Re: Melrose Avenue, once the beating heart of California cool, is in trouble

[Karen Bass screwups]

On 01 Apr 2022, Wi1liam T T <willy...@yahooomail.com> posted some
news:t2704m$3dv53$2...@news.freedyn.de:

> Thank the Democrats!

Once a hub for punk rockers and streetwear enthusiasts alike, the dining
and shopping district has many vacant storefronts these days. What
happened?

When Caitlin Cutler was growing up in Los Angeles in the late 1990s and
early 2000s, no place was cooler or more thrilling than Melrose Avenue.
Cutler and her friends would meet up at the Coffee Bean and walk down the
length of the street near West Hollywood, then densely peppered with
irreverent vintage stores, funky dining institutions and record store
gems. Unlike other pedestrian-friendly shopping areas throughout the city
like Venice’s Abbot Kinney Boulevard and Larchmont Village further east,
Melrose is idiosyncratic in that mom-and-pop businesses, not chain stores,
line its main thoroughfare.

“If you just went outside and walked, you would find something to do,”
says longtime Melrose area resident Johanna Nelson. “It was like an
artistic hub.”

From roughly the late 1970s through the early 2000s, the mile-long stretch
between La Brea and Fairfax was beloved by tourists and locals alike. It
was a favorite of TV, as the characters of “Entourage” and, of course,
“Melrose Place” roamed the street. It was a place where you could run into
your friends and probably Madonna or Tyler, the Creator, too. That’s no
longer the case.

For decades, it felt as though every nook and corner of Melrose thrummed
with raucous excitement, its shops and hangouts influencing subcultures
around the world. The bygone Aardvark’s Odd Ark helped to popularize used
clothing stores when it first opened its doors in the early 1970s, not far
from where L.A. Eyeworks brought quirky eyewear to the masses. Johnny
Rockets — that Johnny Rockets, of gee-whiz burgers and shakes fame — got
its start on Melrose during the thick of the ’50s revival in the 1980s,
back when the street attracted edgy punk rockers and new wavers. The
improv venue Groundlings is where countless comedians and actors,
including Maya Rudolph, Paul Reubens and Jennifer Coolidge, cut their
teeth. The trucker hat and baby tee trends of the early aughts, which have
recently made a comeback, owe a lot to Melrose: Von Dutch’s outpost
arrived on the street in the early 2000s, as did the bejeweled skull
hamlet Ed Hardy, both helmed by designer Christian Audigier.

Fairfax Avenue, located a few blocks further down, is synonymous with the
rise of streetwear as a worldwide phenomenon in the mid- to late 2000s,
with the likes of Supreme, Flight Club, Golf Wang and the Hundreds setting
up shop there. From a pop culture perspective, Melrose and Fairfax may as
well have been the center of America for the past quarter century.

“When you looked down the street on a Tuesday or a Thursday, as far as you
could see there were people,” says Dom DeLuca, the owner of skate shop
Brooklyn Projects, which has called Melrose home since 2002. “It was like
CityWalk, at Universal Studios.”

Avner Lavi, whose father owned a custom leather goods store on Melrose in
the late 1990s, fondly remembers buying vintage army jackets for $7 a pop
at the famous Sunday flea market Melrose Trading Post, at Fairfax High
School.

“There would be maybe 2,000 people walking up and down Melrose Boulevard,
it was insane,” Lavi says. “There was no brisk walking, because it was
full of people.”

While Melrose still bears flashes of this original irreverent spirit, the
difference now is the crowds are gone — and so are many of the eccentric
businesses that made it a destination to begin with. If you walk or drive
down Melrose, you’ll notice that dozens of once-full storefronts now sit
vacant and boarded up. Mainstays that temporarily closed years ago still
have no return date in sight. And newer places have a habit of turning
over or going out of business in mere weeks.

Among those are the Mexican institution Antonio’s restaurant, shuttered
after more than 50 years on Melrose, and Lala’s Argentine Grill, which had
a kitchen fire and hasn’t reopened. Vinyl Fetish, the record store
frequented by the minds behind tastemaking internet radio station dublab,
is no more. Upscale pub the Village Idiot closed last year, and the
neighborhood Italian spot Spartina said farewell last month. The original
Johnny Rockets couldn’t hack it any longer on Melrose, and the building
housing the vegan burger joint that sits there now, Nomoo, is looking for
a new tenant. The adjacent Fairfax district isn’t as vibrant these days
either, and even streetwear giant Supreme has moved on to glitzier places:
the Sunset Strip.

A handful of longtime Melrose holdouts are hanging on, such as Posers
(home to beloved British subculture brands like Dr. Martens), the
secondhand shop Wasteland, decades-old dive bar the Snake Pit and daytime
cafes like Blu Jam and Fratelli. And while there’s often a sense from
older generations that things used to be better back in the day, the
reality is that residents and business owners alike are feeling the sting
of Melrose’s ongoing decline.

“Business has been the toughest I’ve ever seen,” says DeLuca, who notes
that sales at Brooklyn Projects from 2023 were down 28% from 2019. “It’s
just … horrible. If I was going to open up a business I wouldn’t go there.
Whereas 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you wanted to open up on Melrose, but
you couldn’t find a store.”

In many ways, Melrose represents a microcosm of problems coalescing
nationwide. Here’s a non-exhaustive list: inflation and interest rates
remain high after the pandemic, and consumers are cutting back on non-
essential spending, like shopping and dining out, as they struggle to make
ends meet — no wonder Gen Z has been dubbed “generation stay-at-home.”
Unemployment numbers are supposedly down, but tell that to anyone who’s
tried to get a job in this labor market. Like other urban cores, Los
Angeles has also seen a drop in commercial real estate rentals (which
certainly aren’t cheap on Melrose), and some storefronts remain empty for
longer periods of time. The confluence of the Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA
strikes last summer, which left tens of thousands of people out of jobs
and with drained savings, coupled with rising costs of goods, didn’t help
matters.

“Our business [went] down 20% within 3 weeks after Memorial Day, and by
Labor Day, another 20%,” says Stephen Kalt, chef and owner of the recently
shuttered Spartina. “If I’m going to say anything that occurred that
changed our fortunes going forward, it was the strike and the general
sense across the country of people getting sticker shock and realizing,
‘Wow, I used to go out and spend $50. Now I spend $75.’”

Financial issues aren’t solely to blame, though. An ongoing decline of
face-to-face hanging out among Americans is fueling a loneliness crisis,
especially among teenagers, as The Atlantic recently reported. Meaning
that places that used to be the ultimate weekend hangout zones, like
Melrose, aren’t seeing as many people strolling around with friends and
shooting the breeze.

“There is no statistical record of any other period in U.S. history when
people have spent more time on their own,” the magazine noted, adding that
this phenomenon began picking up steam even before the pandemic.

Residents and business owners cite 2020 as an inflection point for
Melrose. After some restaurants and retailers gingerly reopened after the
first lockdown, Melrose saw lootings in late May of that year.

“Though most [Black Lives Matter] protesters assembled peaceably
throughout the day, nighttime brought a level of destruction not seen in
Los Angeles since the 1992 riots sparked after the police officers’
acquittal in the beating of Rodney King,” the Los Angeles Times reported.
“Some unleashed long-simmering anger over police brutality by shattering
windows and stealing merchandise. Others scrawled graffiti with messages
decrying systemic racism. Storefronts along Melrose were torched.”

DeLuca says that businesses on Melrose, many of them small and minority-
owned, were left to their own devices in the summer of 2020. Some opted
not to return. “The city didn’t go, ‘OK, let’s give the money to Melrose
so we can rebeautify, so we can clean up, fix the broken glass.’ And a lot
of the stores went: ‘F—k it. We’re not going to do it,’” DeLuca says. “All
these places that were staples closed, and now nothing is taking its
place. It’s like a ghost town.”

Even after some Melrose businesses gradually came back, tourists ceased to
flock there. Some point to a rash of break-ins and robberies a few years
back, and the heightened media attention that came along with it, as a
possible explanation. Cutler, who now co-owns the pizza joint Ronan on
Melrose, says that the street hasn’t fully recovered after it “got a
reputation for being dangerous” around 2021. Melrose “just hasn’t been
able to replace tenants that have left,” Cutler adds. “There are a lot of
vacancies on the street. You’re better off if you’re in a densely
populated area. It may seem counterintuitive that you want more
restaurants around you, but you do. Because then people see that as an
epicenter of where to go.”

---

A few weekends ago, shortly after days of torrential rain gave way to the
sort of breathtakingly clear-skied LA day that musicians write songs
about, the sidewalks of Melrose Avenue were scant save for a handful of
people walking around the sidewalks scrawled with promotional stamps,
motivational quotes, and street art. Suddenly, a double-decker Big Bus
crammed with tourists hurtled down Melrose, headed east — but not a single
visitor’s arm rose up to wave to passersby, as there was practically
nobody to say hi to on the street. It’s a wild turn for a place that once
drew the hordes of crowds you’d expect on Hollywood Boulevard.

It’s tough to say what the future holds for Melrose. Maybe the area’s
upswing is right around the corner. It’s possible that rents will drop and
upstart small businesses will return there once again, and perhaps new
boundary-pushing restaurants, cute cafes and cool bars will help bring
people in. For his part, DeLuca is heartened to see younger generations
coming to Melrose as of late, looking to hang out and skateboard at the
ramp behind Brooklyn Projects.

“The new generation doesn’t want to order on Amazon, they don’t want to
order it online. They want to come get it there, and they want to see it
and feel it and be a part of something,” DeLuca says. “[Melrose] is going
to come back. Eventually, hopefully, it’ll pick up. But I don’t know when
that’ll be.”

And decadeslong residents, like Nelson, love Melrose despite its issues.

“I still feel like it’s like the heart of Los Angeles,” Nelson says. “You
can find amazing things here.”

Change and transition are inevitable anywhere, including Melrose. But if
this heart ceases to beat altogether, though — if institutions and little
nooks alike continue shuttering on Melrose, and if inventive, family-owned
businesses look to other areas of the city to launch — the effect is more
dire than just a smattering of buildings standing empty. It means that a
critical juncture of Los Angeles’ dissipating irreverence will cease to
exist. Few pedestrian-friendly districts populate this city to begin with,
and hardly any have been as historically friendly to small businesses that
thrive and go on to change culture writ large. If that’s lost, it makes it
harder to imagine a different future.

Over that same sunshine-drenched weekend, I meandered around Melrose and
dipped into a few stores. Though I was struck by just how many empty
storefronts stand right next to each other on practically every block, I
also saw a few groups of friends clinking margaritas at watering hole
Durango Cantina, and Blackbird Pizza Shop, a deep-dish slice joint that
had closed its doors in December, was back for now as a pop-up. Vintage,
resale and “reworked” fashion stores are still kicking, some brimming with
daring and cheeky clothing: At 2nd Street, you might stroll through the
denim aisle and find a pair of distressed leather chaps, or a goofy
Hawaiian shirt emblazoned with the defunct ESPN Zone logo. A creative
vending machine display at CoolKicks showed only a fraction of its
impressive sneaker collection, festival wear and punk rave gear abounds at
The Shop and Typhoon, respectively, and used clothing by the pound is
available at New Friend (for $19.99/pound).

At that moment, I realized why Melrose has been a cultural touchstone for
many generations: There’s space to dream here. Young people need time away
from their parents and teachers, in environments that lead them toward
personally uncovering things that are new to them. Hearing a song they’d
never heard before in a thrift store dressing room, or seeing a unique
style of graffiti art on a wall, for instance, could lead them to learn
more about a subculture that makes them feel more at home in the world.
Adults could certainly use a break from the demands of everyday life for
an afternoon of people-watching in the sunshine, and the generative thrill
of doing absolutely nothing (or shopping, if they’re so inclined).

Melrose reminds me of the places that anchored me during my formative
teenage years growing up in Houston, Texas. I would have been lost back
then had it not been for the pint-sized bookstores, diners with mediocre
coffee but great conversations, and used clothing haunts that ignited my
curiosity, reconfigured my brain, and laid the foundation for the person I
am today. That spark still exists on Melrose, however dampened it might
now be compared to its heyday. I feel the fantasy when I walk around. And
while I’m admittedly not the sort of person who can pull off studded
leather pants paired with a poofy, multi-hued faux fur coat and an
original Backstreet Boys shirt from the Into the Millennium Tour, for a
second, thumbing through the racks of vintage clothes, I thought I could
be.

https://www.sfgate.com/la/article/why-are-so-many-places-closed-melrose-
los-angeles-18654638.php