Before the developer restored the Art Theatre, he renovated four key industrial buildings in central Long Beach

Press-Telegram reporter Kristopher Hanson’s story Monday on the emergence of a design district along Coronado Avenue north of Anaheim Street led us down a street I’m not sure many of us would go unless we had business there. Not because it’s not nice–it is–but because it’s a semi-industrial area; and until about two years ago, parts of it were a vacant semi-industrial area.

What you didn’t read in Hanson’s piece on the arrival of Vision Design Studio about 18 months ago–and the naming of a “five-block industrial park now-known loosely as the Long Beach Design District [encompassing] 29 acres bounded by Redondo and Temple avenues and 14th and Anaheim streets”–was the name of a man who helped turn all that around: Jan Van Dijs.

Sound familiar? Van Dijs is the developer also responsible for last year’s spectacular restoration of the Art Theatre–and, before that, the re-envisioning of our Ebell Club. In between those two projects, he was out there on Coronado Avenue, not far from Alex’s bar.

“We bought the whole block of buildings and we spent six to eight months redeveloping them,” Van Dijs said Tuesday.

He’s referring to four industrial buildings on the east side of Coronado Avenue, progressing north from the first alley north of Anaheim Street–northward from 1312 Coronado Avenue. On the market for a while before Van Dijs found them, they were collectively the former home of Washington Uniform Services.

Built over four or five decades spanning the 1920s to the 1960s, they’d been connected together–but Van Dijs realized they could just as easily be separated.

“They were pretty derelict buildings, pretty ugly and crappy,” he says. “We did the shells, the exteriors of the buildings, and then we resold them. We were just able to envision them being boutique-style studios, which is what they became.”

One of the buyers in mid-2007 or early 2008, as Hanson points out, was Carl Dene. He promptly relocated his Vision Design Studio from Huntington Beach–and with the arrival of other like-minded design types, here we are.

Tags: alex's bar, California, Carl Dene, Huntington Beach, Jan van Dijs, Kristopher Hanson, Long Beach, Long Beach Design District, press telegram, Southern California, The District Weekly, Theo Douglas, Vision Design Studio