This Time, Street Closure Is Cause for a Party

The last thing you’d think a business owner on West Hollywood’s main street would want is another road closure, particularly since repeated disruptions have chased away customers for the last two years.

But merchants along Santa Monica Boulevard are cheering a planned 22-hour shutdown that will close about a mile of it to cars on Sunday.

City officials are staging a street party to commemorate the completion of a $35-million project to rebuild the thoroughfare--and the end of the turmoil that shopkeepers have endured.

To make way for the festival, the boulevard will be closed between Crescent Heights and La Cienega boulevards from 3 a.m. Sunday until 1 a.m. Monday.

Sunday’s street festival will run from noon to 7 p.m. It will include three stages with live entertainment, food booths and Russian-themed shows for immigrants from the former Soviet Union who make up about 30% of the city’s population.

The city is spending $153,000 on the party. Another $70,000 is being kicked in by the West Hollywood Convention and Visitors Bureau.

City leaders say it will be money well spent. They say they are obligated to thank merchants and residents who struggled with open trenches, traffic tie-ups and clouds of dust starting in mid-1999 as workers struggled to turn the boulevard into what some have dubbed “the Champs-Elysees of the West.”

“The residents and business community have sacrificed during construction,” said Mayor John Heilman.

Some merchants say they lost hundreds of thousands of dollars as construction upheaval chased shoppers away.

“To say the least, we’re glad it’s over,” said Mike Gibson, manager of the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in the 8700 block of the boulevard. He said his store is staging its own “grand reopening” on Sunday as well.

“Parking was a disaster. Even regular customers couldn’t get in here. My employees would come late for work because they couldn’t find a place to park,” Gibson said. “There are some owners who just gave up, like Stonewall.”

The Stonewall Gourmet Coffee Co. closed its doors after an open trench replaced a sidewalk dining area outside its storefront. In an interview with The Times 15 months ago, owner Michael d’Addio had predicted the store’s demise. He said he had already lost $150,000 in revenue.

“This could easily kill us. We’re teetering,” d’Addio had warned.

City officials say they have no way of knowing how many of the estimated 1,000 businesses along the boulevard were forced to close because of the lengthy construction. But they say West Hollywood did not experience a drop in sales tax revenue during the project.

“I think a few small businesses, a handful, went out, but they might have been on the edge anyway,” said Helen Goss, a city spokeswoman.

The redesigned boulevard has wider, tree-shaded sidewalks, new bicycle lanes and special curb extensions at pedestrian crosswalks. It is the largest public works project in West Hollywood’s 16-year history.

During the project, workers removed more than 15,000 feet of railroad tracks and 5,000 rotting wooden ties from beneath the old boulevard roadway. They rehabilitated the 1920s-era sewer line that runs beneath it, adding what officials say is another 50 years to its life span.

City leaders say the new roadway has won design awards from architectural and business groups and from the state Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. That agency cited the replacement of old ficus trees along the boulevard with 1,200 evergreen elms and flowering jacaranda and silk floss trees.

Sunday’s street festival will include performances at the western end of the blocked-off boulevard by the West Hollywood Orchestra, gospel singers from the House of Blues, the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles, flamenco guitarist Robert Simon and the Midnight Cowboys dance troupe.

Russian entertainment at the eastern end will include the Russian Strings orchestra, opera singers Boris Zhaivoronak and Boris Rusanovski, the Amarus String Quartet, the Limopo folk-rock group and the Russian Souvenir dance group.

One thing missing from the festival may be clowns.

As they allocated city money for the street party in July, a majority of City Council members expressed a fear of clowns. Councilmen John Duran and Steve Martin joined the mayor in specifying that clowns not take part.

This week, Goss said the three didn’t really mean it. Happy that the boulevard project was over, she said, the council members were just clowning around.