Personality Crisis
Independent shops close as gentrification destroys the character that makes SoCal neighborhoods desi
The Talking Stick in Santa Monica is pretty close to the perfect coffee shop, not only a place to drink and chat, but a real community hub where writers tap away at their computers for long hours every day, musicians perform at regular open mic sessions, mothers play with their toddlers in the cushion-filled back room, and artwork supplied by customers and friends of the owners, Rich and Sheri Braaksma, adorns the walls.
Like many other people, I've been using it as an alternate office for the past several years. We all know and love the staff, and the staff knows us well enough to anticipate what any of us is likely to order at any given time of day. Best of all, they serve coffee in real mugs, not Starbucks-style paper cups.
A place like this seems almost too good to be true, which is exactly what it has now become. Last month, the Talking Stick's landlord, a Brentwood-based family investment company called the David J. O'Keefe Trust, informed the Braaksmas they needed to be out by June 1. The coffee shop and two adjacent properties are being converted into a new retail and catering outlet to be called the Thyme Café and Market. The new tenant listed in the application papers is one Maire O'Keefe - apparently a relative of the owners.
The Stick's loyal customer base feels both devastated and strangely helpless. This is America, after all, and landlords have a perfect right to pick and choose tenants as they see fit. But the Talking Stick is something special - a real piece of community on the rapidly gentrifying Westside - and it is extraordinarily frustrating that nothing can be done to save it. This is, after all, exactly the kind of spot that makes Santa Monica such an attractive place for homebuyers and business owners in the first place.
It's the same story all over the Westside, especially for niche cultural businesses like independent cafes and book stores where profit is not the only motive. Two-and-a-half years ago, the left-wing book store Midnight Special shuttered its doors after a long struggle for survival on Santa Monica's Third Street Promenade. Margie Ghiz, the owner, received condolence letters from Denmark, Australia, and Spain.
More recently, it has been the Dutton's book shops that have been in the firing line. The book shop on Laurel Canyon Boulevard closed last year, and the Beverly Hills branch stopped trading at the end of December. Now, as the Los Angeles Times has reported, the flagship Brentwood branch, with its colony of mini-book shops around a central courtyard, is being converted into a mixed-use development of condos and retail. The landlord, Warren Buffett's business partner Charlie Munger, wants to keep an independent book store on the premises, but it will be much smaller.
Each of these closures is a body blow, not only for the local community but for the cultural life of Los Angeles as a whole. And nobody can do a thing about it. The impending Dutton's closure has moved some of its celebrity clients, like Diane Keaton and Dustin Hoffman, to write protest letters, but they are as ineffective as England's 11th century King Canute trying to stop the ocean tide. The brutal fact is that real estate prices have risen to a point where landlords have to be extraordinarily generous, or crazy, or both, not to boot out tenants who can no longer afford the market rents and bring in someone - often, if not always, a corporate chain outlet - who can. The result is that our best communities, the ones that cost the most to get into, are growing ever blander.
As Kevin McKeown, a Santa Monica City Council member and Talking Stick customer puts it: "This is the market economy at work. As much as we cheer on capitalism in this country, it undoubtedly has an ugly underbelly for the little guy. We live in a country that seems to have a limitless supply of cheap consumer goods, but can't provide affordable housing to bring any of that crap home to."
The Braaksmas' story illustrates just how fragile a place like the Talking Stick is. They came to southern California from Canada with the intention of establishing a branch of their Christian Reform Church. When that didn't work out, they hit on the idea of running a non-profit community coffee shop instead. In 2003, the Talking Stick took over from another, far less successful cafe that had been much more overt in its Christian inspiration. The new shop didn't preach to anyone; it merely encouraged people to come together, connect, and be creative. "We wanted this place to be a marketplace of ideas, in music, the visual arts, in ideas," Rich Braaksma told me. "We envisaged it as a community hang-out."
The first sign of trouble came last summer, when the O'Keefe Trust bought out the previous owner and immediately signaled its reluctance to sign a long-term lease with the Braaksmas. They quickly suspected that they did not figure in the O'Keefe's long-term plans.
Since last month's eviction notice, they have been figuring out what they can do to postpone or avoid their departure. But the options are few. "Our only recourse is to delay things, to be a thorn in their side by arguing, for example, that the parking is not good enough for what they envisage," Braaksma said, adding that such tactics are unlikely to buy more than a month or two of extra time.
McKeown said there was little the city could do either. "There is no commercial rent control," he said. "If it's not a matter of tearing down or modifying a building, the landlord can do whatever he wants." The city can encourage independently-owned retail ventures through smart zoning and restricting the size of businesses in certain parts of town - which Santa Monica does to some degree. But the rest is out of its hands.
There is, of course, nothing new about businesses coming and going. Santa Monica's Montana Avenue, now an exclusive row of chic boutiques and upscale restaurants, was, back in the 1970s, a street of gas stations and modest small shops. It went from nondescript to unaffordable in less than a generation.
It's a similar story on the Santa Monica Promenade, so much a victim of its own success that the few remaining independently owned business are vanishing fast, unable to compete with chains that can afford to run at a loss for months or even years to gain competitive advantage. (The latest victim is Bracken Jewelers, on the block between Broadway and Santa Monica Boulevard.)
Such seems to be the pattern in much of L.A.: a street or neighborhood improves and becomes interesting, only to become unaffordable to the most interesting but least profitable local ventures. The Talking Stick is on a stretch of Ocean Park Boulevard that is just coming into its own, with clothing boutiques, a newly opened used bookstore, jewelers, and furniture stores. It may be only a few years, perhaps less, before Starbucks and Koo Koo Roo take over. As McKeown observed: "Why would you go to a neighborhood when it just has the same chain outlets as every other neighborhood?"
Published: 02/15/2007
DIGG | del.icio.us | REDDIT
