Reinventing an overlooked neighborhood meant shop owners did it by themselves

THAT NEW-THEATER SMELL
Open just four weeks since a bravura restoration of its Depression-era good looks—art-deco ocean-liner prow, whiter-than-white exterior—Long Beach’s Art Theatre still has that new-theater smell. It has fresh carpet and paint, and a hint of something oak-y from the new hardwood seats. And it has this: a tantalizing whiff of good things to come, not just from the Art Theatre—the city’s very last working vintage movie theater and only art house—but from the Fourth Street business district it overlooks.

Fourth Street is the city’s highest profile retail success story. On Sept. 24, Long Beach’s city officials will gather here to celebrate the renaissance of the theater—and the street—with an invitation-only premiere at the Art.

The well-suited city hall crowd will be lured by the promise of a night at the movies; everyone likes movies, even hardworking public servants. But—and this is the ironic part, the point of our story—the revival of the Art and the flourishing individuality of Fourth Street’s funk-and-vintage district has a lot to do with the fact that city officials haven’t come here much over the years. Fourth Street was created by citizens. It was unplanned, unvisioned, unofficial, unfocus-grouped.

But they’ll be here, those city officials. They’ll be here en masse to sing a song of themselves, at the grand reopening of the Art Theatre. They’ll come for the possibility of catered hors d’oeuvres and the rumor of a real red carpet—which sounds a bit recherché, given the Art’s unique highly polished mosaic-tile entryway. And once they sit down, they’ll watch the first 30-minute episode of Inside Long Beach, a new cable TV show “geared toward talking about what the Redevelopment Agency does, how it improves the quality of life for citizens of Long Beach,” says LaVerne Duncan, the city’s housing community officer.

And that’s what will make the evening kind of, well—what did I call it?—ironic.

Fourth Street has become a destination precisely because of its organic, eclectic, indigenous feel, which has been made possible in great part because it’s never been redeveloped—not in the way city hall typically redevelops anything. But this also will make the evening an almost-perfect tribute to what has been accomplished here—irony has been one of the underlying spirits of Fourth Street from the get-go.

That’s pretty much where it had to start, considering what everyone—including the city—started with. Actually, everyone began with something different. And that’s how you build a Fourth Street.

THE POWER OF NO
Howard Linn began the Art Theatre, which he purchased with five investors in 1973. His plan was to buy them out, which he did, and then buy more small theaters, which he didn’t. Keeping the Art turned out to be enough for Linn—often more than enough, which is why his wife Florence made popcorn, and why his son Steve sold tickets, and why there was never quite enough money to do something about those seat springs that poked your posterior.

Thirteen lonely years later, a woman named Kathleen Schaaf—who’d been carting armfuls of unsold vintage clothing out of our finest, most out-of-business haberdasheries since high school—showed up on Fourth Street. She began by buying a dry cleaner’s old building in a faded collection of retail structures dating back to the 1920s. This was not auspicious at all; perhaps the highest profile business on Fourth Street in recent years had been Conehead’s Ice Cream. By 1986, the sundae had melted, and the block of stores facing Burbank Elementary School mainly was home to an upholsterer, a furniture store or two and a used bookstore—with porn!

“Fourth Street was always known for having antique and vintage stores, way back to the ’70s,” says Schaaf, who was still waitressing at Marie Callender’s in the marina when she bought it. “There was Smitty’s Used Books, and there was the locksmith and the Antique Clock Gallery.”

And then there was the vintage store called Meow, which Schaaf spelled out in graceful pink neon, punctuated by the emblem of a winking cat—all stick-legged and trapezoid-shaped. That’s how cats looked in the ’50s.

“I didn’t advertise or anything, but people started coming in,” Schaaf recalls, still a bit incredulous. “I made more at the shop in one Saturday than I made in tips waitressing in a month.”

All the while, Schaaf did her best to keep city officials away from her good thing.

“From what I had always heard about the city of Long Beach, I wanted to stay as far from them as possible,” she says. “The city’s always been known as not being business-friendly. They didn’t have these $2,000 start-up grants, like now.”

Especially not for someone selling old clothes—back then, considered a step up from fencing stolen merchandise.

And not a big step.

“There was a real stigma attached to opening an antiques store or a used, second-hand store,” Schaaf says. “You had to go down to the police department and get fingerprinted. You couldn’t buy from the public.”

But even then—and this speaks to a resourcefulness Fourth Street is now famous for encouraging—Schaaf found a way around the law, feeding our need for the new, even if it was old.

“I opened a retail shop. I sold deadstock—nothing had ever been worn,” Schaaf says. “I had been collecting for years. My specialty was never-worn vintage clothing.”

And it’s still her specialty, though the years when Japanese collectors and shopkeepers bought armfuls of whatever she found have gone. Now, the Japanese pick and choose, just like everybody else.

Two years later, in 1988, photographer Carlos De Avila arrived. A former ceramics instructor, he moved onto Fourth Street after gang bangers held a bullet festival outside his Eighth Street home. He’s still here, too, grandfathered into a live-work space—probably the last of a half-dozen artists who populated the small strip in the ’80s and ’90s.

“Artists look for space. We don’t look for the high-fashion condos, because that doesn’t work,” De Avila says. He keeps touching my leg for emphasis, and it works. “The less expectation you have, the better. Make a five-year plan, and if it doesn’t work, throw it away after six months.”

It’s difficult to hear De Avila, because he’s sitting on a bench outside Portfolio Coffee House. Now semi-retired, he comes here daily to soak up the scene and get a cup of coffee, just like what artists, documentary filmmakers, bar owners, firemen, punks, vintage bicycle club members and staffers from Second District Councilwoman Suja Lownethal’s office do along the commonly known Retro Row.

Everyone drinks at Portfolio—and has for so long that it’s difficult to remember a time when it didn’t occupy the corner of Fourth and Junipero. Difficult, but not impossible—old-timers (and by this, we mean people in their 40s and older) will tell you this place used to be Al Greenwood’s Bedspread Kingdom. That was B.K.: Before Kerstin.

Portfolio owner Kerstin Kansteiner didn’t arrive on-scene until 1990. “I wish I could tell you some grand story,” she laughs, as though there’s nothing unusual about a University of Nuremberg business student moving from Germany to Long Beach for an internship at Columbus Lines. Kansteiner’s story—of bringing a strange idea to a foreign country—is grand in its own way.

“Back then, it was such a novelty to buy a cup of coffee every day,” says Kansteiner, who turned this playful motivation into Portfolio’s staple. “At the time, it was possible to do that—to open up with a small coffeemaker and some seating—because Starbucks wasn’t here.”

She quickly put down roots in Long Beach.

“I always lived kind of around the Rose Park area. It was pretty run-down, but it had some potential. I met somebody; we got married and opened it, all at once. I just pulled out my credit card.”

Start-up costs were cheaper then, and her landlords—who’d purchased the entire building from the Duke of Duvets, His Royal Dust Ruffle Al Greenwood—were accommodating. Their business, Atlantic Studio hair salon, occupies the building’s other half.

Across Junipero soon appeared another vignette in the Fourth Street mosaic—Siren variety store, which stocked everything from handmade Asian sterling silver jewelry, to fatalistic hand-blown Christmas tree ornaments, to authentic Day of the Dead dioramas.

Gary and Kathy Tesch owned Siren—Kathy running the store; Gary, a contractor and handyman who played in the funky Latin-and-soul jazz band OOSoul, fixing things—and the place quickly came to epitomize the growing mix of variegated businesses with young, dedicated owners. A fetching succession of doe-eyed hipster damsels behind the counter didn’t hurt.

And by the early 1990s, there were enough of those eclectic, dedicated types to form the Fourth Street Business Association.

“I remember the first meeting—it was at Siren—but I don’t remember who was there,” says Schaaf. “I just remember sitting there going, ‘Hey, guys, we need to do something.’ When I think of the energy on the street then—a lot of ball-crushing women business owners—it was very interesting dealing with all the personalities.”

Ah, yes, personalities—including the collective personality exuded by the city of Long Beach, which was still a few years away from being perhaps as outgoing—maybe oppressive—as it is today.

“How can I say this?” Kansteiner wonders. “I don’t think we ever looked to the city for any help. We just thought, ‘We’re on our own.’ We didn’t know how things worked, and we would just have to do everything ourselves. It was, ‘Let’s go get it and not take no for an answer.’ ”

That came naturally, partly because they’d been doing it for years.

“I don’t like people telling me no. I think that’s it,” Schaaf says. “There’s a pipeline, but you’ve got to tap into it.”

TAPPING THE SOURCE
Alan Lowenthal agrees. In 1992, the state senator won his first race for political office—the Second City Council District, which includes Fourth Street—by tapping into the down-zoning issue favored by the neighborhood and its businesses.

“It was up-zoning in the ’80s, when they built all these apartment buildings—when the Second District lost all its bungalows. Hundreds, anyway,” says Lowenthal. He paints a picture of the city bulldozing low-slung, human-scale buildings to make way for towering babbles of architecture. “The city had no understanding. It took a long time for people to appreciate restoration, revitalization and resources in the neighborhood—to see how you try to build on strengths, not to look at each neighborhood based on its weaknesses.”

That shift in thinking came just in time for Fourth Street.

“Fourth Street didn’t need redevelopment,” says Lowenthal. “Rather than tearing it down, it meant working with the people in the neighborhood. Its strength was unique people and the kinds of shops they wanted to do.”

But it wasn’t just the shops—though their names are locally storied, including Artists Reaching Out to Kids (ARK), Ten Ton Records, Rodan and the Starlite Room. It was the projects and the plans. And simple challenges, like what to do with all the trash.

Trash always has been a problem on Fourth Street, where many businesses don’t have alley access—or, back then, street-side trash cans. Kansteiner thought maybe the city could help.

“We called the city and were told there’s no such program for business districts that don’t have trash cans,” she recounts. “We were told we’d have to become a Business Improvement District (BID), and we would have to pay into a fund and basically finance our own trash cans.”

Fourth Street’s BID didn’t happen until last year, with Kansteiner pushing. But the trash cans came earlier, also with her help.

“Kathleen Schaaf and I went to Wilmington, to a place that recycled big oil drums,” Kansteiner says. (Schaaf doesn’t remember going.) “We got them, and we spray painted them black in my backyard. And we got signs that said ‘Keep it Clean/Keep it Green’ and our first Fourth Street logo, and we stuck them on.”

THE NICE MAN COMETH
Slowly, the city started realizing what was happening in neighborhoods like this one and, just as slowly, started reaching out to its residents and their businesses. The Neighborhood Resource Center opened as a place where homeowner associations could hold meetings, photocopy newsletters and learn about applying for grants. It’s also where, sometime in the mid- to late-’90s, Fourth Street business owners learned about federal façade-improvement grants—and wound up with nearly a $0.5 million dollars to spruce up 30 buildings in their business corridor.

That grant changed a lot.

“Even though it was just a facelift,” says Second District Councilwoman Suja Lowenthal, “I think it changed how people saw that street, and it helped you imagine what the future could be.”

Other grants followed, including cash to replace an ugly strip of asphalt outside Burbank Elementary School with drought-resistant plants—everyone taking a shift muscling the rototiller—and to plant more trees.

By now, the city was getting into the act.

“I used to write urban grants for tree planting. All those were planted with that grant,” says Department of Development Services Director Craig Beck. “We’ve been there to help them, but I think a lot of what’s happened on Fourth Street has happened through the business owners. They were really there to be engaged and create that collective dialogue.”

ALAN IN THE DUNK TANK
That’s what Shea M Gauer found when he and his business partner Sé (pronounced “say”) Reed moved {open} bookstore to Fourth Street from the East Village Arts District in April 2007. They love the area for its all-together-now camaraderie and seemingly perpetual-motion foot traffic.

“In downtown, everyone was really pleasant, and there were a number of businesses nearby, but we were all alone. We had to bring people to us,” says Gauer. “Here, every day, probably 80 percent of the people who come in are new to the store.”

Not that the more recent chapters of the Fourth Street story don’t have detractors. Former business owner Jason Smith believes Fourth Street is being built into something he doesn’t recognize anymore—or maybe just something he doesn’t want to see. Smith’s vintage boutique, the Starlite Room, was a Fourth Street fixture from August 1997 to February 2008. But he says the vintage mecca’s best days are behind it and asserts that becoming a Business Improvement District is an ill-conceived attempt at change.

“I think Fourth Street is a lost cause,” Smith says. And then he gets a little cautious: “I don’t know how far into this I want to go—because it’s not sour grapes. I’m from an era when Fourth Street was for the punkers, and Second Street was for the jocks. They’re trying to change Fourth Street into something it’s not. They’re trying to make it upscale, and it’s not. It’s not Belmont Shore.”

The event that most epitomized Fourth Street—for Smith and others—was the Fourth Street Fair, which ran for six years in the 1990s. It began as a fundraiser for ARK, a nonprofit community center that was part kids’ workshop and part art gallery. But the fair came to define the street through live roots-rock, vintage clothing sales—and Alan Lowenthal in a dunk tank.

Who could pass up the chance to give a councilman a good soaking? No one, apparently.

“Everybody came to put me in the water,” Lowenthal says, noting that the Second District Council office subsidized the event for a time by getting permit fees waived. Even the city helped pay for the Fourth Street Fair—even if it wasn’t supposed to.

“I got in big trouble from the city manager [Henry Taboada], because I helped fund the stage through the Neighborhood Program Fund,” says Dennis Thys, director of Community Development, whose son, an artist, was attracted to Fourth Street’s bohemian vibe and now lives nearby. “Normally, they should have applied through the Neighborhood Partners Program. I got called up to the city manager’s office and read the riot act. But I didn’t mind. In retrospect, it was the right thing to do.”

Those city subsidies didn’t last, though.

“As it went on, we had to bring the money up on our own,” Schaaf says. “And the city would sock us with a big bill after we’d paid out our charity [contribution].” This, as much as anything, probably killed the Fourth Street Fair: the realization, after all the bills had been paid in 1998, that merchants still owed the city something close to $2,500.

“I got very angry at their decision not to do [the fair],” says Smith, who, in later years, withdrew from the Fourth Street Business Association and was vocal in his opposition to the birth of the BID, which adds $200 a year to the business license fee in order to create a common savings. “I don’t think the BID will do anything for businesses.”

We’ll find out: In coming months—more than a year after applying to become a BID—shop owners will finally be able to start spending some of their $10,900 first-year budget. Merchants are excited; Kansteiner says the new owner of Ashley’s El Encanto—a long-shuttered restaurant several blocks west of the BID—approached her about becoming a member. Gauer is equally bullish.

“We were paying into it downtown, but it was going to the Downtown Long Beach Associates. But we didn’t see it directly benefiting us,” he says. “The BID we’ve got now for this street, we choose what it goes towards. That’s such a perfect system.”

TO BE CONTINUED
A month into its run, much the same could be said of the Art Theatre. Fourth Street always will be a work in progress, but the theater’s restoration gives it a finished look. In an Irvine shopping center, they might call it an anchor—the draw, the architectural equivalent of paperwork with real purpose and gravity. And we have Howard Linn to thank, as well as urban developer Jan Van Dijs.

Linn devoted 35 years of his life to saving the Art from becoming an indoor swap meet. That makes him one of Long Beach’s most dedicated preservationists. Van Dijs, who bought the place for $850,000, was responsible for its six-month restoration, including those new seats, an enlarged snack bar and, in the two tiny storefronts outside, a wine bar and coffee kiosk run by Portfolio.

The result was almost too much for Linn, who seemed to fall in love all over again at the theater’s unofficial opening on Aug. 21.

“I wish it were still mine,” the theater owner confided softly, as his wife, Florence, stood by his side, patting his back understandingly. “I’d love to be able to buy it back.”

Tags: Fourth Street, Long Beach, meow, portfolio, retro row, {open}