1950's Saw Decline of Downtown Department Stores
Los Angeles Times / December 27, 1959
This graph shows how Downtown department store sales declined in the 1950s even as sales across the metropolitan area grew.
DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — During the first half of the 20th century, Downtown's department stores were the place to shop for Los Angeles residents. Buyers would come from far and wide, either via the streetcars or their own personal autos.
Then, in the 1950's, that changed. This graph from the L.A. Times, published on December 27, 1959, shows the drastic divergence of Downtown and region-wide sales in the decade.
Up until 1947, department store sales in the Los Angeles - Long Beach metropolitan area were pretty much all Downtown. Only a dozen years later, Downtown sales had fallen by nearly 40% even as regional sales had nearly doubled.
Tornadoes28 on December 30, 2009, at 12:02PM – #1
This would be in direct inverse relation to the rise of the suburban housing boom and the suburban malls.
Dossier on December 30, 2009, at 09:59PM – #2
Those two lines would be somewhat in tandem if one were analyzing the sales volume of department stores in the heart of New York City, Chicago, San Francisco and perhaps a few other select cities throughout America compared with their suburban counterparts.
Unfortunately, the heart of Los Angeles became so mediocre for so many years, that, as is true of the center of Dallas, Miami, Detroit or Cleveland, it will take a long time to make up for all the losses.
ChattyCathy on January 01, 2010, at 04:53PM – #3
When should we start insisting/demanding/screaming that our local downtown politicians start investing back in downtown?(Bringing Back Broadway stuff is good, but poorly managed. Too timid). Can we find a politician brave/knowledgeable enough to create more tax incentives or local ordinances, similar to the adaptive-reuse ordinance, that gave this last decade such a boost to our poor shabby downtown?
We also need to stop concentrating homeless shelters and drug-rehab housing in our downtown. Other cities need to share in that wealth. You can only walk past so many piles of human waste on the sidewalk before you realize that all of the investing downtown ain't going anywhere.
ubrayj02 on January 03, 2010, at 03:54AM – #4
I think that the death of downtown's retail at the time was due to larger issues in the LA area, like state-sponsored automobile sprawl, as well as downtown-specific problems like the construction of multiple freeways through downtown and multiple efforts to aid automobile travel through the area (while hurting, or ignoring) pedestrian and public transit access.
Downtowner on January 06, 2010, at 08:43AM – #5
There are a lot of incentives in place to bring business downtown. Tax credits hiring tax credit, reductions on utilities, lots of write-offs. Downtown is in the empowerment zone and the enterprize zone, but most businesses don't know about them or don't have an accountant good enough to figure it out.
Response to Chatty Cathy, the building owners need to educate themselves and market the benefits to businesses. But they don't. And even if they did, half of downtown still looks like a dump, which is the problem of the building owners who allow their buildings to go to pot and who are not selective about their business tenants, who let their stores look like crap fests. Bring Back Broadway is about the best thing that ever happened to that area. If you look at their web site it doesn't seem like a timid plan to me at all. I heard about the streetscape which changes the whole traffic pattern of Broadway, reduces traffic and puts in the trolly. It will help a lot to clean up the area, and make it nice again, but I didn't know about what they call the entertainment overlay which sounds like a great tool to get buildings to clean up heir acts, and also "Commercial Reuse Ordinance" which the web site says: "the Bringing Back Broadway Commercial Reuse Task Force will develop a Commercial Reuse Ordinance and incentives to encourage the reuse and reactivation of vacant upper floor space and assist with ground floor changes of use and filling of vacancies. More than 1-million sq. feet of commercial space is vacant in upper floors of Broadway and not all buildings are suitable for adaptive reuse to housing. Current ground floor retail vacancy at 15-20%. Mom & Pop shops are discouraged from opening businesses on Broadway because of difficult change of use process faced in in historic and older high-rises. The Task Force will assist historic core projects with case management and provide financial incentives to stimulate reuse in area." When I was in college we looked at the creation of adaptive reuse for downtown and it took about 7 years to do, so I'm glad they are working on this now.
There is a lot to bring people downtown but a lot to keep them away, too. Skid Row is still a nightmare and centralized homelessness and filth is never going to be a good thing for any part of downtown and there isn't money for the services and housing needed. The city needs to pass laws to do something about THAT, but every time they try, the pressure comes on, and the fact is that the major portion of the city's homelessness is located in two of the fifteen council districts, and the thirteen that don't have those problems don't want them.