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Observations on "Pacific Boulevard"

June 8, 2005
Editor, WatchOurCity.com

Huntington Park, CA - The background musical arrangements here on
WatchOurCity.com’s site are original compositions by the editor.

"Pacific Boulevard"
Each of the compositions is titled after main street thoroughfares that bisect the city of
Huntington Park. The inspiration for each tune, its structure, cadence and rhythm is based
on observing the unique street's daily sound and "ritmo". In fact, there is a store named
“Ritmo Latino” right on Pacific: if it is on a CD, and it is in Spanish, Ritmo Latino has it,
just do not ask for "A Flock of Seagulls" or the soundtrack to "Kill Bill" 1 and 2.

Take “Pacific Boulevard”, the street, for example. It is arguably one of Southern
California's most Latino shopping districts, is perhaps one of the most walkable, and is a
major regional shopping attraction on par with the nearest suburban malls around. It is
hugely popular with immigrants from all over the region and even south of the border.

The wildly popular storefront district on Pacific runs north-south and is bounded on the
south by Florence Avenue and on the north by the active Southern Pacific railroad tracks
along Randolph Street. A precipitous drop in sidewalk foot traffic along the last two blocks
of the boulevard's north end is in part due to misguided wannabe big-box retail
developments from the 80's and 90's that failed miserably because they abandoned
everything that makes the rest of the boulevard a smashing retail success. This faulty
development formula of asphalt jungles and deep-set buildings was precisely the right thing
to follow if the goal was simply to capture tax base dollars without capturing the heart and
peripatetic soul of the immigrant shopper.

The result was a complete failure and a planning black eye. The city won't admit it, but in
addition to not getting its projected flow of tax revenue money, it probably did not recoup
redevelopment funds invested in the boondoggle. This sea of empty parking stalls with
boxy stores far away from the sidewalk, in fact, lay boarded up, moribund and left for dead
from the mid 90's, while only a stone's throw away lay a pedestrian renaissance and retail
bonanza along Pacific's street fronts.

No one connected the dots.

It wasn't until 2002 that the asphalt jungle was resurrected by retail operator La Curacao. It
cleverly stuck cartoonish pre-columbian decorations on the homely stucco box and dressed
up the asphalt with a few trees. Is it a coincidence the pre-columbian motifs trumped
suburban big box? By all accounts it's a great financial success, measured by the complete
lack of available parking spaces on weekends. But a pedestrian friendly place it is not. Not
that it matters on this end of Pacific Boulevard. La Curacao did its best given the limited
opportunities. Bring your car and wallet, but leave your walking shoes behind.

And the dots remain unconnected.

A new development being hustled by city council and the redevelopment agency makes no
pretensions about its proposed retail big box aspirations: an island surrounded by an asphalt
sea of parking stalls. It will push the retail corridor north past Slauson Avenue. You
wouldn't walk there. You would drive there, even if it's only three blocks away. The city
must know what its doing since no one questions the rubber-stamp wisdom at work here.

It's the people, not the cars, stupid. Just for a moment imagine what Old Town Pasadena
would like if a big box development took up space there with all the noble glory of its sea of
parking stalls in full view. Scary. Development, good; sea of parking, bad.

Pacific Boulevard, the lively pedestrian friendly side, seems to be a suburban mall
engineered in reverse that tears open the roof to expose the “Street” and let cars and trucks
wheeze on by alongside throngs of people; chewing gum ends up as sidewalk art worthy of
Jackson Pollack’s best work. This may scare many used to more sanitized environs. No
upstanding local high school graduate, Ivy League alumni son of his immigrant mother will
ever be caught shopping, walking on Pacific Boulevard or contributing to sidewalk art in the
making, or waiting for a bus on Gage and Pacific....unless he was campaigning for public
office. Traditional malls are just fine for this type. It may just be that the poor country
cousin Pacific Boulevard turns out to have more fun because it is flush with pocket cash
and has more of it than the stuck-up suburban mall relative saddled with credit card debt.

Who knows, if the city puts a roof on the boulevard and reroutes cars and buses away,
Pacific can become just like a suburban mall, or another Olvera Street.

Urban planning graduate students from USC recently made Pacific Boulevard a focus of
their Urban Planning studies. Urban planners and academicians decry the loss of walkable
communities and champion transit oriented development, and spend enormous amounts of
time educating the masses of elected officials on the benefits. Most overlook a living,
breathing, immigrant-driven money-making-machine of a livable community, aqui, in our
very own back yards: a walkable community. A good portion of the shoppers depend
heavily on public transportation to visit here. A good other portion also walks from nearby
dense apartment blocks merely blocks away.

A difference between Pacific Boulevard and Colorado Boulevard in Old Town Pasadena or
The Grove at Mid-Wilshire is that shoppers here are recent immigrants mostly from Mexico
and Central America and tend to be on the low end of the socio-economic ladder.
However, you wouldn't know that from the sales receipts.

Pacific Boulevard is hugely successful financially as well. The tax base generated by a daily
influx of immigrant dollars swells merchant bank accounts and city hall coffers. The dollar
per square foot in sales here is equivalent to that at Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, according
to recent studies. There are more bank branches sprouting up here in storefronts as there
are taquerias, or taco shops.

City council members must know well the power and temptation inherent in so much free
flowing cash, to the point of seeming arrogant, wasteful and pushing agendas of
questionable priorities with use of public funds. Despite State and Federal budget cuts,
council members spend nicely on travel, overlook questionable billing practices by city
contractors who coincidentally just happen to be friends and hefty campaign donors.
Taxable retail sales on Pacific is an income stream that is the envy of cities around.

On weekends, Pacific Boulevard moves at a slow steady rhythm that mixes shoulder-to-
shoulder and toe-to-heel storefront foot traffic of strollers, babies, families, green-card and
mango vendors, teenagers, grandmothers and guys with $500 ostrich skin boots, black
Stetson hats and green silk-printed shirts, with bumper-to-bumper traffic of heaving buses
delivering standing room only shoppers to the boulevard that jostle with SUV’s sporting 20
inch tires and shiny chromed rims that give the illusion of movement even while standing
still; the Boulevard hosts SUV’s that seem to follow a DNA protocol suggesting that the son
of campy Chevy Impala low rider has grown into a highly stylized aesthetic of Chrome,
rubber and tropical fruit-colored body shop paint on a sheet metal Zoot suit, with
accompanying thumping sound systems.

Pacific Boulevard would make a fine Zocalo if not for the diesel spewing and badass
muffler traffic sounding through every day.

It is a Zocalo. At sunrise: No people and no cars for long stretches of time, except for the
power steam cleaners sanitizing the chewing gum out of the sidewalk canvas.

The city may be able to enhance the walking experience along Pacific if it adopts pedestrian
crosswalks on all fours sides simultaneously, similar to crosswalks in Old Town Pasadena,
who probably borrowed the idea from the major lively commercial streets in Tijuana,
Mexico City, Tegucigalpa, Managua, or Buenos Aires and many a town in Europe. And if it
does something about the narrow and overcrowded bus stop shelters at Gage and Pacific.

"Gage and Pacific"
At peak hour, on a quarter-block stretch of a six-foot wide, merciless hard-edge sidewalk
on Gage Avenue at the corner with Pacific, are bus stop shelters that barely serve the
waiting crowds.

A toddler learning to walk, styling a brand new pair of shoes holds on to dear life gripping
grandma's index finger while barely two feet away from speeding traffic of trucks, cars and
buses, each with its own signature sound, speed and cadence at odds with the other, but
well syncopated. Bus brakes wheeze to a jolting halt, accompanied by noises of engine
belts about to snap while cars speed by one lane over in vain attempt to beat the flashing
orange then red traffic light at Gage and Pacific. A fire engine passes by, sirens at full blast.

A walkable community is a luxury in the suburbs but a necessity here; like a rationed cigar
is a luxurious necessity on a fine summer evening in Havana.

Enjoy Pacific Boulevard the street and the music.

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