An Old Story

It’s about 11 o’clock on a recent Monday morning, and Canoga Park businessman Joe Vogt is taking a visitor on a tour of the sidewalks along Sherman Way.

A few doors west of the Madrid Theatre, he comes to a vacant store at the corner of Owensmouth Avenue and tells its recent history: Vacated by a tool shop, it will soon be occupied by a copy and printing service.

What Vogt really wanted to see at that spot, though, was a coffee bar. He sounded out the Starbucks chain when the space became available, but came away empty-handed. “They weren’t interested at this time,” he said.

Such lack of enthusiasm from high-end retailers is an old story for Canoga Park’s downtown, which has declined over the decades along with other old commercial strips in the San Fernando Valley. Local business leaders looking for a rebound are counting on street and storefront improvements and a new benefit assessment district.

But their most heartfelt hopes lie with the Madrid, a 499-seat live-entertainment theater that will open Thursday, built with federal and city funds on the former site of a Pussycat sex film theater.

Can a new “legitimate” theater really breathe life into a retail district that most affluent consumers abandoned long ago? No one can say for sure. Even boosters of the downtown revival plan say the Canoga Park area has some way to go before it becomes Westwood after dark.

Vogt, a general contractor who owns an office building in the Canoga Park business district, hopes Madrid patrons will walk around a bit before shows and spend their money at local restaurants, coffee bars, bookstores and other shops that cater to a theatergoing crowd. But as his Starbucks story shows, such businesses aren’t rushing to Canoga Park to become part of the Madrid Theatre scene.

Stores already in the area also seem slow to pick up the theater cue. P.J. Cochran, who runs Lease-on-Line, a nonprofit commercial real-estate listing service launched with help from the Community Redevelopment Agency and Councilwoman Laura Chick, said some of the locals take a show-me attitude toward the Madrid. For now, she said, they’re skeptical that it will make any difference to them.

“We really have to create a theater-district mentality,” Cochran said, recalling one conversation she had with a sandwich-shop owner. “I suggested that he put in a cappuccino machine and learn how to bake scones. He answered back, ‘I close at 6; I’ll always close at 6.’ ”

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Cochran has some of the wait-and-see attitude herself. She isn’t sure what kind of customers the new theater will bring. “Until we see the demographics of the theatergoers,” she said, “It’s hard to say what kind of businesses will be right.”

Rita Cohen, who owns a glass and custom framing shop next door to the Madrid, isn’t one of the skeptics. “I think it’s marvelous,” she said of the theater project. But she says she has a hard time convincing fellow merchants that they have a new opportunity at their doorsteps.

“Nobody seems to understand what [the theater] is,” she said. “We’ve been trying to put it through their heads for two years what it’s going to be.”

For many of the businesses near the Madrid, it’s hard to see any possible theater tie-in with the commercial mix now found on Sherman Way between Canoga Avenue and Topanga Canyon Boulevard--pawn shops, sub-dollar discount stores and auto repair shops.

In the same block as the Madrid--ground zero for the revival plan--are a hair salon, a work-boot seller, a “98-cent” store and, soon, the print-and-copy shop.

The antique stores sprinkled around the business district might be more interesting to a theater crowd, but they look more like the exception than the rule--and many were driven out of business by Northridge earthquake damage--on a street where most businesses seem geared to serving the surrounding low- to middle-income community.

Vogt says there are no plans to make the street instantly fashionable by buying up lots, replacing businesses and bringing in big retailers. For one thing, he said, the business district still must serve the largely Latino local community.

For another, its patchwork of small parcels isn’t what big retail developers are looking for these days. Builders of retail centers need more space and like it prepackaged. As Cochran noted, it doesn’t pay “to assemble 10 parcels on a block when you can get a single parcel somewhere else.”

Given these limits, property owners in the business district have set more modest goals. They’re sprucing up the street and storefronts (with the help of federal grant money), and they’re setting up a city assessment district for the area between Canoga Avenue and Topanga Canyon Boulevard on the east and west and Wyandotte and Gault streets on the north and south.

The grant-funded improvements include tree plantings, improvement to city parking lots, new street lights and benches, and renovation of store facades.

The Canoga Park Business Improvement District, as the service district is called, is being set up through the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency to give the area something like mall management: maintenance, security and marketing beyond what the city provides. With Vogt at the head of its governing board, it has just passed a key hurdle, getting petition support from owners of at least 50% of the area’s property. It now goes to the Los Angeles City Council for approval, which Vogt expects.

With a proposed budget of more than $226,000 a year, funded by assessments on property owners, the district will spend the largest portion--$75,000--on security. The rest will go to landscaping, maintenance, marketing and promotions, attracting new business, administration and hunting down new grant money.

A possible ally: the Los Angeles Conservancy, a nonprofit group dedicated to preserving and revitalizing the city’s historically important buildings and areas. It has been exploring the possibility of a Main Street Initiative for Canoga Park, working with the National Main Street Center, an arm of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

All this should help make downtown Canoga Park cleaner and safer. But when it comes to a business revival, observers in local commercial real estate don’t expect anything dramatic.

“You can put in some trees, benches or cobblestone walkways,” said Bruce Bailey, a vice president of Daum Commercial Real Estate in Woodland Hills. “But I’m not sure that will solve the problem.”

Bailey said the old business strips like that of Canoga Park suffer from “functional obsolescence”--land available for commercial building is too narrow and split into too many small properties. That’s what keeps big retailers out of downtown Canoga Park, he said. “It has nothing to do with local demographics.”

Another real estate broker, Jon Paley of Paley Commercial Real Estate in Woodland Hills, questions the city’s spending priorities and says some merchants in the Canoga Park area feel the same way.

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The Madrid Theatre project had a total price tag of $3.55 million, including $2.95 million in renovation of the theater itself and the rest spent on improvements in the area.

“Could the money have been spent in a wiser manner?” Paley asked. “The feedback I’ve gotten for the most part is, ‘Yes, it could have been.’ ”

But Paley called the theater “a step in the right direction.” And Cochran and Vogt say the future looks bright if you look far enough ahead.

“Canoga Park is one of those areas where, 12 or 15 years from now, people are going to say, ‘Just think about [how bad] it was after the earthquake, “ Cochran said. And Vogt has his eye to the south, where the growth of Warner Center is, in his view, marching inexorably north to Sherman Way.

In time, Vogt sees Warner Center expanding toward downtown Canoga Park. The Ventura Freeway blocks expansion to the south and residential areas confine it on the east and west. It’s already “the insurance capital of Southern California, and it has only one way to go,” Vogt said.

As the owner of a 6,000-square-foot building on Wyandotte Street in the Canoga Park zone, Vogt figures that he and nearby businesses are sitting just where they ought to be--in the path of development.

The future also looks bright to Lynn Cherney, who owns an antique store on Sherman Way. Cherney was among the many dealers who had to leave in 1994 when their shops were devastated by the earthquake.

But recently she returned to her rebuilt quarters at 21527 Sherman Way, where she had operated a store since 1982. “Little by little, the shops are coming back,” she said, and the ranks are back to about 20. “It’s so nice to see.”

With the district clearly on the mend, the Madrid can only help, she said: “The more they discover us, the more they’ll start coming here.”