The Mall Factor
The Majesty of Malls - Shopping... Tax Revenue... Jobs...
Given the number of malls/plazas/shopping destinations either coming online or in proposal in the South Bay, has the impact or benefit of the retail component of Bridge to Breakwater really been looked at and researched? Nothing but greater distance differs it greatly in retail experience than any other mall. Has any research been done on regional commercial development trends looking 30-50 years out? Or is that kind of research basically crystal ball work, meaning that the retail component is a roll of the dice?
Also shopping is changing. I'm sitting at my shopping center right now. It's 6:41 AM and I can do all my shopping, including grocery shopping right now, in my undershorts, before LAwaterfrontmegamall even opens for business. My purchases don't come in bags, they arrive in tightly packed packages. My mp3 player doesn't require me to got to a store and buy physical media to get my fix. It's all online baby, and if you think it won't be even more online in 2020+ when the mall finally gets built, you are smoking something.
What happens when you build a mall and nobody comes? Maybe why that's why the total lack of a meaningful regional attraction is becoming increasingly obvious, with even Port Director Bruce Seaton publicly admitting the lack of pizzaz that all of the currentlty proposed plans have.
Given the number of malls/plazas/shopping destinations either coming online or in proposal in the South Bay, has the impact or benefit of the retail component of Bridge to Breakwater really been looked at and researched? Nothing but greater distance differs it greatly in retail experience than any other mall. Has any research been done on regional commercial development trends looking 30-50 years out? Or is that kind of research basically crystal ball work, meaning that the retail component is a roll of the dice?
Also shopping is changing. I'm sitting at my shopping center right now. It's 6:41 AM and I can do all my shopping, including grocery shopping right now, in my undershorts, before LAwaterfrontmegamall even opens for business. My purchases don't come in bags, they arrive in tightly packed packages. My mp3 player doesn't require me to got to a store and buy physical media to get my fix. It's all online baby, and if you think it won't be even more online in 2020+ when the mall finally gets built, you are smoking something.
What happens when you build a mall and nobody comes? Maybe why that's why the total lack of a meaningful regional attraction is becoming increasingly obvious, with even Port Director Bruce Seaton publicly admitting the lack of pizzaz that all of the currentlty proposed plans have.
6 Comments:
I absolutely fucking shudder to think what sort of stupid gimmicky "anchor" somebody's going to come up with.
Should we start taking bets at this point, on what it's going to be? A high-rise convention center! A roller rink shaped like a ship! Some sort of tall pointy thing like Seattle's Space Needle! A concert hall designed by Frank Gehry or some such purveyor of architectural hideousness! That "Statue of Responsibility" that some nutcase has been proposing for the last couple of years! A humongous bust of John Papadakis gloriously vanguarding the masses, with one hand holding a microphone and the other up in the air making a fist, as if to hector the entire Pacific Ocean! Why, the possibilities are endless!
Amen.
I like the Bust of John Papadakis concept. It would definitely assure San Pedro a life free of outsiders for a long time. The longer I live here the more parochial I get.
Don't be so fast to dismiss the anchor concept. Right now I think they are relying on the adaptive re-use of Warehouse no. 1 and the adjacent berths for "anything interesting" as far as I can tell. Which is good, in a way, because it means that community organisations may get a first crack at developing some really interesting resources.
On the other hand, the project should have an anchor. Although Bridge to Breakwater is in a basic sense, a re-imagining (for good or evil) of San Pedro's waterfront, it is also a re-imagining of Los Angeles' waterfront. There is a certain responibility that we should be shouldering in making sure Los Angeles has a waterfront that is world class, and that does demand some world class architecture and attractions. I can't say specifically what that should be. I'd like to see museums and other cultural facilities, that's my bent and what I see as valuable to the community, much more so than retail could ever be. I want there to be a bad ass fish market/global market, because I'm into food. Those are my personal wants. It doesn't have to be gimmicky to be valuable and relevant to both the local community and the greater communities of the South Bay and Los Angeles.
I can tell you what I don't want - a waterfront that apes other successful waterfronts. I don't want a fucking space needle, a Gehry-turd or a goddamn "Freedom Whatever" monument, statue or musuem. I don't want an opera house or anything that stinks of the ethnic snobbery that segregates San Pedro, I'll tell you that.
I have no desire whatsoever for a waterfront that's "world class." I refuse to buy into that nonsense. Let Long Beach do that unexamined ego-driven bullshit; at least they're geographically set up for it.
Los Angeles is different from other major "waterfront" cities in that the decision was made a long time ago to locate the city's cultural and economic center twenty miles inland. This has had an obvious effect on San Pedro's culture, in that it has developed separately from that of Los Angeles--we think of ourselves as San Pedrans, not LA residents, and many LA people have barely or never heard of San Pedro. That our waterfront--the part of it that we have at least partial access to, south of Berth 93--is therefore a San Pedro waterfront in every meaningful sense is obvious.
The idea that we in San Pedro should think of ourselves as the "Los Angeles waterfront," then, is simply absurd. It's a silly fantasy, patronizingly advanced by the Port and the cruise ship industry to justify their megamall, and pathetically embraced by all the "visioning" morons around here who seem collectively to have a bad case of skyscraper envy.
The real Los Angeles waterfront starts at Pier 400 and ends at Berth 93. If it weren't for all of those terminals and the money they bring in, the legal boundaries of the City of Los Angeles wouldn't still snake down the Harbor Freeway and balloon again at San Pedro and Wilmington; the city would have been glad to let us secede, and good riddance to bad rubbish from their perspective. If the "Los Angeles waterfront" ever does stretch across the San Pedro waterfront, it will only be because the Port got away with foisting another cruise ship terminal (or two) on us at the end of Miner/Signal Street and turned everything between that and Berth 93 into a support system for the terminals on either end. And even then, it will only be for the obvious economic--not cultural--reasons.
One more thing, because I don't think I made this clear. In fact, I know I didn't.
The reason our waterfront is the way it is--fallow in some places and underused in others--is indeed because of neglect by the rest of Los Angeles, and this neglect has been far from benign. But the results are far from a bad thing. They're a very, very good thing. Or at least, they could be.
Our waterfront for a long time was spared the attention of the rest of the city because of the thriving fishing and longshoring industries. If it weren't for them, the waterfront south of the bridge would have been transformed into Tourist Trappe Pointe a long time ago, and San Pedro would be known the world over as a great place to buy t-shirts and cheap sunglasses.
Then, even after fishing declined, there were still enough industrial operations taking place to keep cruise ships out, and because our waterfront is long but not wide, they couldn't put container yards here.
So what we're left with, by and large, is nothing. Why is that a good thing? Because if the goal is to make the waterfront into something for us--something appropriately low-key, something by and for the locals--it's a lot easier to do that on top of nothing than to try to make it out of whatever Disneyfied monstrosity the Port would have built in the 1960s or 70s if it had had the chance (and impossible, of course, had we gotten container yards).
It could still be done, if we had a Port that was interested in doing it, and if our local movers and shakers were intelligent, thoughtful people. Instead, the Port is responsive to big money and big money alone; and for our movers and shakers we've got...well, we've got who we've got. That's unfortunate, but not as unfortunate as we'd have been if we had gotten more of that vaunted "attention" from the city, the state, and the world.
A-Fuckin'-Men.
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