Rescuing the Authentic

For generations, Los Angeles has been regarded as a city where places are concocted rather than evolve. Yet, it is evolving places like Farmers Market, Grand Central Market, Hollywood Boulevard and Venice that best define Los Angeles as an amalgam of nonduplicable and authentic environments. Revitalizing these environments without smothering their essence involves issues of aesthetics and historic preservation. It is also a matter of economics. Los Angeles can continue as a viable retail and commercial center if it can maintain and build upon its clear advantage over suburbs and edge cities: a sense of the authentic and historical.

Few places in the region can match the aura of authenticity and historic feel that pervade Farmers Market, at the corner of Third and Fairfax. Started more than 60 years ago, the market attracts about 6 million visitors annually. Many small, independent retailers have found economic security in its cramped confines. The market’s continuing success is remarkable at a time when “theme”-oriented developments are the rage.

This venerable spot is at the heart of a $100-million redevelopment project. The completed 640,000-square-foot complex, called the Grove at Farmers Market, will include upscale stores, offices, a flower market, bistro-like restaurants and movie theaters. Because Farmers Market is such an integral part of L.A. history, the planned development engages issues that go far beyond the ambitious urban project. As such, preserving the market’s authenticity while revitalizing it is far more than an ideal worthy of lip service. At stake is a defining characteristic of Los Angeles itself.

The history of Farmers Market began in 1880, when the Arthur F. Gilmore family founded a dairy farm on what was originally a Spanish land grant. In 1934, in the heart of the Depression, Earl Gilmore, Arthur’s son, transformed the site into a market where hard-pressed farmers could sell their produce. Later on, part of it was home for a minor-league baseball team, the Hollywood Stars. A parcel of the land was sold to CBS, which built its Television City complex.

Today’s merchants reflect the teeming diversity of Los Angeles. Old standbys like Tusquella’s Seafood, Magee’s Kitchen, DuPar’s and Bob’s Coffee and Donuts have been joined by Moishe’s, which serves Middle Eastern food, the Gumbo Pot Cajun restaurant and numerous Asian eateries. Customers are changing as well. The neighboring Miracle Mile and Fairfax areas are attracting more and more singles and affluent young families, who daily join the ethnic minorities, retirees and tourists who have frequented the market for generations.

Yet, like much of older Los Angeles, Farmers Market has suffered from the dispersion of middle-class families and shopping places to the Westside, the San Fernando Valley and more distant suburbs. The number of shops at the market has dropped from 120 in 1993 to 111 today. Although gross sales are up compared with the recessionary early 1990s, occupancies remain at around 90%, down from 98% earlier in the decade.

Henry L. Hilty Jr., grandson of Earl Gilmore and president of A.F. Gilmore Co., which still owns the site, believes that the market must continue to attract young families moving into the area and increasingly sophisticated and demanding tourists if it is to grow in the next century. Tourists account for roughly a quarter of sales. Hilty sees the Grove development as a way to revitalize what has become a cherished but dog-eared space.

“We want to offer an extended range of things here so we can attract more businesses and get the people here to stay open later,” explains Hilty. “Will [the market] change? Sure. But you have to remember this all started with 18 farmers selling out of their trucks.”

Updating a retail environment without severing its connection with its past is an ideal embodied into many successfully restored retail districts in Los Angeles. Los Feliz, Silver Lake, Santa Monica’s Montana Avenue and parts of Hollywood are examples. For a generation that has been spoon-fed Disney-style developments and suburban malls, such districts offer a sense of the unimitated expressed with architectural character. In contrast, attempts to duplicate the suburban mall experience, as in Pasadena, Santa Monica and downtown Los Angeles, have generally disappointed shopper and investors.

“There’s a great desire to connect with the past, particularly in Los Angeles,” says David L. Malmuth, who heads Trizec Hahn’s $388-million Hollywood and Highland project. “You are looking to restore the heart where everything happened, where action, the look, the history is all of a piece.”

This issue of authenticity will become ever more relevant as developers seek to bring experience-creating principles associated with “themed” retail development closer to the hearts of urban neighborhoods. The problem is straightforward: The hardest thing about authenticity is how to preserve it.

Many restored urban areas--New York’s Times Square, Boston’s Quincy Market and Pasadena’s Old Town--are in danger of becoming malls in brick. Many New Yorkers, for example, do not regard Times Square as their place but as a gathering ground for rubes from the hinterlands who come to Gotham not to experience the spontaneous excitement of the city’s streets but the controlled environments favored by the managers of retail “experience.”

Coincidently, there is growing evidence that the wider public may also be tiring of the heavily engineered “theme-ing” embraced by urban developers. For example, such theme restaurants as Planet Hollywood, New York’s Television City and Fashion Cafe and Dive! in Century City have either gone bankrupt or been forced to retrench.

While many developers recognize this dilemma, Malmuth has experienced it firsthand. When a top Disney official, he spearheaded the initial redevelopment of Times Square. Now, Malmuth aims to avoid duplicating that disappointing result in Los Angeles’ fabled entertainment center. Toward that end, he is encouraging one-of-a-kind L.A. businesses and film-production companies to locate on Hollywood Boulevard.

A similar challenge faces developer Rick J. Caruso at Farmers Market. His project, which will come up for City Council approval this spring, promises to revitalize the area but, in so doing, undermine the singularity and spontaneity that make the market a popular attraction. The temptation to undertake this kind of transformation is heightened by the area’s shifting demographics. Because of a desire to appeal commercially to the market’s newest customers--entertainment types, the hip, young and affluent--the renovated Farmers Market could sacrifice its blue-collar character for stores catering to free-spending urban professionals.

Currently, Farmers Market consists overwhelmingly of small, independent merchants. Its tight spaces and antiquated infrastructure limit opportunities for chain-store developers, who tend to be inflexible about floor plans, cooking facilities and storage space. To date, few chains have flourished at the market and some, including Mrs. Fields, have failed. Luckily, Caruso’s plans call for the market’s food component to remain much as it is. But its nonfood retail element may prove vulnerable to the kind of high-end chains--Pottery Barn, Crate & Barrel, Benetton--that populate many urban shopping districts.

On the other hand, many Farmers Market merchants would welcome the presence of such businesses as a way to lure customers away from the Beverly Center and other malls in the surrounding area. But others, especially those located in the “Dell” area of shops adjacent to that part of the market slated to be demolished, worry about the competition of better-capitalized retail stores. “There’s a question that this may cost us a lot,” says one longtime merchant. “If I were 30, I’d be excited about the risk but now I am only worried I won’t fit into the new place.”

These are new challenges for developer Caruso, many of whose projects are located in peripheral suburbs. He is adept at “creating” new spaces in places lacking histories, such as with his successful developments in Calabasas and Westlake. At Farmers Market, he’ll have to incorporate and sustain a rich historical text.

To his credit, Caruso seems aware that to duplicate the Beverly Center experience or any other mall development at Farmers Market would not only squander a great environment but also represent an enormous business miscalculation. “The market is the reason for the development. It works, so why should we fix it?” the developer asks. “Nobody can duplicate what is already here. Its greatest business asset is that it is a barrier to entry: Another developer can’t go out and create another Farmers Market. This is it.”

If Caruso can be taken at his word, and he leaves the old market largely untouched, the site’s identity may not only withstand the Grove development, it may even profit by it. In updating and transforming one of Los Angeles’ defining spaces, the developer will have preserved those irreplaceable characteristics that make Farmers Market irresistible to visitors and residents alike.