Riverside Sees Arts as Key to a Vital Core

When Riverside’s Fox Theater screened the first public showing of “Gone With the Wind” in 1939, the landmark was a glamorous vaudeville stage and cinema, popular with Hollywood luminaries and featuring the rare luxury of air-conditioning.

More than six decades later, the Spanish colonial-style theater is faded and run-down, like the city blocks that surround it.

The city has spent $122 million trying to revitalize its downtown with limited success, leaving a mishmash that includes a four-star hotel within strolling distance of abandoned storefronts.

Now, Riverside leaders are staking downtown’s revival on the creation of a cultural and nightlife hotspot for the booming Inland Empire; a place where people in Riverside and San Bernardino counties can go for a night on the town without driving to Los Angeles or Orange County.

If successful, the lethargic downtown center would be transformed into a lively, urban district with a performing arts center, art galleries, a Broadway-style theater, restaurants and upscale shops.

Before, “the time wasn’t right for Riverside -- the population base was too small, the demographics didn’t quite work,” said Joseph Gogas, the city’s downtown project manager. “But the whole Inland Empire has transformed itself.”

Steven Erie, director of the Urban Studies and Planning Program at UC San Diego, said Riverside’s efforts are similar to what occurred in Orange County in the 1970s and 1980s. The result, the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa, helped provide an identity for that onetime bedroom community.

“If [Riverside] can bring a performing arts center in, that will bring people back to the city -- to work, to live,” he said.

There are already signs of life: Workers jam Simple Simon’s cafe on the pedestrian mall every weekday lunch hour, college kids gather at Back to the Grind coffeehouse and at art galleries, and BMW-driving couples nosh at Mario’s Place and other restaurants on weekends.

But intermingled with these bright spots are bail bond offices, pawnshops and dusty tchotchke emporiums. Businesspeople and urban planners say downtown’s prospects depend on whether more residents can be persuaded to dine, shop and play in the city center, and if the city is focused enough to achieve its goal.

There are doubters.

“No one seems to know where downtown is going. There’s a lack of vision,” said Ralph Megna, a consultant who was the city’s redevelopment chief from 1990 to 1997. “The shame of all this is downtown Riverside has enormous potential, but it is going virtually completely unrealized.”

The city’s glory days were nearly a century ago, when it was the favored haunt of polo-playing citrus heirs and Hollywood stars.

Because of its citrus industry, Riverside was once the wealthiest city per-capita in the country, city officials say.

“We were the watering hole for Southern California,” said Mayor Ron Loveridge. “Twenty-first century Riverside is different.”

While Los Angeles rose with the glamour of Hollywood, the citrus industry in the Inland counties waned, leaving Riverside the “back lot of Southern California,” he said. After World War II, downtown’s residents fled to the suburbs. Montgomery Ward, Sears and other businesses abandoned Riverside’s downtown in the 1960s. In 1971, the area was declared a redevelopment zone.

Since then, soaring housing prices along the Southern California coast started an inland migration. Riverside and San Bernardino counties, home to more than 3.7 million people, are expected to top 5 million by 2020.

Eric Van den Haute was looking for a location to open a branch of Cafe Sevilla, his popular San Diego restaurant, when he heard the population projections. He spent $2.7 million turning a vacant tractor dealership into a Spanish-themed restaurant in 1999, complete with a weekend flamenco show.

“People from Orange County and San Diego looked at me and truly asked if I fell on my head,” he said.

Sales grew 16% last year alone and are on par with sales at the Gas Lamp District branch. “Regardless if [downtown revitalization] happens or not ... we are there forever,” he said.

Other prominent successes in downtown Riverside included turning the vacant Security Pacific Bank building into a state office complex; luring three federal and state courthouses and, most notably, restoring the historic Mission Inn.

The hotel where Richard and Pat Nixon were married and Ronald and Nancy Reagan spent their wedding night fell into disrepair and closed in 1985. When Riverside native and multimillionaire Duane Roberts bought it for $15.6 million in 1992, it was encircled by a chain-link fence.

The inn has undergone a $55-million restoration. Lush landscaping, stained glass and other eclectic features at the hotel are again drawing tourists and politicians such as President George W. Bush and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Megna faults current city leaders for scattering their efforts on a hodgepodge of projects, instead of focusing on “future-changing” developments such as the Mission Inn.

Councilman Dom Betro, who represents downtown, concedes that the city’s tack must change.

“The [previous] approach was more of a small-town, plan-a-project-at-a-time approach,” he said. “We’re trying to ratchet that up, make it a little more sophisticated, more coordinated, more in sync.”

In November, city leaders named six vital components to bringing downtown Riverside back to life: restoring the Fox Theater, creating the Barbara & Art Culver Center of the Arts, expanding the Riverside School for the Arts and building a shopping and residential complex on Market Street known as the Plaza at Mission Inn. They also called for the construction of 1,000 homes and 500,000 square feet of office space.

In December, the City Council voted to chip in $2.25 million of the $12-million cost of creating the Culver Center, a joint city-UC Riverside project that will be in the vacant Rouse’s department store, which is next to UC Riverside’s California Museum of Photography near City Hall. The center will house film screenings, gallery exhibitions, seminars, artists’ studies and classroom and research space.

The City Council voted in November to seize the Fox Theater from its current owner. The Fox became famous when the producer of “Gone With the Wind” brought the classic to Riverside for a secret preview before the movie’s premiere.

The theater has apparently piqued the interest of the Nederlander Organization, which owns the Pantages Theatre in Los Angeles and approached the current owner about putting on Broadway-style shows.

Jack Kyser, chief economist of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp., said a performing arts district’s success would hinge on regular performances at a variety of venues. “If you have a burst of activity followed by a dark period, that’s difficult. It makes it tough for merchants to survive,” he said.

But if the city is successful, it would be filling a void that encourages Inland Empire residents to drive elsewhere for a night on the town.

“Let’s face it, given the freeways, going to downtown Los Angeles or going to Orange County is tough duty,” he said. “Riverside does have some decent demographics that would seem to support [a cultural and nightlife district].”

Demographics has been a catalyst for revitalizations elsewhere. Efforts to create the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica floundered in the 1960s, but triumphed in the 1980s because of wealthy new residents and planning policies that concentrated movie theaters, cafes and shops there, said Bill Fulton, a senior scholar at USC’s School of Policy, Planning and Development.

Downtown Riverside’s keystone was supposed to be Villaggio, a proposal that included a movie theater, shops, restaurants and housing. The idea crumbled in September, with the developer complaining of rising concrete and steel costs. A city committee is considering four competing, scaled-back replacements to go in the area being called the Plaza at Mission Inn, but city leaders say their goal is not to compete with the malls and shopping centers that ring downtown. Modernization comes with a price, and some worry that something special may be lost in the city’s zeal to revitalize.

A historic downtown building that houses a comic store, artists studios and gallery was nearly razed to make way for a law firm’s garage, until the firm backed down last year. Built in 1886, the building was once a boarding house and restaurant operated by Jukichi Harada, who won a legal battle to overturn laws prohibiting the Japanese from owning property.

Artist Marian Semic, who painted the Harada family portrait on the side of the building, and who runs the People’s Gallery on the second floor, cautioned officials to tread carefully.

“I remember when I was a kid, people wanted to tear down the Mission Inn. Where would we be if they had done that?” she said. “The whole downtown area has really started to go through a renaissance. If they are careful and do it right, it will be a wonderful thing.”