PINING AWAY ON PINE AVENUE : Frustrated Retailers Say Renaissance Remains an Unfulfilled Promise Along Showcase of Downtown Long Beach

Mum’s had a slow night last week. As a mere handful of customers dined in the elegant downtown Long Beach restaurant, owner John Morris doubled as host in place of an employee he had recently let go to reduce overhead.

Across the street at System M, things were not much better. There, as eight people sipped coffee and wine in the trendy 42-seat cafe, co-owner Moins Rastgar chatted with customers about, among other things, the 90-hour work-weeks he and his partner average in trying to make the place go.

And down the street at the Overreact Gallery, a bored-looking attendant flipped distractedly through a magazine without a browser in sight.

Taken together, they formed a portrait of unfulfilled promise on Pine Avenue, this city’s much-touted showcase for its ambitious downtown redevelopment plans. The goal was to create a vibrant retail center capable of attracting large numbers of daytime shoppers and nighttime revelers. The reality is that, so far at least, the avenue’s wide sidewalks--which once won an award for being comfortable to pedestrian feet--have remained largely devoid of those appendages, especially after hours.

“It’s been horrible,” said Al Williams, who slightly more than two years ago opened Birdland West, a late-night jazz club at the corner of Pine and Broadway. “I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known how hard it would be. I’d have moved to L.A.”

In fact, Williams was the first of a string of enterprising restaurateurs and entertainment- or culture-oriented business people to open new establishments along Pine Avenue, convinced that they were part of a downtown renaissance. Although many remain optimistic and point to recent signs portending a turnaround, they also admit that the hoped-for resurgence has been much longer in coming than any would have predicted. As a result, they say, some of the new establishments have already failed while others are barely hanging on.

In recent weeks, for instance, two new restaurants--Off Broadway and Cocomo Joe’s--have closed because of a lack of customers. “It just became unbearable,” said Paul Fillman, former owner of Cocomo Joe’s. The restaurant was in business only four months. “There’s so much competition right now and the market isn’t that large.”

Justina’s, a restaurant that opened a year and a half ago, recently underwent a financial reorganization under Chapter 11 of the federal Bankruptcy Code and is operating at reduced hours, according to its owners.

And the old Masonic Temple, a historic building that developer Lloyd Ikerd spent three years and $2 million remodeling, came very close to going into foreclosure recently because of what Ikerd describes as his inability to attract permanent tenants. “I’m still losing about $20,000 a month,” he said. “Redevelopment hasn’t been a raging success.”

Even businesses that are doing relatively well, such as Mum’s and Pine Avenue Grill, say they are operating significantly under capacity, especially at night, and are just now breaking even or beginning to make small profits. “It hasn’t happened yet,” said Jeff King, chairman of the board at the company that owns Pine Avenue Grill, which opened nine months ago. “We have no alternative but to hang on.”

While daytime crowds aren’t bad, business people say, the real crunch comes at night when downtown office workers go home and customers from elsewhere in the city fail to materialize.

Merchants attribute the problem to several factors, most notably that Long Beach residents citywide have so far refused to let go of their long-held image of downtown as a downbeat area high in crime and low in amenities. That perception has persisted in part, they say, because many promised improvements--including movie theaters, ample parking, good lighting and increased police patrols--have come more slowly than expected. Many blame the delays on bureaucratic foot dragging by the city’s Redevelopment Agency--and more specifically on its outgoing director, Roger C. Anderman, who they say has been largely unresponsive to the needs of retailers.

“He has a tendency to delay in acting on contracts,” said Bill Gurzi, president of the Downtown Long Beach Associates, a city-sponsored agency charged with promoting the downtown area. “The agency needs someone who is able to take more definitive action and do so with great confidence.”

Said King: “What we need is less rhetoric and more activism.”

Shares Merchants’ Frustration

Anderman, who has directed the agency since 1986, says he shares the merchants’ frustration at the slow pace of change. But the slowness, he says, is the natural price of doing things right rather than a result of bureaucratic indecisiveness.

“It’s unfortunate that their hopes and expectations have not been realized,” Anderman said, “but that’s part of the risk you take when you become a pioneer and get in on the ground floor of something that is about to happen. We’ve been pushing to get things accomplished, but it takes time to be done well. You simply can’t put everything in place at once; why make a mistake that the community will regret forever?”

Some of the merchants see cause for optimism in Anderman’s announcement two weeks ago that he will leave at the end of the month to become assistant city manager of Fremont, a city of 160,000 near San Francisco. “With a new director of downtown redevelopment will come a new outlook . . . of cooperation and support for the retail businesses that are already here,” Gurzi predicted.

Other recent developments--many of which, ironically, came at Anderman’s behest--have also been well received.

More Accessible Office

Three months ago, for instance, the city’s economic development bureau moved its offices from City Hall to a Pine Avenue storefront from which bureau manager Hank Cunningham administers small business loans, provides business consulting, spearheads downtown promotions and acts as a general liaison between retailers and the city. “We feel that we are more accessible here,” Cunningham said. “We are part of the business community itself--right here in the trenches.”

Also, since the first of the year the Redevelopment Agency, responding to longstanding complaints by downtown merchants, has been offering two hours of free parking to customers during daylight hours and unlimited free parking at night.

After years of what retailers took to be lethargy, city officials finally appear to be moving forward on two major issues considered vital to the growth of downtown: development by 1990 of a downtown movie theater complex, and an expansion of the convention center which, it is hoped, will help fill new hotel rooms and give downtown businesses a shot in the arm.

Down on Pine, though, something of a siege mentality has set in. The encroaching enemy is the empty sidewalk. The distant cavalry is time. The only unanswered question: which of the pioneers will be able to hang on long enough to see the prosperous future they believe is coming?

Different Definitions

It can be seen at meetings of the Pine Avenue Merchants Assn., where members frantically try to decipher what sort of promotions will actually work. Or in the private bickerings up and down the street over just what kind of a place it should be. While one faction envisions Pine Avenue as sort of an upscale trendy Melrose-type district, others contend that it must attract the kind of less affluent shoppers and diners who will come out for a $9.95 T-shirt special.

Mostly you can see it in the bleakness of weekday nights, when some establishments seem almost desperate to get people in.

Keith Anthony, a 27-year-old longshoreman, had never been to Birdland West before one recent Tuesday night. He showed up, however, because a pass he had received at a local restaurant enabled him to enter without paying the usual $6 admission. “It’s more than I expected,” he said of the rich-looking jazz club decorated with art deco trimmings. “I thought it would be a hole in the wall.”

Marilyn Dunn, a local waitress who entered that same night, also got an inducement: an impromptu discount on the price offered at the door when an attendant realized that she was about to change her mind and walk away. “I was expecting jazz,” said Dunn, 39. Instead she got an evening of comedy, something the club has been offering weekly for the past four months in an attempt to broaden its audience.

She Left Early

In Dunn’s case, however, the attendant’s quick thinking had only a short-term effect. “The humor was terrible,” the waitress said, leaving in a huff after the second set. “They should have some live music or something.”

So the hustle continues, with one overriding question dominating the minds of Pine Avenue merchants. Simply put, it is this: What will work and what will not?

Underlying the question is a shared perception, recently given voice by Downtown Long Beach Associates president Gurzi.

“The jury is still out on Pine Avenue,” he said. “Either it will develop the way we all want it to, or it will be a failure and become a ghost street.”

More than a few fortunes are riding on the outcome.