Westwood, the Sequel

It was the neighborhood that introduced Los Angeles to the joys of walking, to people-watching and to moviegoing, all with a cosmopolitan flair. It was the neighborhood that was corrupted by its own success, overrun by unruly teenagers, frozen yogurt shops and pizza joints.

Now, Westwood Village is the neighborhood struggling to come back, to again become one of the places to be in the city that it helped define.

The community’s leaders are in the midst of what one called “a rich man’s improvement program,” a plan to spruce up the neighborhood’s appearance and image so that it can compete with Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade, Pasadena’s Old Town and the San Fernando Valley’s Universal CityWalk. Westwood helped inspire those developments, but now their success has passed it by.

“Sometimes when you step back and look at it, this is a ridiculous problem in the village,” said Tom Carroll, who helped form the village’s business improvement district before moving on to a similar project in Sacramento. “There is wealth in every direction that you look and yet the village is not quite working. It’s more a question of definition: What does the village want to be?”

What the village hopes to be, most business people and community activists say, is a thriving commercial area that is something more than the homey, collegiate enclave of the 1950s and ‘60s and something less than the rollicking Teen Town of the 1980s.

A neighborhood squeezed between income engines such as UCLA, Bel-Air, Brentwood and the high-rises of Wilshire Boulevard is hardly going to succumb to blight or disrepair, but it could continue to grind into economic stagnation if something is not done, most observers agree.

On a recent evening, a father pushed two little girls in a stroller past Stan Berman’s doughnut store, bringing a gentle smile to the 30-year village proprietor. “That is what we missed for awhile,” said Berman, who has served up thousands of crullers and jelly-filled through the area’s economic ups and downs. “It’s terrific to see the families coming back.”

Stan the doughnut man and his fellow merchants see reason to believe that business is picking up again, but most agree that a comeback cannot be left to pure market forces. Westwood’s boosters feel they need a concerted effort to bring back the older and bigger-spending clientele that was driven off by the youth movement of the previous decade.

Merchants and the city have completed some improvements and are poised with several others:

* A city-sponsored Business Improvement District was inaugurated late last year and has sponsored events such as a Thursday night farmers market and Friday night jazz concerts at the Armand Hammer Museum. The group, the Westwood Village Community Alliance, levies fees on merchants for the programs, including the hiring of yellow-jacketed “hosts” to help customers find their way around the village and get change for parking meters.

* A police services center opened in February in an effort to thwart persistent perceptions that the neighborhood is dangerous. Police statistics show that it is one of the lower-crime shopping areas in Los Angeles.

* A 400-car parking structure is under construction on Broxton Avenue in the heart of the village. It is designed to make up for the dearth of parking that has been a consistent complaint about the neighborhood.

* A streetscape program is being planned to widen and repair broken sidewalks, replace worn and battered benches and newspaper stands, plant 77 Chinese flame trees and light the neighborhood’s main thoroughfares with decorative tree lights. Property owners will soon decide whether to assess themselves from $11,000 to $250,000 over 10 years to pay for the work.

* A universal parking validation system is being planned, so that customers can park at any of the village’s myriad lots and be guaranteed two to four hours of free parking when they use local businesses.

* Two major theater chains, Mann and AMC, are fighting to expand in a village market that has been Mann Theatres’ exclusive domain. AMC is hoping to operate a 17-screen, 4,700-seat multiplex in the proposed Village Center Westwood project, while Mann is countering with a more modest buildup at its Gayley Avenue location.

For most of its history, beginning with the opening of UCLA in 1929, Westwood Village didn’t have to worry much about drumming up customers. The community’s proximity to UCLA and many affluent neighbors made it, almost by default, a smart and stylish retail center.

But in the late 1960s and ‘70s--some key it to the release of the movie “Love Story”--the neighborhood began to shift to a regional entertainment attraction as its number of theater screens nearly tripled, from five to 14.

For years, Westwood Village was among the few places in Los Angeles to see movies the day they were released. Woody Allen might have been honorary mayor in those days, so many of his hit films opened there. Dillon’s disco might have been the City Hall, a place where young people from around the city converged. A generation of Angelenos met their first dish of frozen yogurt on those crowded village streets.

But the increasingly youth-oriented fare in the movie industry and in the village lead to crowding, blockaded streets and a carnival atmosphere that drove out many of the older patrons.

Then, in January 1988, Karen Toshima was shot. The murder of the 27-year-old graphic artist from Long Beach, outside one of the village’s trendiest restaurants, was a sensation. The random killing epitomized the fear that gang violence was spreading throughout Los Angeles.

Today, doughnut shop owner Berman still hears from people about the shooting. “They say, ‘Has anybody else been shot down there?’ ” Berman said. “We had one incident almost 10 years ago and we can’t live it down.”

Fears of violence drove out many customers. Those who left the village soon found a host of other venues that offered similar amenities--Third Street Promenade, Century City mall and Westside Pavilion.

By last year, a survey by UCLA’s Anderson Graduate School of Management found that Westwood Village had slipped to the point that its customer satisfaction rating (22%) was substantially lower than that of the Promenade, Century City and Westside Pavilion centers and shopping enclaves in Brentwood and Beverly Hills.

“It has been pretty grim around here as the recession bottomed out,” said one merchant, who asked not to be named. “This place was golden for a time, but nobody put any money into it, nothing new was being built, architecturally it was stagnant.”

Even on Westwood Boulevard, the main entry point to UCLA, bunches of storefronts remain empty today, as do a sprinkling of other shops in the neighborhood.

Real estate experts said many of those businesses could not sustain the high rents of $4 a square foot or more that were a holdover from the boom times. And the fast-food restaurants that can generate high revenue in a small space are now limited in numbers by restrictive regulations that guide development, adopted by city officials in the late 1980s.

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Now most village merchants are hoping for a return of the high-end boutiques and family restaurants--establishments that they hope will lure back neighbors from Bel-Air and Brentwood. Even the UCLA Anderson School report cites the older clientele as preferable to students because of their access to “more disposable income and less concern for affordability.”

The recent opening of a Jerry’s Famous Deli outlet, which has been packed with customers, and a microbrewery restaurant called Westwood Brewing Company are cited as bright spots in the village’s comeback.

It is a mega-development on the horizon, however, that is creating most of the hopes and fears in Westwood today. The project is known as Village Center Westwood. It is a combination theater-shopping-restaurant complex and public plaza that would replace a five-acre parking lot and shuttered shops behind the Macy’s department store on Weyburn.

The Village Center is hailed by its proposed developer, Ira Smedra, and by some of the Westwood Village’s existing businesses as a much-needed shot of adrenaline. It is viewed skeptically by some neighboring homeowners who see it as too big, potentially producing too much traffic and triggering the same kind of crowds that flummoxed the community in the 1980s.

The $100-million development proposal is patterned on the traditional Mediterranean look of Westwood, with tile roofs, cupolas and towers. But the new “village” would be layered three levels deep, stacking theaters on top of theaters on top of shops and a supermarket. In all there would be 17 screens--one a 90-foot-high IMAX model--and 4,700 seats, nearly as many as on the Third Street Promenade.

“This project will be the centerpiece of revitalizing the entire village,” says Smedra, a former UCLA student who also is planning a retail center in West Hollywood where the legendary Chasen’s restaurant once stood. “It will bring in the restaurants, the people and everything else with it.”

Many neighboring merchants agree. They are pulling for the project to succeed. In a sea change from the no-growth 1980s, even neighborhood activists concede that development on the property is needed. They particularly like the supermarket--to replace the four markets the village has lost--a mega-drugstore, 242 units of senior citizen housing and a football-field-sized public plaza.

The battleground over the project promises to be the theaters, which would push well above the maximum number of seats permitted in the community’s specific plan.

“The traffic those theaters will generate is going to be horrendous and you can’t fix it,” said Laura Lake, a long-time community activist. “There are all these little tiny streets, one of which they want to close [Glendon Avenue]. It’s a very fragile system and you are messing with the circulation of the whole village.”

But Smedra says he can give little on the size of the theater complex. “Theater operators today have certain requirements for these multiplexes,” he said, “otherwise they are not economically viable.”

Los Angeles City Councilman Michael Feuer hopes to find a compromise. He has created a “working group” of Westwood residents and business people to study the project through the rest of the year. An environmental impact report is expected this fall. It’s unclear when the city’s first votes on the project will come, although Feuer is expected to stake out his critical stance on the project before he faces reelection in April.

Smedra has said he will enter into a contract to have the AMC theater chain operate the 17 screens. But Mann Theatres, holder of the longtime monopoly with seven theaters in the village, is expected to counter Smedra with a smaller and arguably less disruptive multiplex proposal for its property on Gayley Avenue.

Observers say the fight between the two theater chains is just another evidence of the village’s resurgence.

The challenge of any new development in the village will be to capture some of the area’s charm without overwhelming it with the type of crowds that became its downfall in the 1980s.

“What you have is new investment that is proposing to come in and a re-commitment in the village by the businesses that have already been there,” said one prominent businessperson. “I think there is going to be a resurgence.”