A Skid Row Bistro Sounds Pretty Good, Despite Reservations

If you buy into the notion that location is everything, you’d have to say Pete McLaughlin has made a curious choice about where to open a restaurant.

The prostitutes aren’t far from his door, and neither are the crack addicts or the parking meter bandits. Then you’ve got the urban campers of skid row Los Angeles.

But McLaughlin, who quit a good job in marketing a year ago, is sinking three-quarters of a million dollars into 4th and Main. Pete’s Cafe Bar, a French-American bistro located in the street-level corner of the renovated San Fernando Building, is scheduled to open next month.

“Why here?” I asked McLaughlin, 42.

“You look at two things,” he said. “Who are your customers going to be, and who’s your competition?”

The customers, he said, are the 300-plus people living in renovated turn-of-the-century buildings at that intersection. (McLaughlin’s wife is an executive with the Gilmore Co., which redeveloped the buildings.) They’re also the employees of the Ronald Reagan State Building, City Hall, the L.A. Times and several other places.

And as for the competition?

“There is none.”

Not everyone, however, is cheering McLaughlin on. Some hearts bleed over the possibility that downtown gentrification, along with the conversion of tired old hotels into spiffed-up apartment houses, will drive out the poor and spill them onto the street.

“Skid row is the last place in the community where a person can go if they have no money and no family,” says Alice Callaghan of Las Familias Del Pueblo.

Nonprofit groups own two-thirds of the 60-plus hotels in the area, she said, and they are home to 8,000 people who pay roughly $62 a month. But developers are swooping in.

“For them to come and take irreplaceable housing stock for people who have no choice about where to live, so they can have some Disneyland Manhattan experience, is outrageous and immoral,” says Callaghan.

Especially, she adds, when the government is “throwing money” at the developers as incentives. And, as The Times reported, City Hall has been so blindly gung-ho at times, it has let developers get sloppy with fire and safety codes.

Callaghan, I must say, sounds like a saint, and I have nothing but admiration for those who fight for the dignity of the most destitute among us. But to tell you the truth, I think her argument is too cynical.

If downtown shouldn’t become some kind of Disneyfied Manhattan, neither should it be a Calcutta adventure park, with huddled misery and the dead-end stench of urine in the air.

Shame on Los Angeles for our indifference to so much despair. But you don’t begin to solve the problem by making the downtown of the second-largest city in the country the exclusive domain of the down-and-out, enabling users and abusers to rot in sprawling squalor.

You do it with a greater commitment to mental health care, drug and alcohol treatment--the kind of things that keep people from crashing onto skid row in the first place. And you scatter low-rent housing around the region rather than corralling people in wretched isolation.

Look, downtown Los Angeles isn’t going to make a comeback on the strength of the Staples Center and all the Grand Avenue hoo-haw. Especially not with the new cathedral having inexplicably set itself apart from the new city by bumping up against the highway and concealing a splendid public space behind fortress walls.

It’s only going to work if, along with becoming Southern California’s center of commerce and culture, it’s a place where people of all persuasions live together in some balance of chaos and harmony. A real city, in other words, with life pumping 24 hours a day, and a bistro around the corner from a soup kitchen.

And it can, in time, become a place where an executive lives down the street from a secretary and shops at the same Ralphs as a starving actor, as well as a bloke who’s been in a tailspin but just got himself a job at Pete’s Cafe Bar.

McLaughlin has already gone to Chrysalis, a job-training center for the homeless and the poor, and to the Midnight Mission, setting up pipelines for job applicants.

Yes, McLaughlin admits without apology, he’ll get substantial financial incentives because of the risk of doing business in a blighted area, and one of them is a tax credit for hiring from the neighborhood.

“I worked in a soup kitchen in Detroit, and I know how important it is to create opportunity for people,” McLaughlin said as work crews drilled and hammered, bringing his new restaurant into being. “We’re going to exhibit local artists on the columns over there too. If it’s going to work, it’s got to bring in people from all walks of life.”

The storefront sat vacant, part of the downtown blight, for five years. When he took over the property, McLaughlin snooped around in the basement and found cast iron railing, doors and other furnishings that were part of the original building.

They’re now being worked into the recycled space, which has served as a drug store, a men’s haberdashery, and a cigar store.

Lunch and dinner will be served beginning Oct. 11, no reservations required. But Christmas could be tight. A state employee from across the street has already booked a dinner party for 40.

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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com.