Old Pomona Downtown Gets an Update

Pomona, one of the oldest cities in Los Angeles County, finally can boast its first new commercial structure downtown after a three-decade dry spell.

A $14-million hybrid retail, office and condominium project has been completed across from City Hall on a site that had been empty since the Sylmar earthquake destroyed a post office there in 1971.

The rise of Mission Promenade, as the project is known, ended about a 30-year period during which nothing was built in the city center, said Robert Wise, the city’s redevelopment project manager.

Now, he said, downtown Pomona is beginning to recover from the economic beating the city of 137,000 took when the town’s largest employer, missile manufacturer General Dynamics Corp., started laying off workers in the late 1980s as the Cold War ended.

By the time the defense contractor left in 1994, about 7,000 jobs had been eliminated. Several retailers and other businesses already had left downtown for the suburbs as part of a national trend dating to the 1960s that drained commerce from the central districts of many cities.

Recovery began with the housing boom that swept Los Angeles County in the late 1990s. Several once-empty office and retail buildings, including the former Progress-Bulletin newspaper building, have been converted to residential use, adding about 120 units of loft-style housing downtown in the last five years.

Pomona home prices have jumped 90% to a median $215,000 during that time, according to DataQuick Information Systems.

“Some of the retail downtown has struggled in the past, but lofts were always doing well,” Wise said. “We thought we could duplicate that success in Mission Promenade.”

The city sold the former post office site to Southland Land Corp., a Pasadena developer that specializes in affordable housing and building projects in blighted areas. The company’s recent projects include the El Paseo entertainment center in South Gate and University Village, a retail and housing complex in Riverside.

Mission Promenade includes two three-story buildings surrounding a courtyard. A bridge connects the offices on the second level and the condominiums on the third. Architect Mitchell E. Sawasy said he wanted the design to be compatible with older Art Deco and traditional American brick buildings in the neighborhood.

The 22,000 square feet of stores on the street level will house the Pomona Chop House, which will be downtown Pomona’s only white-tablecloth restaurant when it opens this summer. Other retailers include the downtown area’s first Starbuck’s coffeehouse.

Among the design challenges faced by Sawasy, of Los Angeles-based Rothenberg Sawasy Architects, was the city’s requirement that four large trees on the site be preserved and the need to insulate the 23,500 square feet of offices from potentially noisy neighbors upstairs with six inches of concrete.

The first two floors are built with steel frames, while the condos on the third floor are wood-framed. All 26 have been sold or are in escrow, at prices ranging from $179,500 to $289,500, said developer Michael Keele, president of Southland.

Typical buyers are single professionals, some of whom said they plan to commute by train to their jobs in Los Angeles, Keele said.

Rail played a key role in the development of Pomona, which was incorporated in 1888 and soon emerged as an agricultural powerhouse. By 1916, Pomona Valley farmers produced more than one-third of the citrus products grown in California. The city organized the first Los Angeles County Fair in 1922 and still hosts the annual event.

Pomona scored a coup of sorts in 1962 when it closed nine blocks of 2nd Street to automobiles and became the first city west of the Mississippi to try creating an outdoor pedestrian mall to keep shoppers coming to the central city. The concept failed in most cities, including Pomona, where most of the former department stores and other businesses have been painted white and taken over by the massive Western University of Health Sciences.

Small stores on a nearby tree-lined swath of 2nd Street have prospered, however, and in 2002 were painted riotous pastel colors for a stint as fictional downtown Anville in last year’s “The Cat in the Hat” movie.

The city will keep working to attract new residents to downtown, Wise said. “We’re hoping to make it a commuter bedroom-type community,” he said.

Already planned is the second phase of Mission Promenade, with 78 condos and 20,000 square feet of stores. Downtown Pomona also is looking forward to getting its first McDonald’s restaurant within a year.