Breathing New Life Into Old Main Streets

There’s a novel sight on the brick sidewalks of downtown Covina lately: people.

By day, they are queued four deep for holiday sweets at Joslin’s Bakery, nibbling lunch on the patio of the Downtown Deli Cafe. By night, they are strolling to a show at the renovated Covina Valley Playhouse or lingering over cappuccinos at one of two new coffeehouses. Where vacancies peppered this formerly moribund stretch of Citrus Avenue, an ambitious downtown makeover has brought a host of new eateries, new life--and a waiting list for storefronts.

“My dream is to open a little espresso shop with a cigar room in the back,” says real estate agent Ted Borowinski, who sees a possible gold mine in Covina’s turnaround.

The rebirth of Covina’s four-block center also has caught the eye of planners next door in downtown Azusa, where shuttered businesses and a deserted main avenue make for a forlorn public face. Officials there plan to spend millions of dollars to revive a core wilted by neglect and a losing battle with outlying malls.

Call it downtown fever. Or Main Street mania. After decades of muscling outward through subdivisions and shopping centers, suburban cities all over Southern California are rediscovering their civic hearts--laying sidewalks, fixing vintage buildings and wooing new shops--in hopes of recapturing local identity and gaining desperately needed tax revenue.

Having witnessed the commercial success of entertainment meccas such as Old Pasadena and Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade, smaller cities such as Whittier, Downey and Monrovia are striving for their own slice of the action, if in more modest ways. The downtown comeback is taking root nationwide, fueled in equal parts by nostalgia and, experts say, a rising appetite among mall-weary consumers for fresh pedestrian shopping and movie hubs. Often with little room left to develop, suburbs are refocusing on their overlooked centers.

The rise of the suburbs over a half-century decimated the downtowns of larger American cities. But the centrifugal tug that freeways, shopping centers and planned communities exerted on big-city dwellers also eventually pulled the life from the downtowns of the bedroom cities that hosted them. Now the suburbs must cope with graying centers--marked by pawnshops, seedy bars and boarded storefronts--that no longer feel safe.

“The old center cities had trouble a long time ago when people moved out to the suburbs,” said Reba Wright-Quastler, immediate past president of the American Planning Assn.’s California chapter. “Now the suburbs are having some of the same problems.”

The current drive is also propelled by an emerging urban philosophy aimed at building places where homes, jobs and shopping are just a walk from each other. Heightened sensitivity about saving old buildings has put historic preservation at the heart of many efforts to save suburban downtowns.

“Fifty years ago people may have valued things that were new. Now people want to preserve historical buildings that help define what a place is,” said Kennedy Smith, who directs the National Main Street Center, a Washington, D.C.-based project aimed at preserving downtowns. “It’s almost like America is searching for a cultural identity now.”

But some critics dismiss the push to rescue suburban centers as a vain and costly exercise in sentimentality. And proposals to build movie theaters, frequently pitched as engines of downtown revival, have hit opposition from residents who fear party crowds. A ballot fight is under way in Monrovia over a plan to build a 12-screen theater in the quaint Old Town section, which local officials say must lure shoppers back from the big-box stores elsewhere.

“If the movie theater doesn’t come in in 1997, we’ll see six to 10 businesses close,” said Dick Singer, executive vice president of the Monrovia Chamber of Commerce. “We’re up against Wal-Mart.”

Similar anxieties are prompting rejuvenation efforts in other Southern California cities, some of which underwent face lifts or were bulldozed as part of a wave of urban renewal two decades ago. In Ventura County, the first task of a planned $2-million revitalization in Oxnard, scheduled to begin this month, will involve straightening a key downtown street once converted into an ill-fated pedestrian mall. And Brea officials will reuse remnants of its former downtown, including a tavern facade and an old church steeple kept in storage, that came down to make way for a supermarket and other stores.

Arcadia spent $8 million over two years for a host of downtown improvements, including new sidewalks, street lights and plantings, to sow what city officials hope will be a flowering of specialty shops aimed at pedestrians. A 10-screen movie theater under construction in downtown Downey is envisioned as a way to get trendy shops, such as Starbucks and Barnes & Noble, to move in beside the mom-and-pop stores that dominate now.

The city of San Gabriel spent $1.1 million to create a pedestrian oasis around its historic mission, drawing a few new restaurants and live music to a strip more commonly used as a commuter shortcut to Pasadena. And Pomona hopes to turn around its downtown by creating a regional antiques bazaar and attracting artists to live and work.

The 25-year-old California Downtown Assn., which represents about 150 cities with revitalization programs, witnessed its largest membership surge ever during the past six months.

Planners and scholars say a resurgence in suburban downtowns is particularly promising in Southern California, whose vast sprawl is made up of dozens of distinct cities that bled together. It is the compact “old town” centers that stand the best chance to succeed as pedestrian-friendly marketplaces and residences, said Peter Katz, executive director of the San Francisco-based Congress for the New Urbanism.

Boosters are hoping to capitalize on “mall fatigue” and changes in how people spend their time and money. National retailers have increasingly ventured out of the shopping malls and boosted a vogue in commercial districts known as “urban entertainment centers” that cluster shopping with movies and restaurants, such as in Burbank and Old Pasadena. Suburban downtowns are learning what the malls have always known: Spending is a leisure activity. And a theme helps.

“Nowadays, a community that has a sense of place to it has a competitive advantage,” said William Fulton, publisher of the California Planning and Development Report.

Small cities like Monrovia, whose chief downtown attraction is a popular Friday-night family festival, and Covina may be appealing because they provide an urban experience without the fears of big-city crime, experts say.

And many contend that small-scale downtowns answer a public longing for a sense of place and community, a sort of Norman Rockwell civic intimacy.

Veronica Collins, a Covina cafe owner, noted that business owners closed their shops to attend a funeral when a relative of a local woman was killed in an accident a few months back. “There’s a lot of love here,” said Collins. The couples pushing strollers beneath Covina’s Victorian street lamps are probably too young to remember the downtown before shopping centers sprouted around it, stealing customers and turning it into a ghost town after dark.

“One of the things that bothered me about Covina was you could set a cannon off downtown after 4 p.m. and not hit a soul,” Mayor Linda Sarver said as she showed off the city’s $5-million downtown renovation, which began in 1989. “There was nothing here.”

In neighboring Azusa, roads and shopping malls struck in an especially cruel triple whammy. Construction of the Foothill Freeway a mile south of downtown in the 1960s robbed traffic from the city’s center. About the same time, a shopping center went up on the outskirts, siphoning shoppers and stores. Making matters worse, Azusa Avenue, the main street through downtown, was made a one-way artery, a miniature freeway carrying traffic north to the San Gabriel Mountains.

The effect has been “like a neutron bomb,” said Robb Steel, the city’s acting redevelopment manager.

The result was a down-at-the-heels strip of pawnshops and dive bars, and a vacancy rate that hovers close to 25%. Sales there are estimated at just $13 per square foot, a sliver of the $75-to-$150 rate found at shopping centers, according to city figures. The most successful downtown business is a lawn mower shop, Steel said, a sign that the district is oriented to people in cars, not on foot.

Reviving Azusa’s downtown will first involve taking control of Azusa Avenue from Caltrans, a transfer that is nearly complete, and narrowing the street to slow traffic. The city will tear down some of the most blighted buildings and is seeking a developer to fix a pair of turn-of-the-century brick buildings.

Steel said officials view Covina’s revitalized downtown as a model for Azusa’s fix-up, which is expected to cost $8 million to $10 million over the next decade. Azusa’s largely working-class residents, many of them Latino immigrants, mean any downtown revival will need a blue-collar start, perhaps with a carpet store, a VCR repair shop, craft stores and sporting goods, Steel said.

Other cities have attacked the same decay using a fairly standard recipe: first prettying the streets with decorative bricks, planters and antique-looking street lamps, then renovating buildings with touches to evoke a bygone era.

Movie theaters, whose magic is in drawing crowds, are fast emerging as the favored building block for aspiring suburban downtowns--and one of the most controversial. All over, it seems, someone is proposing a theater to anchor a revitalizing downtown. Oxnard plans a 14-screen complex as part of its face lift. Ventura approved a 10-screen theater for its recovering center. In Whittier’s uptown, a renovated former porno house now shows “101 Dalmatians” and an expansion is underway to add six screens.

But nervous residents in Monrovia are battling to prevent a planned 2,700-seat complex from being built in the heart of Old Town there. The theater taking shape in Downey was halted by opponents until it was scaled back.

While supporters of the Monrovia theater say it could rekindle interest in the downtown and might bring restaurants and juice bars, opponents fear that the five-block stretch will be overwhelmed with traffic and young people hanging out. A referendum is set for March.

“We’re worried that what’s going to happen to us is what is happening in Old Pasadena. It’s a party town,” said Cindy Goss, a secretary who lives three blocks from the proposed site. “If they over-commercialize like they have in other areas, we’re ruined.”

The flood of proposed movie theaters has some observers wondering if that market will soon be saturated. But experts say there may be no limit to the number of downtowns that can thrive, as long as they stick to a local clientele and do not try to become the next Promenade.

Still, skeptics argue that attractive new streets and sidewalks are not enough to reverse the forces of history and the powerful pull of malls and mega-stores such as Target or Home Depot. Borowinski, the real estate agent, may dine in downtown Covina, but he treks to the mall for serious shopping.

Arcadia’s new downtown, which includes a narrowed 1st Avenue and new diagonal parking, has gotten off to a wobbly start since its unveiling last spring, with merchants grousing that the spruce-up hasn’t brought shoppers. “The argument was, if you built it, they will come. Well, they didn’t come,” said Councilman Robert Harbicht.

City Manager William Kelly said it is too soon to judge the effort’s success. “We primed the pump and made it look better and more comfortable and more attractive. Now it’s up to the merchants,” said Kelly, who oversaw Burbank’s renovation in the late 1980s.

While Old Pasadena now earns that city about $1.4 million a year in sales tax, the record is less clear for the smaller cities that have renovated their downtowns.

Smith said communities in the nationwide Main Street Center program have generated an average of $30 in new private investment for every public dollar spent to revitalize.

But the bottom line isn’t necessarily the top consideration, officials say.

Covina’s restoration “was done for community service--to create community,” said Sarver, the mayor.

Experts caution that such projects should not be approached merely as local government’s bid to improve business and earn sales tax. “The key is private investment,” said Richard Peiser, a USC professor who directs the Lusk Center for Real Estate Development.

Peiser and other observers also say cities should get more people living downtown again.

“A downtown shouldn’t just be a Starbucks, a Cineplex, a Gap,” said former Pasadena Mayor Rick Cole, a downtown booster and Southern California director of the Local Government Commission. “It shouldn’t be a theme park.”