by Garrison Frost

Hermosa Beach city officials are saying that the renovation of the city's pier will be finished this July, and when they cut the ribbon on the new lifeguard towers, observation platform and Strand plaza they will probably declare their renovation of city's downtown completed. But will it be? If by that word, they mean the end of construction, then yes, they'll certainly be done. But if completed means the achievement of the fully realized commercial and community center that everyone envisioned 10 years ago, then no, they won't even be close.

If one believes the nut graphs of just about every newspaper story on the subject, one would think that the city's downtown was nearing a state of blight in the mid-1990s when city fathers decided to turn it into a pedestrian plaza to spur new investment and interest. Things were bad, that is true, but the problem probably had more to do with policy than landscaping. Once a thriving little downtown, the area now featured a scattered group of failing businesses clinging to life despite horrible parking and a disinterested, often hostile, city government. In lieu parking fees devastated any hope of new development. Misguided attempts to attract new visitors to the downtown – which involved closing the streets on every sunny weekend day – ultimately just hastened the demise of the downtown's retail core in favor of bars. Nonetheless, the perception among those in power was that only when the lower Pier Avenue section of downtown Hermosa Beach was closed off would it ever turn around. In other words, if it was going to be as successful as Santa Monica's Third Street Promenade, it would need to look like Santa Monica's Third Street Promenade.

That said, it should be noted that opposition to creating a pedestrian plaza was so great that the final project didn't actually call for closing lower Pier Avenue off to cars. Even today, if one looks closely at the plaza, one can see that it was intended to serve a driving public. Concrete bollards mark parking spaces, lines indicate traffic flow and blue lines indicate handicapped spaces. It was only after the plaza was created that city officials hastily closed off the street permanently – confirming almost immediately that the plaza would not do what it was built for.

Many would claim that the renewed interest in Hermosa Beach's downtown in the late 1990s was the result of the lower Pier Avenue renovation. Actually, by far the biggest driver of new investment in the downtown was the relaxation of rules that required any landlord changing the use of a building to pay the city for additional parking spaces that might be required from additional use. Now, a landlord wishing to convert a clothing store to a restaurant would no longer have to compensate the city tens of thousands of dollars it would cost to create parking for those new customers. The almost immediate result of this was a building boom in the downtown, and a rapid depletion of any significant retail presence. Restaurants, but more specifically bars, sprouted like weeds because of the high rents they promised.

Say what one wants about the parking giveaway, it was the most effective of all the downtown policy changes. Locals might recall a consultant the city hired to attract so-called anchor businesses to the city, an effort that resulted in exactly no new anchor businesses. And then there was the failed attempt of the city's planning department to do the same, which also resulted in no new anchor businesses. This last program proved untenable when existing businesses realized that their tax dollars were being used to encourage their own landlords to double their rents and drive them out.

It has taken a few years for the city to recognize the problems that its policy failures have caused in the downtown area. The plaza draws great crowds on sunny summer weekend days and weekend nights, but it is barren at other times. Rowdy nighttime crowds have drawn complaints from people living on neighboring streets. In response to fights and other violence, the city now spends a fortune keeping the peace down there. After recognizing that the downtown was becoming something no one wanted, the city not long ago declared a moratorium on new development while a volunteer community group came up with ideas on how to improve things. In the end, the moratorium was lifted, but absolutely none of the worthless recommendations have been implemented.

While the city has proven that it can break up and pour new concrete (albeit very slowly – the pier renovation has dragged for more years), the city has never been able to do what's right at the policy level. How many meetings will the police and city officials hold with bars before realizing that this will not stem the drunken brawls? How long will it take the city's leaders to realize that Pottery Barn and the Gap aren't coming? When will officials develop a comprehensive parking strategy? When will it begin to take its planning function seriously?

Nonetheless, they have a new downtown and pier to point to. Certainly, we have all forgotten the cost overruns and delays that plagued both projects from the beginning – problems that have left both projects in strange shape.

The plaza is a vast blank space that functions more as the city's driveway than its living room. The plaza lacks the focal point, consistent seating and sense of enclosure that public spaces require. Sure, people go there, but the plaza itself is still more of a transitional space – a thing you walk across to get to your destination, a place to stand in line. The palm trees look good from afar but offer little or no shade on those days when the sun could melt metal. Seating on the plaza is sparse, unwelcoming. Really, the best place to enjoy the plaza is just off of it, plunked down on one of the adjacent restaurant patios under an umbrella – confirming that while the plaza is nice to look at, it isn't much of a place to be. Commercially, it's a single function entity. You go there to eat and drink. Head down there to go shopping and you're done in a few minutes. If you're not looking for a beer, you're heading back to your car. If it's nighttime, you run back to your car. Poorly lit and full of dark corners and always replete with surly thrill seekers, the plaza at night isn't for the meek.

What can one say about the pier renovation? Thankfully, the city managed to repair the infrastructure before the thing fell apart, but questions still remain. Will the city put a restaurant or some such thing at the end of it, or will the open plaza remain as it is? As for the plaza at the base of the pier, we'll just have to see how that works out. It has been a long time coming – seven or eight years depending on how you look at it – since the city began planning the project. Not much of the original vision is actually going to be built. Nonetheless, it can't come out worse than the downtown plaza it will link to.

So the city fathers have their new downtown and they have their new pier. Unfortunately, the only people happy with it are bar owners and politicians beholden to them. Sure, the people who like bars have fun down there, but they would enjoy a more rounded downtown just as much, if not more. But these capital projects were intended to do much more than create a college town bar scene. They were intended to bolster a vital commercial and community center for Hermosa Beach, and in that these projects have so far failed. The current downtown Hermosa Beach is one that nobody asked for, and one that may prove even harder to fix than the old one.

(April 21, 2005)

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