96.5 F
San Fernando
Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Boulevard Still Defies Both Definition, Beautification

Boulevard Still Defies Both Definition, Beautification Traffic: Even in the 1950s, Ventura Boulevard was the busiest street in the Valley. By JACQUELINE FOX Staff Reporter Stretching 18 miles from Universal City to Calabasas, Ventura Boulevard is the San Fernando Valley’s main artery and commercial thoroughfare. Along one of the oldest continuously traveled routes in Southern California are roughly 7,000 restaurants, retail shops and small businesses, many sandwiched between clusters of high-rises filled with high-tech firms, film production companies and well-heeled attorneys. A large percentage of The Boulevard’s smaller businesses are owned by immigrants. Others are in the hands of natives who can trace their Valley roots back two and even three generations. And, there is every conceivable type of business to be found: from teashop to tattoo parlor, the diversity is exactly what most experts say gives the street its staying power. And, even if there is a high turnover rate among many businesses, The Boulevard refuses to completely surrender to trends in other communities where window shopping has become the preferred activity for “date night” and pasta and lattes the culinary mainstay. Once a dirt road and a stretch of the famed El Camino Real, The Boulevard served as the connecting pathway for Spanish missionaries on their quest to construct the state’s 21 missions and convert American Indians to Christianity. Traversing The Boulevard today can be a maddening affair. Traffic has become so thick, a few months ago Mayor James Hahn deployed white-gloved officers to some of The Boulevard’s busiest intersections to help ease the congestion. But without the traffic, the eclectic array of coffee shops, one-of-a-kind boutiques, upscale food markets, sushi bars, delis, drug stores and auto repair shops, it wouldn’t be The Boulevard. And it wouldn’t be on the Business Journal’s list of 25 Economic Engines of the Valley. While new businesses spring up along The Boulevard every month, real commercial growth, for the most part, ended a while ago. With the exception of one vacant lot just east of De Soto Avenue, there isn’t much raw land left to develop. And what land there is doesn’t come cheap: the rate at which businesses come and go is a reflection of both the rising costs of commercial real estate along The Boulevard and the difficulty small businesses have staying afloat these days. “The number of small businesses that start up and fold along Ventura Boulevard is absolutely staggering,” said William Malin, founder of Venturaboulevard.com, a business registry site and link to other Valley-related sites on the World Wide Web. Malin said roughly 25 percent of the businesses that signed on to the site when it was established in 1996 no longer exist. Most understand that The Boulevard is really a string of unrelated commercial pockets, each reflecting, to a large degree, the different tastes and cultures of those who live in the surrounding neighborhoods. Because the automobile and The Boulevard remain intrinsically linked, somehow the street refuses to be transformed into another Old Town Pasadena. Residents living near The Boulevard may frequent certain businesses in their neighborhoods but, for the most part, said Malin, there is not a lot of strolling going on. People come for a reason. Then, as fast as traffic allows, they get out. “Ventura Boulevard isn’t a destination,” said Malin. “This is something that the business improvement districts have been trying to do for years, but it just isn’t that kind of place. It’s a place you use to get to other places. On Melrose Avenue, in Los Angeles, you park your car and you go walking. Here, you get to where you want to go by car and then you move on.” “We are trying to create a culture that may not exist,” said accountant Dale Jacobs, a partner with Sandler, Powell, Jacobs & Berlin in Tarzana. “We’ve improved security, the streets are clean, but I don’t think people want to get out of the car. It seems to have become Main Street of the Valley. But I think the Valleyite isn’t going to walk The Boulevard and window shop. They’ll walk the malls, but they won’t walk The Boulevard.” So, what keeps the engine running? “Having a business on Ventura is like having a Hollywood address,” said Jacobs. “Business owners like having a Ventura Boulevard presence because it means something to the reader of the mail, that they are established and they are a legitimate business.” And, because of its length and the fact that it’s a straight shot from one end to the other, it’s easy for newcomers to become familiar with. “I think, because it’s so long, it can’t be packed together like (Santa Monica’s) Third Street Promenade,” said Joel Kotkin, a senior fellow at the Davenport Institute for Public Policy at Pepperdine University. “What’s nice and important about Ventura Boulevard is that a lot of independent stores have managed to coexist there. It’s really the emergence of the urban village of the Valley. There are some pockets that are fairly dead, but I think the Valley needed a shopping street and that’s what it has become. People don’t want to just go to the mall. They want options.” And, despite the apparent success of shopping destinations like Old Town Pasadena and the Third Street Promenade, businesses in those locations have not been immune to high turn-over rates either, and they must continually struggle to appeal to the eternally shifting tastes of a particular age group or income bracket. Whereas The Boulevard, because it changes so dramatically one mile to the next, is long enough and diverse enough to appeal to a wider category of consumers. “You have to remember what you are doing in places like Old Town and Third Street is unique to the area,” said Jack Kyser, chief economist with the Los Angeles Economic Development Corp. “So what worked in Santa Monica won’t necessarily work here. It’s a big street and carries a heavy volume of traffic, and there are differences that won’t let it be something it’s not quite ready to be.”

Featured Articles

Related Articles