California Apparel News

For one year, Bonnie Kim and Sally Daliege brainstormed on the services that downtown Los Angeles needed to make the area not merely inhabitable, but as livable as New York’s Greenwich Village.

Just to start, they decided that their downtown neighborhood—the Old Bank District at 4th and Main streets—needed a florist, a dry-cleaning service and a fashion boutique.

Daliege and Kim had the luck of being at the right place at the right time. Their neighborhood seemed to be filling up with well-to-do loft dwellers who clamored for these services. On June 1, the two women opened their first retail venture, Push Emporium, at 400 S. Main St., right in the middle of the burgeoning loft area.

But their store put them in a situation that was as unique as the fashion, flowers and dry-cleaning services offered at Push. Kim and Daliege are both homesteaders and purveyors of luxury items in an area that had been desperately poor. Homeless people once dominated their neighborhood, Kim said.

“It’s completely changed. We used to call [the 400 block of South Main Street] the DMZ,” Kim said referring to the no-man’s land of the demilitarized zone on the Korean Peninsula. “It was difficult to walk across the street.”

But the neighborhood changed when the L.A. Mission, a provider of homeless services, moved from the Main Street area to San Pedro Street more than 18 months ago, Kim said. Many homeless people seemed to follow the mission to its new address. By mid-2006, a handful of fashion boutiques had moved into the Old Bank District.

Icelandic designer Stella Dottir opened a 1,300-square-foot, self-named boutique in May. Carves, a designer sneaker store, opened a 1,500-square-foot boutique on 4th Street in April. (Other Carves boutiques are at The Lab specialty shopping center in Costa Mesa, Calif., and in San Diego’s rejuvenating downtown.) Carves owner Tak Kato said he plans to open a downtown L.A. fashion boutique, which will sell designers such as Comme des Garccedil;cons, perhaps toward the end of the summer. He has faith that the growing loft-dweller population and overflow business from the Staples Center and Grand Avenue projects will make downtown a thriving retail center. But it will take time.

“It is slow, but everyone knows downtown is going to change,” Kato said. “It will take five years or so, but I wanted to be here first.”

Other urban pioneers have moved in to open businesses in the Old Bank District, offering nightlife that other neighborhoods might take for granted. The Vietnamese restaurant Blossom opened at Main and Winston in March. Pitfire Pizza opened in October. Old Bank DVD has been renting film festival–style DVDs since December 2005, said co-owner Erik Loysen. “We’re skid row adjacent, but this also is an affluent neighborhood.”

According to a study published in January 2005 by the Los Angeles Downtown Center Business Improvement District, the median income was $90,000 for the area’s new professional residents. Nearly half of downtown’s residents, in general, were between ages 23 and 34, the study said.

Nightlife will be coming to another formerly desolate-looking section of downtown.

Developer Paul Solomon hopes to build an economically diverse neighborhood in the Arts District, less than two miles from the Old Bank District. The managing partner of 7- year-old development company Linear City vows that a gym and two restaurants will open for business in his Toy Factory and Biscuit Company loft buildings.

Royal Clayton’s, a 2,900-square-foot avant-garde American restaurant at Industrial and Mateo streets, will open in July and should cater to a breakfast, lunch and dinner crowd, as well as to after-hours patrons. The French bistro Church and State is scheduled to debut in January in Solomon’s Biscuit Company Lofts.

Solomon is confident the restaurants will be successful because he reports no trouble in finding residents for his lofts, which cost between $250,000 and $4.9 million. He also believes that downtown Los Angeles will replicate the success of now-thriving areas such as Tribeca in Manhattan and West Loop in Chicago. “Those former warehouse areas once looked like urban ghost towns,” he said.

Fashion companies are the homesteaders in downtown’s Arts District. Located at the Toy Factory are fashion labels Tuff Gong Clothing and Goldsign, a project of Adriano Goldschmied, as well as The Road, an independent office that handles international sales for True Religion jeans.

Downtown nightlife is a special concern for the Valley Economic Development Center. It has a contract with the city of Los Angeles to assist entrepreneurs in securing real estate and loans in downtown, said Warren Cooley, its director of retail and economic development.

“One of the challenges with downtown is that you need to create activity on the street. Then dress shops and other retail begin to follow,” he said. His organization helped 12 bars and restaurants start the process to move to downtown in 2006, Cooley said.

But the efforts of these urban pioneers are just the beginning, said Larry Kosmont, president of Encino, Calif.–based Kosmont Companies, which consults local governments and retailers on real estate. “A downtown needs a variety of retail, and a critical mass of it,” Kosmont said. “So far, these new boutiques are not enough.”