The Hatch Pack

People who want to observe a city in the act of self-renewal should visit a curving stretch of Silver Lake Boulevard. On this narrow and heavily trafficked street, a row of shining storefronts has emerged from a street once filled with dusty and undistinguished buildings.

Out of the corners of their eyes, drivers may notice a store with the attitude-laden name of Rubbish selling vintage furniture. Next door is Hairllucinations, a post-punk hair salon with a psychedelic painting in the front window. A hip pet supply store called Bone Yard and florist Gillyflowers are among other thriving small businesses and restaurants.

Most of these enterprises are less than 5 years old.

This stretch of thoroughfare in the Silver Lake district is an example of an “incubator” neighborhood. Pioneering landlords and merchants in such neglected or overlooked areas have created newly fashionable shopping districts out of aging, low-rent buildings.

Many of the most popular shopping and commercial districts in the city have been renewed by incubator activity. Twenty years ago, Melrose Avenue was an incubator area. More recently, the La Brea Avenue-Third Street area in Los Angeles went through incubation, as did Hillhurst Avenue and North Vermont Boulevard, both in the Los Feliz district of Los Angeles.

It’s a pattern city planners would love to see repeated, but the question of whether such changes can be managed or must rely on informal grass-roots enthusiasm has yet to be answered.

The common thread among incubators is that they are formerly depressed areas that have been rejuvenated by the in-migration of specialty shops, galleries, artist studios, architectural offices, coffeehouses and other small businesses. Many of the entrepreneurs started out with little or no capital and chose these locations for their low rent and the cachet of being an early arrival in a cool place.

*

The notion of an incubator neighborhood was one of a number of then-revolutionary ideas advanced by social critic Jane Jacobs in her influential 1961 book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” In her diatribe against the planning profession of the time, Jacobs praised the vitality of older neighborhoods, many of which were being “renewed” with bulldozers rather than new businesses.

Above all, she praised neighborhoods that could attract pedestrians both day and night, places where people would not only shop, but visit restaurants, bars and nightclubs.

Business practicality, not planning theory, however, drove Scott Mangan five years ago to rent a storefront on Silver Lake Boulevard. He describes himself as a pioneer of the area.

“When I opened, I was the only store here,” said Mangan, proprietor of Rubbish, who added that friends criticized his choice of a location and “thought I was crazy” for setting up shop on an out-of-the-way street.

Nowadays “I have people who come in here and say, ‘Do you have anything for rent? We want to open a store,’ ” he said. “I wish there were more space.”

One of the forces shaping Silver Lake Boulevard is Horst Wolfram, proprietor of the Dreams of L.A. nightclub. Since opening the club 32 years ago, Wolfram has acquired a number of storefronts in the immediate area and leased them to the businesses he thought fit best with the neighborhood.

“I could get a lot more money than I am getting, but I am not really pushing the issue,” Wolfram said. “I like to get the right kind of tenant.”

One of his tenants is Hairllucinations co-owner Angelica Casanova, who started her business on a different street in Silver Lake but later moved onto the boulevard, in part because the area provided more parking and in part because other businesses had already gained a foothold nearby.

The area has “become a little funkier, in the good sense,” she said. “There is definitely more happening here than where I used to be.”

*

The “NoHo” arts district in North Hollywood is another incubator area that is experiencing a burst of development and investment.

Low rent first attracted theater manager Dan Hirsch to North Hollywood, where he founded NoHo Actors Theater in the early 1990s. He recalled that the area was “a no man’s land for a while.”

The Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency had already invested heavily in North Hollywood. Projects included the rehabilitation of many homes and assistance in building the office complex known as the Academy. During the recession, however, those efforts did not seem to be paying off.

“We weren’t getting any big buildings. We weren’t getting any massive investment,” said Walter Beaumont, assistant project manager for the CRA North Hollywood Project Area.

Instead, “we were getting small business and small eateries and really taking off as an arts district,” he recalled. Although the 1994 earthquake prolonged the struggle, it also enabled the redevelopment agency to help business owners rehabilitate older buildings, several of which later became theaters. The agency also assisted some other businesses, such as Pit Fire Pizza, with matching grants for facade improvements.

After the first theaters took hold, “little coffee shops came in after that, followed by bookstores and recording studios and other entertainment-related businesses. Altogether, I think that created a terrific synergy in what had been a very depressed area,” Hirsch said.

Today 30 theaters and theater companies make their home in NoHo.

Pit Fire Pizza partner Paul Hibler said the city assisted his business with a $50,000 matching grant to build a new facade, and Hibler and his partners also leased a vacant lot from the city agency.

“This [street] was not very good two years ago,” Hibler said. His expectation that the neighborhood would get better stemmed from North Hollywood’s nearness to Universal Studios and the entertainment businesses of Burbank. “We have studios all around here,” Hibler said. The area was “begging for something to happen.”

He described the view out his window: “I am looking at a building that is being built on what was an empty lot three months ago. There is a Starbucks. Next to that, there is a $2-million theater project almost done. Everything is just starting to jump here,” Hibler said.

*

Businesses in incubator neighborhoods often expand and create businesses in other areas. NoHo’s Pit Fire Pizza plans to open an outlet in Universal CityWalk. Mangan, the proprietor of Rubbish in Silver Lake, has since opened Design House in West Hollywood.

For better or worse, incubator neighborhoods do not stay incubators forever. In several months or several years, Silver Lake and NoHo will probably become “in” spots, and rents will rise.

When that happens, nontraditional entrepreneurs will prospect for new streets to pioneer--and start anew the process of recycling the city.