Shopping Central

Most of the famous shopping districts in Los Angeles operate on the principles of cachet and exclusivity. Not Santee Alley, the sweltering, swarming marketplace at the heart of downtown’s Fashion District, which has more in common with a Moroccan souk than Sunset Plaza.

Call it a melting pot or a salad bowl, Santee Alley is one of the places in this vast, fractious city where people of all backgrounds meet and mingle, buying one another’s wares, checking out one another’s outfits and literally stepping on one another’s toes.

It’s loud, it’s dirty and it’s far from home for anyone but a handful of loft-dwellers. The goods run the gamut from cheap to dirt cheap, and virtually the only “quality” items are knockoffs.

The bargains are legendary. But Santee Alley isn’t just about bargains; it’s about inclusion. As on the Champs Elysee in Paris, you can stand in one spot and see the whole city pass by: There goes a tall, curvaceous blond woman in a shocking pink tie-dyed mini-dress, teetering on platform heels while she coos at a hatchling box turtle in a plastic cage that she bought from a street vendor for $5. Here comes a hatchet-faced and weather-beaten elderly man dressed like a vaquero in cowboy boots and a straw hat, dripping with dignity and gravely carrying his sole purchase--a pastel baby stroller. Suddenly, a willowy woman in brilliant gold and black print African robes and tribal jewelry, her head shaved bald, double-parks a red Mercedes and climbs out. She waits, leaning on the hood, while a man in a charcoal business suit hops out and dashes into the throng, evidently pursuing a quick purchase.

Meanwhile a shy-looking woman stands elevated on an overturned milk crate in the alley’s entrance, selling colored contact lenses for $11 a pair.

Another street vendor, a middle-aged woman who speaks only Spanish, sells slices of papaya and mango from a box slung around her neck. “Come inside! Take a look! Oh my God! Oh my goodness!” barks Jose Carillo from Mexico City, perched on a stepladder so that he can dominate the crowd at the entrance to Tina USA, a narrow alley-front shop selling stretch pants in loud prints and skimpy crepe tops. “Everything under five dollars!” He grins and claps, keeping a rhythm to his exuberant patter.

Saturday is the busiest day of Santee Alley’s week, but on any given weekend the pilgrims include bargain-hunting San Marino housewives like Meg Synes, who took her 12-year-old daughter and her friends to buy bootleg Kate Spade handbags for Easter, and shoppers from Pico Rivera, like Pressie Menendez, a licensed vocational nurse who brought her husband and children along to shop for a fancy white dress for her daughter’s first communion.

These are people who don’t go to the same supermarkets or movie theaters, who probably don’t even share the same freeways most of the time, but here they are. They’re drawn by what few of them realize is one of the most successful and diverse business communities in Southern California and a quiet urban renewal success story.

Inside Tina USA, Donna McCollins, an information technology professional who lives in Westchester, is trying to look at the clothes and at the same time keep an eye on her 7-year-old daughter, Jada, a gangly, excited, smiling young shopper in an electric blue T-shirt and braided pigtails. A teenage niece who lives with McCollins is roaming the alley with a girlfriend. For McCollins, the alley provides a day’s entertainment and a cheap way to clothe a houseful of fashion-conscious females.

“Pants, skirts, tops, toys, turtles,” McCollins says, “you name it, I’ve bought it here.”

Across the alleyway, Gail Ma, a schoolteacher, and her boyfriend, Malcolm O’Donnell, are trying on knockoff Oakley sunglasses. “I can wear these on the golf course,” O’Donnell says. “Who’s gonna know?”

“We just had dim sum in Chinatown, and now we’re looking for purses and accessories,” Gail’s sister, Tina Ma explains over the din. She is carrying a gray Kate Spade handbag--a real one, not one of the imitations for sale at a tenth the price a few booths down, she notes ruefully.

But mostly they’re out to soak up the carnival atmosphere, and to show Gail Ma, from Palm Springs, a bit of the “real” Los Angeles. “This is so fun!” Tina Ma exclaims, laughing, even as the three are pinned to the sunglass stand by the press of the throng, which is momentarily gridlocked. “It’s so incredibly crowded! But my God, what an interesting place!” Then the Ma sisters are swept away on the tide, and O’Donnell hurries to catch up. “They’re both short, and I don’t want to lose them!” he cries.

Most everyone who ventures into Santee Alley for the first time feels he or she has discovered it as surely as Marco Polo discovered spaghetti. What usually happens when people start to repeatedly “discover” a neighborhood is that gentrification can’t be far behind.

Sure enough, one major residential-retail project is already in the works. Santa Monica-based MJW Investments recently announced plans to issue Fannie Mae-backed bonds to finance a 790,000-square-foot retail and residential development at the intersection of Santee and 8th streets.

But the character of Santee Alley isn’t likely to change any time soon, even if the surrounding area becomes a residential hot spot. For starters, Starbucks probably couldn’t afford the rent.

“Do you know how much I pay for this space?” Joseph Yamini, owner of Orly Fashion says incredulously as he sits behind the cash register in his narrow shotgun retail space filled with men’s and women’s sportswear. “Eleven thousand dollars a month! It’s as much per square foot as Rodeo Drive!”

He’s not far off. While rents on Rodeo Drive hover around $18 to $20 per square foot, rents on Santee Alley--$10 per square foot--are higher than downtown Beverly Hills; on Beverly Drive for instance, the average is $6 to $7. That’s because foot traffic and sales in the alley justify the premium lease rates. Rent is Yamini’s biggest expense, but Santee Alley has been good to him. He’s been a tenant for 17 years and does well enough to own a house in Brentwood.

For all its rough edges, this is a rundown neighborhood with a thriving economy, and it’s been that way for years. Santee Alley got its start in the ‘70s, when the wholesalers lining Maple and Santee streets started selling production overruns and lines dropped by department stores out of the backs of their wholesale showrooms on weekends.

The experiment was so successful that eventually the showrooms’ orientations turned completely around, so that the alleyway became the new front door. The alley is still the ultimate prestige address, but the Fashion District now encompasses 82 blocks, with more than 1,000 retail outlets doing $1 billion in business with the public each year (wholesale sales for the fashion district total $7 billion). The garment business is Southern California’s third-largest industry, behind movies and aerospace/technology, and this is its epicenter.

Incredibly, 85% of the businesses here are mom and pop stores with fewer than five employees. It’s almost like shopping in an international Mayberry. “We have a wide cross-section of business owners, ethnically,” says Kent Smith, executive director of the Fashion District Business Improvement District. “There is a strong Middle Eastern contingent, a strong Korean contingent, the Jewish community has been here for many years and there’s a growing Latino entrepreneurial presence. We’ve become the fusion place.”

Born of the collision of so many traditions, the business culture of Santee Alley takes a wild and woolly frontier-town approach to the marketplace. Many vendors and retailers operate on--well, let’s just politely call it the “cutting edge” of legal commerce.

The small bootleg operators who are selling knockoff shoes, handbags and toys know that anyone caught with fewer than 1,000 illegal items is charged with only a misdemeanor instead of a felony. While Kate Spade and Tommy Hilfiger surely don’t appreciate such cavalier attitudes, the merchants take the occasional minor bust in stride. And larger retailers may sell bootleg goods, but they usually pay the sales tax on them.

It may not look like it from street-level, but there is order amid the chaos. Because of this sense of order and purpose, the alley is thriving even through the recession.

Retail sales in the fashion district did drop somewhat after Sept. 11, but the Fashion District Business Improvement District reports that the district’s 2001 holiday shopping season topped the previous year’s, and 2002 is shaping up to be the district’s best year yet.

“We’re adding 200 stores a year,” says Smith. “And the pedestrian traffic on Santee Alley easily rivals that of Hollywood Boulevard or the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica.”

The cavalier attitudes toward trademarks and licenses don’t extend to dealings with customers, who are generally treated well. You aren’t likely to get ripped off here or suffer any kind of villainy at the hands of the locals. After all, this level of easy prosperity means that the sidewalk vendor selling bootleg Gucci wallets or $15 pet iguanas is only a bootstrap removed from the established storefront operator, and no one wants to scare off business from the area.

“The worst problem we have is with the illegal food vendors,” Smith says. “I’ve seen them cutting up fruit in public restrooms. It’s important to get the word out to consumers about that.”

The area has experienced a subtle form of urban rejuvenation since the downtown property owners formed a Business Improvement District in 1995. The group’s first action was to rename the Garment District the Fashion District, making it sound less commercial and more consumer-friendly. Then it began to apply a $2.8-million budget, funded exclusively with dues collected from property owners, to provide extra trash collection, graffiti removal and security, including bicycle and foot patrols and a pickpocket detail that makes citizen’s arrests. The result is an area that retains its raw, unique character but is in fact not unsafe.

“We’ve seen a 53% decrease in crime since we started our security details in 1996,” says Smith. “It’s one of the safest places in the city. You’re as safe as you are in Beverly Hills.”

Still, favorable statistics have done little so far to change the perception of lawlessness shared by many out-of-area visitors, whose only prior experience with bargain shopping may be a trip to Costco and who have driven through Skid Row, only a few blocks away, to get here.

Bride-to-be Shavon Pennington of Bakersfield, who looks like Marcia from “The Brady Bunch,” emerges from D&R; Fashions, where she has just ordered her bridesmaids’ gowns, and stops to ponder the wallets and trinkets that Indian emigre Khadija Motiwala is selling from a folding table. Pennington’s mother, Cheryl, follows close behind, carrying her new mother-of-the-bride dress in a garment bag, looking flushed and cheery.

“We were here yesterday,” Cheryl says. “It was so great, we drove all the way back today. I got this dress for $139, down from $189. I bargained for it,” she adds breathlessly. “I love this even more than the outlet malls.”

She lowers her voice. “But don’t be down here past dark, we got caught yesterday, and it was a little bit scary.”

To combat these perceptions, D&R; Fashions has aggressively sought to expand its retail clientele by hosting shopping seminars.

“Our main clientele is church women, who attend church every Sunday, so they need to buy a lot of formal dresses,” explains sales manager Mary Green. “We have groups of women coming from as far away as Sacramento. We bring them in, have an event at a local restaurant and teach them everything they need to know to navigate their way through the downtown shopping experience.”

A shopping trip so arduous it requires a course of study will never be everyone’s cup of tea, of course, but that’s what makes Santee Alley such a distinctive attraction.

It is a bustling center of day-to-day commerce, but it’s also one of the highlights of L.A.’s shopping underground, a scene that’s more about word-of-mouth on the best flea markets and thrift stores than Presidents Day sales and shopping malls.

For those who see shopping as an extreme sport, Santee Alley is a kind of Mt. Everest.

Winter Rosebud, who designs custom bras and corsets for Trashy Lingerie in Los Angeles, lives just around the corner and is one of the area’s hard-core denizens. She agrees that shopping Santee is a learned art.

“I definitely have my favorite shops. There are so many stores it’s impossible to find the good ones in a day unless you know where to look. I know where to get everything, and I go at 9 a.m., when no one is there.”

She warms to her subject as she contemplates the big game lurking in the alley’s byways (there’s a reason it’s called “bargain hunting” and not “bargain gathering”).

“There are places where you can get rhinestones, fabulous leather coats, zoot suits, African dashikis, things that you can’t find anywhere [else] in L.A. You just have to know where to look.”

But even if you hate to shop, Santee Alley has depths to plumb. An afternoon in its environs can give you a glimpse of the changing face of the city, a place where lively trade and cooperative efforts between unlike individuals creates an organic sense of community no amount of city planning can achieve.

Santee Alley has a bit of something for everyone, whether it’s pursuing the American dream from a prime spot on the street corner, managing a million-dollar enterprise tucked into a tiny piece of real estate or simply scoring 10 pairs of socks for $5.

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Hillary Johnson is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer. She last wrote about the art gallery scene for Calendar Weekend.