The Renaissance of Santa Ana
I did a double-take recently when I drove past Alfredo Amezcua’s new office on Broadway in midtown Santa Ana. The refurbished old house, now home to the attorney’s private practice, stood out like a small gem in a secondhand store.
The new mission-style facade features a white colonnade covered in red tile. The front yard boasts a lush, green lawn and a festive flower bed of white, red, pink and purple impatiens.
And the crowning touch: a classic, cascading fountain gracing the property off to one side.
In most towns, a lawyer moving to a new office is not news. In this once-depressed and rundown part of Santa Ana, even the smallest real estate investment rates a headline.
Lawyer Turns Heads With Fixer-Upper; City Sees Signs of Renewal
Believe me, I wasn’t the first to notice Amezcua’s attractive property. The city manager and the mayor have taken time to congratulate him. His clients have felt inspired to call him on their car phones as they cruise by, saluting the improvements and making new appointments.
Even Michael Macres, the florist active in the city’s downtown merchants association, recently sent a basket of red carnations with a note for Amezcua: “Congratulations on the job you’ve done on your office. It looks great and improves the appearance of North Broadway.”
Clearly, Amezcua has made a statement with his home improvement project. Santa Ana is his city and he doesn’t intend to turn his back on it, like so many others have done during the past decade. He lives here, he works here and he plans to stay here.
At one point in his career, the lawyer admits, he was tempted to follow the flock of attorneys who had abandoned the city for newer, plusher quarters in Irvine and Newport.
“Then I thought, I can make that happen here,” Amezcua told me this week.
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Amezcua is part of an economic surge that is breathing new life into the city’s commercial corridor along Main Street and Broadway, once the county’s main financial center. Other lawyers, many of them Latinos, have also moved into new quarters along the city’s main arteries.
Across the street, the firm of DiMarco, Araujo & Montevideo hung its handsome shingle on a former medical building, refurbished three years ago as a legal suite with a designer’s touch. Like Amezcua, this firm had survived the city’s hard times in rented properties just down Broadway.
“Why would I move away from the best client base in the county, especially when my roots are here?” said Jess Araujo, who’s practiced in Santa Ana his entire 23-year career. “Buying now made sense. We are in this neighborhood for the long term.”
But lawyers haven’t cornered all the action. Over on Main Street, Rueben Martinez recently relocated his popular bookstore to a retail spot that had been empty for more than a decade. Libreria Martinez Books and Art now occupies the front of a large building that once housed Chandler’s, a high-end furniture store that folded years ago.
Santa Anans have been so accustomed to dark and dreary storefronts along North Main Street that strangers stop in amazement to welcome Martinez. Some passersby see lights in his store at night and pop in just to rejoice, as if the dead had come back to life.
By no accident, Martinez’s new shop is next door to an office tower at 1200 N. Main, new headquarters for his landlord, a developer named Michael F. Harrah. Observers agree that Harrah and his group of investors have spearheaded the recovery of Santa Ana’s financial corridor.
In the past three years, companies connected to Harrah snapped up at least five office buildings along Broadway and Main Street at fire sale prices. Harrah’s management firm, Caribou Industries, refurbished them and attracted new tenants.
“He caught the market at the perfect time--at the bottom,” says Gil Marrero, an agent with the Irvine broker leasing the Harrah properties. “Prices have already started to ratchet up along Broadway. The steals that were available two to three years ago don’t exist anymore.”
In late 1995, I wrote an extensive article for my former newspaper, the Register, detailing the demise of Santa Ana’s once prosperous financial district. The headline labeled the area a “ghost town” and the story sparked an outcry from civic boosters suffering from serious denial.
The economic decline was hard to miss. On any given day, you might have found moving vans on the street loading up furnishings of the latest lost tenant. The professional flight had left behind any number of half-empty or even abandoned buildings that could not be rented or sold because they were so outdated.
Empty storefronts lined the avenues where transients outnumbered shoppers. The area’s property values had plummeted 20%, and vacancy rates were twice the county average.
It was that article, Marrero said this week, that caught the attention of Harrah, a specialist in refurbishing depressed commercial properties. He had emerged from his own bankruptcy a few years earlier and decided he could help rehabilitate Santa Ana.
Meanwhile, yours truly was treated like the reviled messenger bearing bad news. The week after the article appeared, I was barred from attending a meeting of Mayor Miguel Pulido’s Central City Task Force, charged with solving the very problem I had so ably documented for them. City honchos sent out poor Roger Kooi, the late downtown development director, to tell me I wasn’t welcome. That’s gratitude for ya.
Marrero now credits the mayor, whose family owns a downtown muffler shop, with being a catalyst in the midtown revival. Mayor Pulido, in turn, credits the sharp drop in crime and, of course, a surging economy.
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One sign of the turnaround: Last week I again saw moving vans on the street, but this time they were moving a new tenant in to Harrah’s building at 1200 N. Main. The County of Orange had leased the eighth floor, one floor below Caribou.
Another building at 1600 N. Broadway, close to Amezcua’s new law office, was only 20% occupied before Caribou got it, gutted it and painted it white on the outside. Now it’s 75% full, Marrero said. Housing and Urban Development, the federal agency, took half of the building’s 10 floors. The Census Bureau took two others.
How strong is the recovery? Harrah is now planning on building an office tower at Broadway and 10th, to be the tallest in Orange County with as many as 44 stories. The plans are preliminary, and some say overly optimistic.
One block from the proposed site, the Segerstroms are still stuck with two older office towers that are still struggling. The former First Interstate building at 1010 N. Main is shut down, too expensive to run for too few tenants. The old Union Bank building across the street is only 40% occupied.
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“We all hope it’ll turn around, but the facts of life are it’s very difficult,” said Eugene H. Moriarty, manager of the Segerstrom Center, which includes the two tired towers.
Amezcua, the lawyer, also could not believe the area was as bad as my story had said. He actually drove around to the buildings I had mentioned and convinced himself it was true.
Then he decided to be part of the solution.
About a year later, in 1997, he too did a double-take when passing the Broadway building he now occupies. Amezcua spotted a real estate agent putting out a For Sale sign and he did a U-turn. By June of that year, he owned the rundown, two-story building, once the home of Orange County’s first coroner.
After almost $200,000 in renovations, even the gardener is attracting new customers among passersby impressed with his landscaping. Daniel Cendejas, who went on his own last year with 25 years gardening experience, is enjoying what economists call the ripple effect of recovery.
From his sunny front office with its panoramic, curved windows, Amezcua watched Cendejas work the front yard on the day I visited. The lawyer said he wanted a garden-style setting, rare in the city’s densely populated center.
“I’m very proud of it, I have to tell you,” beamed Amezcua. “I figure I’m going to be practicing here the rest of my life, so I wanted to make it the best place in town.”
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Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday and Saturday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com
