchants isn’t another downpour. It is fear that Laguna Beach will be seen by outsiders as a disaster zone--again. The first time was in October, 1993, when the Laguna Hills fires slowed tourism for months, even though the flames didn’t spread to the downtown business district.
“Laguna has not washed into the sea, and our businesses are open,” Mayor Kathleen Blackburn said, reflecting that concern.
Many of the city’s gift and specialty shops and restaurants said they came off a healthy holiday season after months of slow sales caused largely by Southern California’s lingering recession, then the fires. They were looking ahead to 1995 with hope.
Now they aren’t so sure.
Rene Battistone, a co-owner of Areo, a home-accessories boutique, said the floods probably caused $4,000 of direct damage to inventory. But she said she also had to close the store for several days, and there were other days when the shop was open, but shoppers couldn’t get there because of road closures.
Battistone had projected January sales of $27,000. With more than half the month gone, total receipts were just over $6,000--enough to pay the rent but not much more.
“We really suffered after the fires,” said Battistone, a former Crate & Barrel designer who, with two others, started Areo on a shoestring budget nearly three years ago.
“We were just praying and praying,” Battistone said, noting that business was beginning to grow as satisfied customers spread the word. “We just hope that people still do shop in Laguna.”
