Remodeling Project Adds to Woes of Center’s Merchants

Laura D’Angelo counted on this to be a busy spring at her small Reseda Boulevard gift shop, Kids at Heart.

After struggling for 16 months to keep her sales up as residents and other businesses fled the crumpled neighborhoods near the Northridge earthquake’s epicenter, she figured that a string of commercial-friendly holidays that stretched from Easter to the summer solstice would provide a welcome boost.

But that was before the Northridge Garden Plaza strip mall--where Kids at Heart and six other surviving shops are located--underwent remodeling last month. The construction, which has swathed the already desolate shopping center in wood scaffolding that makes it looked closed, has been nothing short of another economic calamity, according to D’Angelo and other merchants.

On the day before Mother’s Day, when her store should have been bustling, the center’s parking lot instead was filled with workers cutting down trees--and few customers.

“People are ready to be back to normal and here we are looking worse than ever before,” D’Angelo said. “Before we had cracks, but it didn’t look foreboding and it didn’t look scary and it didn’t look closed.”

The remodeling is not related to the earthquake--those repairs were mostly completed last September. Phoenix Home Life Mutual Insurance Co., the Hartford, Conn.-based insurer that took control of the mall two months after the earthquake, wants to spruce up the center, which has filled only six of its 22 spaces. Along with a new metal roof, the company plans to give the strip mall a new name, Boulevard Shops.

The restaurant owners and shopkeepers who stayed on this beaten block adjacent to the Northridge Meadows Apartments after the earthquake say they welcome the face lift in concept. But with their bottom lines and nerves already battered from the task of rebuilding, they object to the way it has been carried out.

For gift store owners such as D’Angelo and Jackie Jones, proprietor of Jones Coffee Co., the timing was problematic because it coincided with their busiest season, D’Angelo said.

Further fueling their anxiety over any downtime now is the imminent reopening of the Northridge Fashion Center, which may draw business away from the strip mall for several weeks this summer.

John Beauchamp, general manager of Truly Yours restaurant, said that if the remodeling had been done in stages instead of all at once, it would have been less disruptive for the businesses.

Instead, chain-link security fences run the length of the center, obscuring store windows, and safety tunnels have been erected in front of almost every entrance.

“I just had the worst month I ever had,” a visibly angry Beauchamp said. “Nobody thinks I’m open and the ones that do are scared to come in.”

Jones has tried to compensate for the center’s sorry appearance by covering her store’s entrance in cozy floral fabric and putting a decorative whitewashed wagon out front.

Nevertheless, she said she is seeing less than half the traffic than before the construction began. Her sales are barely covering her $1,100 monthly rent and fees, and she does not have enough left over to keep up her inventory, she said.

The merchants have asked Phoenix Mutual Life to either excuse or discount their rents while the remodeling is going on and the company is considering their request, said Ken Ferraro, a spokesman for the insurer.

“We certainly understand their concern,” Ferraro said. “What’s critical in this situation is to take the long view. The restoration of Northridge Gardens is really an effort to put something back into the community. It will benefit all tenants.”