Lofty Dreams : One Man’s Fantasy Leads Downtown Pomona Revival

Ed Tessier grew up watching downtown Pomona die.

As businesses fled, his attorney father, who owned real estate in the city’s decaying central shopping district, stubbornly kept his office there. Young Tessier would prowl the pedestrian mall after school, breaking into abandoned buildings to play shop.

In his fantasy world, downtown Pomona was not a bleak landscape of empty streets and boarded-up buildings. It was a thriving place with an ice cream shop here, a comic bookstore there, crowds of strollers having fun.

Most people never realize their fantasies. But most people are not Ed Tessier, a quadriplegic who has surmounted one challenge after another in his 27 years. One of the first things Tessier did when he took over his family’s commercial properties in 1992 was flout conventional wisdom and open a coffeehouse in the dying heart of downtown. Aptly christening their new place the Haven, Tessier and partner Ken Bencomo painted it vibrant yellow and purple, stocked it with used books, mocha java, live local music and art.

Flash forward three years to 1995. The Haven is now the epicenter of a downtown arts revival that is slowly taking shape from the ashes of downtown Pomona. More than 200 artists have gravitated to its industrial lofts and Art Deco buildings--many of them renovated by Tessier’s firm. But that’s only the beginning.

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The city of Pomona has swung its muscle and money behind downtown with grants and new zoning that encourages residential artists lofts, entertainment and specialty retail shops. Although many storefronts still stand empty--and the city still wrestles with high crime, an eroding industrial base and racial tensions--an antique mall with 400 dealers is thriving and an osteopathic college with 950 students fills the streets with pedestrians from morning until night.

“We’re building this neighborhood from scratch,” Tessier said. “It’s a raw landscape, you can do anything with it.”

Once a jewel of a city whose wealth and history rivaled Pasadena, Pomona’s reputation began to tarnish in the 1960s as businesses died or fled to new malls. Trouble accelerated in the ‘90s as high-paying, unionized jobs disappeared: Hughes Missile Systems Co., the city’s second largest employer, pulled up stakes in 1992 and moved to Tuscon, taking 2,000 aerospace jobs. A glass container factory with 325 skilled workers closed last December. Strapped for cash and jobs, the city is pursuing controversial plans to open two card club casinos that could bring $10 million in tax revenues.

Conventional wisdom sends cities in search of new chain stores, factories and discount warehouses that translate into hundreds of jobs. Pomona has not abandoned that philosophy, but like many cities grasping for solutions to urban decay it is realizing that rebirth of downtown lies in attracting small, diverse grass-roots businesses instead of the Broadway and Home Depot.

“This is a manifestation of new thinking,” said Frank Wykoff, professor of economics at Pomona College. “We used to think we needed to have a big department store, a hotel or grocery chain, but the best way to revitalize is a lot of new, smaller businesses. The best thing the public sector can do is make it feasible from a zoning perspective, then get out of the way.”

And that is exactly what the city did, adopting a new downtown plan last year that allows mixed residential, office and commercial use. The plan makes it legal for artists to live in industrial spaces and lofts downtown, a tactic that more cities, including Los Angeles, have taken.

Serving as midwife to this urban experiment is Tessier, who whizzes along the pedestrian mall in his wheelchair greeting gallery owners, conferring with City Council members and squiring artists around in search of a loft space with good light.

“He fights City Hall single-handedly,” said Janet O’Keefe, a college student who lived in a loft for several years. “He’s put a lot of effort into trying to rebuild this area.”

The key to Tessier’s success is his ability to wear different hats.

In addition to landowner, he is also a city planning commissioner and president of the Central Business District. Last year, the moderate Democrat challenged Republican Rep. Jay Kim in the heavily Republican 41st District, but lost by a wide margin despite dogged campaigning because he was unable to muster much political or financial support.

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In Pomona, Tessier puts his money where his mouth is by living downtown in an 1880s brick building he has converted into a homey loft. He has also brought in a mix of businesses owned by African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, women, disabled and gay entrepreneurs drawn by the cheap rents.

“This reminds me of what (San Francisco’s) Haight-Ashbury must have looked like in the early 1960s before it blew up,” said Richard DuPertuis, a computer graphic artist who works downtown.

Pomona’s efforts drew positive reviews from national experts last year when the city took part in a pilot project on revitalization sponsored by the National League of Cities. HyettPalma, an Alexandria, Va.-based firm that specializes in revitalizing downtowns, assessed Pomona and came away impressed.

“Pomona is in a very fortunate and enviable position,” said Dolores Palma, the firm’s co-owner. She says many cities work for years to develop the art colony, college and antique communities that form a cross-pollinating triangle in downtown Pomona.

Also on the drawing board are a farmer’s market and low-interest, small business loans. A new downtown police substation appears to be cutting crime; there were only six burglaries downtown last year, police say.

The city has hired Darrell George, a redevelopment specialist who oversaw the revitalization of Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade, to cultivate Pomona’s rebirth.

A $21 million regional transit center that will bring daily Metrolink and bus commuters into downtown is due to open in early 1996.

But will commuters want to linger downtown? Will more businesses want to move in? After all, Pomona remains a stubborn pocket of urban woe. It logged 40 murders last year among 150,000 residents and more crimes overall than any other city in the San Gabriel Valley. Almost 12% of its residents are unemployed, among the highest rates in the county. Gang wars plague huge chunks of the city. For many, the overall image of Pomona is that of a decaying, crime infested suburb.

“It’s a big problem,” George said. “We’re getting a lot of calls . . . but no one wants to be the first.”

Tessier helps convince them.

“He brings to the table an optimistic point of view and he’s willing to do what it takes to make a deal happen,” George says.

Tessier has been fighting most of his life.

At age 16, a bodysurfing accident left him paralyzed from the chest down. Doctors thought he might regain some control of his muscles as his broken neck healed but two months later, a nurse’s aide accidentally dropped him, breaking his neck a second time and ensuring that he would remain paralyzed for life.

Undaunted, Tessier earned a degree in urban sociology from Pomona College, where he founded a nonprofit firm called Designs for Independence, which consulted on how to make buildings more accessible to the handicapped.

When his father fell ill in 1992, Tessier started managing the family business. It was a jumble of run-down properties at 30% occupancy, but Tessier saw an opportunity to mold downtown to his utopian vision of an alternative shopping and pedestrian area.

Using hard salesmanship and slashed rents, Tessier cajoled in the tenants. He uses as his model the works of Jane Jacobs, the visionary urban planner whose seminal book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” advocates mixed use areas where people can live, shop and work amid a thriving street life.

Michael Oh, 27, a recent graduate of Cal Poly Pomona’s Restaurant Management Program, was one convert. Next month he will open Fabi’s, an upscale American restaurant.

“The location is excellent; I think this is going to be the shopping/retail/dining area in Pomona,” Oh said.

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Phillip Graffham, who owns Pipperdoodles, a notions shop, took the plunge 15 months ago.

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

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

“They get this big space for $400 a month and 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.

Today the Tessier properties are 70% occupied and there is a waiting list for loft space. One who wants in is Joy McAllister, a painter who graduated from the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles and got the Tessier Tour one recent day.

“I wouldn’t want to live in Downtown L.A. anymore, it’s too dangerous,” McAllister said. “But I like the good energy here.”

The most unexpected player downtown is the College of Osteopathic Medicine of the Pacific. Founded in 1977 in the old J.C. Penney’s building with 36 students, the college, which teaches a century-old form of medicine that emphasizes the body’s muscular and skeletal structures, has grown to 950 students and 14 acres. The school expects to grow to 2,000 students by the year 2000 and has acquired two vacant department stores to expand.

The third cornerstone in downtown Pomona’s revival--and the oldest--is Pomona’s Antique Row, where 400 dealers began settling in 1980 in former jewelry stores, shoe emporiums and five and dimes.

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

“Pomona’s marketing niche,” Tessier said, “is to be a little alternative, a little off center, a little cutting edge.”