El Segundo Booms as Downtown Struggles

Amid pomp, circumstance and trays of sushi, the future of grocery shopping arrived Wednesday in El Segundo, a sky-lit testament to gourmet cheese and salad bars that city officials hope will further a heady boom along its two busiest thoroughfares--while not killing off its declining downtown.

In a town that has long resisted drive-through fast-food joints, the arrival of a new Ralphs supermarket on Sepulveda Boulevard was cause for ribbon-cutting, speechifying and excited pawing through the garlic-and-herb cream cheese.

But it was also cause for more concern for the city’s distinctive downtown, a mile to the west. There, the ficus trees fluttered Wednesday in the autumn breeze above the mom-and-pop shops and the leaves swirled about in front of what used to be the bank and the drugstore, both now closed, both directly across Main Street from City Hall.

El Segundo’s downtown has long been a key component of the small-town feel that has kept the city of 16,000 people unique in the greater Los Angeles area. Hemmed in by Los Angeles International Airport, a Chevron oil refinery, the Pacific Ocean and the San Diego Freeway, it nonetheless is not hard to imagine among the brick storefronts downtown that, as City Councilwoman Nancy Wernick put it, “Dorothy and Toto landed here, right on Main Street.”

Main Street’s merchants include a hardware store from yesteryear, a pizzeria, a cafe, and hairdresser, jewelry and tailor shops. Among the stores around the corner on Grand Avenue are a barber shop and a small, neighborhood-style Ralphs, a fixture downtown for more than 30 years.

In recent years, seeking to stem losses sparked by the dramatic downturn in the aerospace industry in and around El Segundo, city officials have aggressively recruited new retail stores, restaurants and employers to town. Just not downtown.

Instead, the city has pushed renovated office towers along Sepulveda Boulevard and a suburban-style office park a mile to the south, along Rosecrans Avenue.

The results: Sales tax revenues are up 95% since 1995, said James Hansen, director of the city’s economic development department, from $2.9 million in fiscal 1995 to a projected $5.7 million this year.

About 58,000 people fill the office buildings each day, up 4,000 from two years ago, Hansen said. In addition, home prices and school enrollment are surging.

On Wednesday, speaking to a crowd jammed into and around rows of plastic seats in front of the cash registers at the new Ralphs, Mayor Sandra Jacobs called the supermarket the “first jewel in what we are going to call the Sepulveda Corridor,” and added to loud applause, “This is a definite signal . . . to the region that El Segundo is alive and on the move.”

Everywhere, that is, but downtown.

And no one is quite sure what to do about it--because, in El Segundo, growth is good, but so is that small-town feel.

Downtown, the stores are an easy walk from El Segundo High School and after class it’s no great shakes to grab a root beer float. At the high school this Friday night, according to the banner flying Wednesday above Main Street, the Kiwanis Club is sponsoring a bingo game--everyone’s invited.

At the old Ralphs, the bulletin board is adorned with fliers promoting Little League sign-ups. Ralphs President Al Marasca said Wednesday the old store will stay open, at least for a few years through the end of its lease.

City officials, however, note that there has already been some slippage from downtown to the Sepulveda Corridor. When the bank across from City Hall closed last summer, its accounts shifted to a branch north of the new Ralphs.

If the old Ralphs joins the bank and the drugstore on the shuttered list, that’s trouble well beyond Dorothy and Toto and a click of the heels, officials said.

Bill Crigger, the El Segundo-based developer whose firm, the New Group, built the new Ralphs on Sepulveda, observed: “People want this small-town, Norman Rockwell-like lifestyle. In their hearts they want it, they really want it.

“But,” he said, “in their minds and dollars they’re pursuing the contemporary suburban model. They want coffee shops and juice bars.”

And arugula and other suburban amenities, and that’s why many in El Segundo had been driving out of town to do their grocery shopping.

“I went to Westchester,” Wernick said at the new Ralphs, adding, “This is going to cut my shopping time in half.”

The fix downtown, Crigger said, lies “in giving people what they want,” adding, “I just think downtown needs to offer more.”

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What that is remains uncertain. Crigger, in something of an irony, was recently tapped to head a task force to address the issue; it has commissioned a study on such topics as “leakage,” or what dollars are leaking out of downtown because certain amenities can be found elsewhere--for instance, the juice bar opening in a few weeks next to the new Ralphs.

The study is due to be completed next year. Vowed Wernick: “You’re going to come here a year from this date and you’re going to see a much different downtown.”

A few trial balloons already are floating about, Hansen said.

Some officials believe they might be able to capture a bigger piece of the Hollywood pie. The downtown storefronts are ideal for movie sets, Hansen said, noting that the high school--with its brick exterior, evocative of a Midwestern campus--already is a Hollywood discovery.

Also under consideration is a plan that would close a block or two of Main Street to cars and turn it into a funky outside mall, in the manner of the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica.

It has not gone unnoticed in El Segundo that Hermosa Beach, just a few miles to the south, made a pedestrian walkway out of a downtown block by the municipal pier. In Hermosa, trendy bars and restaurants now line both sides of what used to be the street.

On Main Street in El Segundo, meanwhile, the leaves keep falling. And out on Sepulveda Boulevard, the jackhammers keep roaring.

In the lot next to the Ralphs, a hotel is under construction. To the south, the Chevron station is supposed to reopen by Christmas, with a McDonald’s attached. It’s the first McDonald’s in town--complete with a drive-through window.

“In El Segundo,” said Tony Barthel, a reporter for the weekly El Segundo Herald, “Ralphs is big news. But McDonald’s, that’s like an oh-my-god kind of thing.”

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Big Changes in a Small Town

Business is booming along Sepulveda Boulevard and on Rosecrans Avenue in El Sequndo. But some say success in this city of 16,000 has been at the expense of the distinctive downtown.