Fade to Black

Two landmark Melrose Avenue shops whose eye-catching storefronts and eclectic merchandise helped define trendiness in Los Angeles for nearly two decades will close Saturday--victims of changing times.

Merchandise at the Soap Plant and Wacko is no longer being snapped up by a new breed of shopper that frequents the famed Hollywood thoroughfare, their owner said Thursday.

“This street has gone to the dogs, and they’re yapping at my heels,” said Billy Shire. “This used to be rock ‘n’ roll and happening. Now it’s a street of jeans shops and shoe stores.”

Wacko, a toy and trinket shop with a bizarre inventory ranging from eyeball magnets to “mystic smoke for fingertips,” is famous for its colorful neon name sign that has become an icon of hipness known worldwide.

Soap Plant, part bookstore, head shop and art gallery, symbolized Melrose’s outrageousness with its weirdly painted exterior and its jarring series of window displays--including a four-foot inflatable penis that once caused such a stir that the police asked that it be removed after six hours on view.

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This week, passersby were startled by a fake tombstone surrounded by pink plastic pigs in the store’s front window. Its inscription asked that Melrose Avenue rest in peace.

“Being here used to be a gas,” said Shire, 46. “This used to be a place for kids with colored hair . . . now it’s for tourists from the Midwest. I don’t belong here anymore.”

Shire, an Echo Park resident, said he plans to keep a 2-year-old combination Soap Plant and Wacko store in the Los Feliz area open. It is on Hollywood Boulevard near Vermont Avenue in an area that some have already labeled “the next Melrose.”

Departure of the two stores from the current Melrose was being mourned Thursday by shoppers and rival shopkeepers alike.

“I’ve been saying for years that this street’s dying. Everybody’s moving east,” said Brian Waters, a 27-year-old guitarist from the Fairfax area who was in Soap Plant shopping for a book.

“There used to be a lot of unique shops. Now, everything’s the same. Things on Melrose just got weak.”

West Hollywood resident Marcia Dacosta, who was buying a 1960s-style set of hanging beads, said: “It’s true. Melrose is changing.”

Across the street, merchant Richard Jebejian agreed. He is a furniture maker and upholsterer who was born 53 years ago just a half-block from his shop.

“Yes, the street is going through a metamorphosis,” Jebejian said. “It makes me sad to see him leaving. It took me several years to get used to the paint job on his building. Now, I love it.”

Jebejian, who heads a Melrose Avenue merchants group, said the street is finally recovering from a slump that started in the early 1990s.

“I don’t know if it will ever be as chic as it used to be. But it’s coming back,” he said. “We still have a wonderful seven blocks of walking and eating.”

Until about 1978, Melrose Avenue was a tired street lined with fading tailor shops and antique stores. It started changing when shops such as L.A. Eyeworks, Neo 80 and Aardvarks opened and began drawing younger shoppers to the neighborhood.

Shire, who ran a Soap Plant store in Silver Lake with his mother, moved it to Melrose in 1980. By the end of the decade, he and other newly arrived merchants had put Melrose Avenue on the map.

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Celebrities could sometimes be spotted among punk rockers sporting purple Mohawk haircuts and stylishly torn clothing. The punkers were often from places like Beverly Hills and they had money to spend on leather jackets and other expensive merchandise.

Television shows and films were soon flashing images of Melrose Avenue to audiences around the world. Often, Shire’s neon Wacko sign and his garishly painted Soap Plant store facade were prominently featured.

These days, the well-heeled punk rockers seem to have yielded to youngsters with less money to spend and to tourists whose tastes tend to be conservative, Shire said.

Melrose sidewalks remain crowded, particularly on weekends. “But I can’t make my overhead,” Shire conceded Thursday as he stood outside his two shops.

Inside Wacko, clerk Linda Aronow--who has worked there 10 years--was dusting things like plastic heads with bloody spikes driven through them and 3-foot-tall foam gargoyles for the last time.

Looking on from the front of the store was a full-size human skeleton made of fiberglass.

“He’s $650,” Aronow said. “He’s been here a long time.”

For today’s Melrose shopper, that price is apparently not bare-bones enough.