SAN GABRIEL VALLEY / COVER STORY : Pomona Starts Over : The diverse forces of art, education and commerce are sparking a renaissance for the city’s faded downtown.

For years it was a ghost town, unclaimed even by local street gangs.

There was nothing in downtown Pomona worth fighting for, just a bleak landscape of boarded-up shops, broken glass and the occasional Jesus Saves storefront church.

Once a haughty dowager of a city whose wealth and history had rivaled Pasadena’s, Pomona began to tarnish in the 1960s as small businesses died or fled to new malls. By the 1980s, the suburban city of 150,000 was battling crime and unemployment. Its biggest news stories recently have been the battle over plans to bring in two card clubs and the closing of a local glass factory.

But within Pomona’s blighted downtown, hope is stirring. Unknown to each other, disparate forces of art, education and commerce are converging to spark what city fathers now hope will become a full-scale renaissance.

The signs of change are subtle but unmistakable. Although many storefronts downtown still stand hollow, they are interspersed with new art galleries, antique shops and vintage clothing stores.

A purple and yellow coffeehouse serves up latte and live music until 2 a.m. to crowds that top 150 on weekend nights. Down the street, workers are installing a wood-burning pizza oven for an upscale restaurant due to open in February.

If you only cruise Pomona’s big boulevards, you will miss most of it. The action is mainly on the side streets off Garey Avenue, where merchants and city workers are renovating Art Deco storefronts, polishing half-century-old chrome, restoring winsome mosaics that depict Pomona, the Roman goddess of the harvest, holding up fruit--a legacy of bygone days when the city of Pomona was known as Queen of the Citrus Belt.

Scratch below the surface and more significant signposts emerge:

* A budding artists colony with 200 members living and working in mixed-use buildings downtown.

* The Pomona Antique Row, where 400 dealers offer everything from Victorian trains to empire chairs.

* The College of Osteopathic Medicine of the Pacific, sprawled across Pomona’s old pedestrian mall, where 950 students, teachers and staff fill the once deserted downtown with warm bodies from morning to night.

Pomona received a particularly encouraging message from experts last year, when it was one of 10 cities that participated in the Rebirth of America’s Downtowns pilot project sponsored by the National League of Cities.

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As part of the project, HyettPalma Inc., an Alexandria, Virginia-based planning firm that specializes in revitalizing downtowns, assessed Pomona’s position and came away impressed.

“Pomona is in a very fortunate and enviable position. They have something in place that most downtowns work years to establish,” said Dolores Palma, the firm’s co-owner.

Palma said the city has three complementary entities that bring people downtown: the arts colony, the osteopathic college and Antique Row. The three cross-pollinate, with customers and students and business people who patronize each others’ shops and services and bring a vitality to the downtown streets that hasn’t been seen in decades.

THE ARTISTS

Ed Tessier, 27, a downtown landowner, city planning commissioner and president of the central business district, has brought his properties from 30% occupancy to 70% occupancy in just two years by wooing a mix of specialty retail stores, galleries and artists.

Along with partner Ken Bencomo, Tessier owns the Haven, a coffeehouse that has become the focal point of the downtown revival.

“When I moved into an artist’s loft here in May, ‘92, it was kind of scary. There was nothing here; there was no one here at night, just one crazy guy who walked down the street screaming,” recalled Janet O’Keefe, 27, a psychology student at Pitzer College in Claremont.

“When the Haven opened that December, we all started meeting here and it started to feel like a community.”

Richard DuPertuis, a computer graphic artist with a studio in a historic building downtown, was drawn by affordable rent and the opportunity to get to know his neighbors.

“It was an economic holocaust down here, and I’ve watched it slowly come back to life,” DuPertuis says. “This reminds me of what Haight-Ashbury must have looked like in the early 1960s before it ‘blew up.’ ”

On the civic side, Pomona officials are spending $250,000 on capital improvements such as new lights, banners, planters, mosaics and decorative arches.

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Pomona also set aside $180,000 to fund the Pomona Downtown Revitalization office, which markets the area to potential businesses and helps mediate between existing tenants and the city.

Aware that zoning can make or break a neighborhood, Pomona has adopted a new downtown specific plan that allows mixed residential, office and commercial use. The plan makes it legal for artists to live in industrial spaces and lofts downtown.

One who took advantage of the lofts is Enrique Martinez Celaya, a Cuban immigrant and artist who teaches at the Claremont Colleges and rents a space in the newly renovated Art Deco building formerly occupied by the Pomona Progress Bulletin newspaper.

“The environment is great and it’s very safe, with little shops where you can get dinner or have your hair cut,” Celaya enthuses.

The transition from an old eyesore to an Old Pasadena is bumpy at times. Many people downtown are watching to see what will happen with the Towers, a five-story historic building dating to 1930 that artists both lived and worked in.

In late December, the city declared the building unsafe for residential use and booted out about 40 tenants. City officials say they want the owner to upgrade his building to comply with zoning laws, although they concede that they are unsure exactly what work needs to be done.

Towers owner Bob Dahms, who often has tangled with the city in the past, says officials are targeting him unfairly.

The messy debacle is seen as a test case: Does the city really want to back its nascent downtown rebirth?

“Sometimes it seems they don’t want this to happen,” said Mark Lindley, who rents an artist’s studio on 2nd Street. “They harass the landlords. We’re paying rent here, but they’re not giving us any help.”

Not true, say city officials, who are close to luring a farmers market, which will boost foot traffic and help create a festival-like atmosphere. The city is looking into licenses for vending carts where merchants can hawk wares. Also on the drawing board: low-interest loans to small businesses, micro-enterprise loans, loans to bring buildings up to earthquake standards and a program to renovate the facades of historic buildings.

The new zoning makes it easier to obtain permits for outdoor dining, live music, dancing and other entertainment.

To help flesh out its civic dream, Pomona has brought in Darrell George, a redevelopment specialist who oversaw the revitalization of Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade. Even though Santa Monica and Pomona have as little in common as an ocean breeze and a smoggy summer day, George is optimistic.

“The dynamics of turning around an older downtown are the same,” he points out.

The trick for Pomona will be making downtown appealing enough so that commuters will linger. But before that happens, administrators must revamp Pomona’s image as an unattractive, crime-ridden place.

“It’s a big problem,” George conceded. “In the last six to eight months, we’re getting a lot of calls from potential business operators. There are people waiting in the wings, but no one wants to be the first.”

One exception is Michael Oh, 27, a recent graduate of Cal Poly Pomona’s Restaurant Management Program. Oh will soon open Fabi’s, an upscale American restaurant.

“I’ve been coming to the Haven for a year now, and I saw what Ed was trying to do, and I want to ride that growth wave up,” Oh said.

One who took the plunge 15 months ago is Phillip Graffham, who owns Pipperdoodles, an arts and notions shop. Graffham, who sits on the board of the nonprofit DA Gallery downtown and has been active in the arts community for a decade, believes downtown is entering a make-or-break period.

“If I can hang in there another year, I think it will be OK,” he said. “I’ve seen the downtown area improve by leaps and bounds.”

But Michael Agee, who owns Michael’s Coffeehouse downtown, says those who come seeking quick riches will be disappointed.

“They get this big space for $400 a month and they think they can just open the doors and get business, and then they blame the city when that doesn’t happen,” says Agee, who honed his own business acumen managing a Domino’s Pizza.

THE DOCTORS

Perhaps the most unexpected player in downtown’s revitalization has been the College of Osteopathic Medicine of the Pacific, known as COMP, a medical school that is one of the major sources of family/general practice physicians in the Western United States.

Osteopathy, a century-old form of health care that emphasizes the body’s muscular and skeletal structures, went out of favor in 1962, when a California referendum banned further licensing of osteopathic physicians and allowed existing osteopaths to trade their degrees for medical degrees.

But the state Supreme Court overturned that ban the following decade, and, in 1977, COMP was founded with 36 students in the old J.C. Penney building. As osteopathy has re-established its reputation as a credible alternative to traditional medicine, COMP has grown to 950 students spread over facilities covering 14 acres.

A wrought-iron archway announces the campus with the motto “To Teach, To Heal.” With a boom in osteopathic medicine now under way, COMP expects to grow to 2,000 students by 2000 and has acquired the two-story, 72,000-square-foot former Nash department store to convert into a Health Sciences Center and the old Buffums Department Store to convert into a school of pharmacy.

COMP President Philip Pumerantz says the city was initially lukewarm about the college, worried it wouldn’t last and concerned that as a nonprofit, non-retail entity it didn’t provide much in taxes. But studies done by COMP indicate that the school, its students, faculty and staff bring an increase of $4 million in total personal income into the area and account for more than $1 million in purchases of goods and services. Local banks receive more than $11 million in deposits from the college and its students.

“There’s been a remarkable turnaround,” Pumerantz muses. “In this area, there’s practically no crime. It’s a vibrant place, with students walking around all day.”

THE ANTIQUE DEALERS

The third cornerstone in downtown Pomona’s revival is Pomona’s Antique Row, where 400 antique dealers have settled in former jewelry stores, shoe emporiums and five-and-dimes.

The first pioneer was Mike Hawkins, who arrived in 1980 and opened Robbins Antiques, which became the flagship. An auction house settled next. Then came several other antique dealers, piggybacking on the existing businesses.

Today, a heavily promoted antique fair draws up to a thousand people each year, including buyers for the film industry who haul away booty for movie sets by the truckload and Japanese tourists who arrive by the busload.

One coup for the antique district was persuading Pomona to open a police substation downtown eight months ago. The district did it by providing the police with a rent-free building. Now up to 20 police officers walk the beat downtown, dropping in on merchants to drink coffee and exchange news.

As a result, crime in the central business district dropped almost 8% from 1993 to 1994. There were only six burglaries last year, according to Pomona police statistics.

The city is also set to open the Pomona Regional Transit Center downtown in early 1996, housing a MetroLink station and a regional bus terminal that will draw more than 150 commuters daily, said Thomas Eiden, head of the Pomona Revitalization office.

Steve Sisneros, a co-owner of McBeth’s Antiques and president of the Pomona Antique Row, believes MetroLink will bring more customers. Already, business is so good that he and his partners want to open a second store near the Haven to capitalize on the coffeehouse’s younger crowd, which is especially keen on ‘50s memorabilia.

“We’re very excited; I see it as only going up,” Sisneros says.

Although most everyone hails the resurgence of downtown, some wonder whether the area will lose its charm if it becomes too popular.

“It’s starting to get trendy, and teenyboppers are coming,” says Claudette Schimmer, 26, who lives downtown and attends Chaffey College in Alta Loma. But for now, Schimmer plans to stay.

“So long as it doesn’t become another Melrose.”