Putting El Segundo First

A health club advertises its Manhattan Beach location. A radio station does a promotion at a Mexican restaurant and invites the public to check out its newest location in the upscale beach city. And Wolfgang Puck Cafe serves up California cuisine from a menu that announces its only South Bay location, Manhattan Beach.

What’s wrong with this picture? In the eyes of El Segundo city boosters, the problem is that all those businesses are stretching the truth, if not the city boundary.

They’re actually located in El Segundo, along the bustling Rosecrans Corridor that divides the two towns.

On one side, a chic beach suburb, on the other an industrial city.

Although an El Segundo marketing campaign has helped create a boom in the corridor, drawing a $10-million, 16-screen movie theater complex that opened Friday, a soon-to-open Starbucks and other upscale businesses, one old problem remains: image, image, image.

“The El Segundo side of the street has been changing dramatically with addition of all these new retail businesses,” said Economic Development Director Jim Hansen.

“Over time, the image of that area will help to change the image of the city.”

At this point, El Segundo is still better known for its proximity to Los Angeles International Airport, the Chevron refinery and the Hyperion Sewage Treatment Plant; as a result, many prestigious companies near the city limits say that claiming a Manhattan Beach location is better for business. But city officials have visited these businesses asking them to re-label themselves with their real location.

“We’re proud to have them here and we want them to be proud to be here,” Hansen says.

Last year, El Segundo launched a billboard campaign to change its image and attract new businesses to fill vacancies left by the aerospace industry crash that cost the city 45,000 jobs.

As a result, nearly 30 businesses relocated to the 5.5-square-mile city, including Unocal’s world headquarters and Andersen Consulting, one of the Big Six accounting firms, adding more than 5,000 jobs.

Wolfgang Puck Cafe lent its name to one of the billboard ads: “El Segundo is like Mayberry. OK, Mayberry with a Wolfgang Puck Cafe.”

And although the cafe’s menu cover identifies it as part of the neighboring city, general manager Jim Humphrey says the restaurant plans to change the menu and that everything else in the restaurant, such as the business cards and matchbooks, touts the correct address.

Some businesses in the corridor, occupied by a plaza-style office park, retail shops and restaurants, say their association with Manhattan Beach was an accident. J.B. McDougall, general manager of Cozymel’s: A Very Mexican Grill, which opened seven months ago, said it wasn’t until they were halfway through training the staff that they realized they were in El Segundo.

“Manhattan Beach is right across the street,” said McDougall, whose employees now answer the phone, ‘Cozymel’s El Segundo.’

“We knew the businesses over there were in Manhattan Beach so we just figured we were too. A lot of our customers don’t even know they are in El Segundo.”

Still there are some businesses, like the Spectrum Health Club, that use the Manhattan Beach label for marketing reasons.

Spectrum Manager Beverly Triesch said that most of the club’s members live in the seaside city and that using an El Segundo address makes the club sound farther away.

“People buy a health club packages based on the convenience of the location and El Segundo adds a few miles,” Triesch said.

“Logistically, it’s easier to say Manhattan Beach because we are right on the border.”

Manhattan Beach City Manager Geoff Dolan, who had no idea that his neighbors were really Manhattan Beach wannabes, said his city would “sure love to have their sales tax revenue.”

With the addition of the Pacific Theatres Beach Cities Cinema, the biggest movie theater complex to open in the South Bay, El Segundo is confident that it can change its image.

“What is happening here is definitely changing the image of the city,” said Richard Lundquist, president of Continental Development Corp., which rents 2.5 million square feet of office space in and around the corridor.

He said rentals have increased by 50% over the last two years.

“As new retailers come to the area the stigma will be erased.”