The Downtown Raleigh restaurant Oak City Meatball Shoppe has closed on Davie Street after 11 years in business.
jdjackson@newsobserver.com
Drew Jackson
The ball has stopped rolling at a popular downtown Raleigh restaurant.
The Oak City Meatball Shoppe announced that it has ended operations after 11 years in business. The meatball spot’s last day was May 1.
Oak City Meatball was a cheeky kind of specialty restaurant, popular with the Raleigh lunch and after-work crowd. The restaurant opened in late 2013, serving specialty meatballs, pastas and sandwiches, plus a popular version of mac and cheese.
Raleigh’s Meatball Shoppe was owned by restaurateur Ken Yowell, whose other projects over the years have included longtime hotspot Calavera Empanadas and the ramen bar Kaiju, both of which are now closed.
The closing of Oak City Meatball Shoppe was announced on the restaurant’s social media accounts.
“Today is a sad day in meatball land,” read the post, signed by Yowell and co-owner Hans Huang. “We always have a lot of ideas, hopes, and goals when opening any business, especially a restaurant. You hope people enjoy what you’ve built and you’re over the moon when someone loves the meal you’ve prepared. A restaurant can be a background player in so many moments and celebrations. Over the last 11 years we strived to make our guests’ nights special and we welcomed the opportunity. As of May 1st we’ve balled our last ball and served our last drink.”
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Drew Jackson writes about restaurants and dining for The News & Observer and The Herald-Sun, covering the food scene in the Triangle and North Carolina.
A rendering of the Upton, a condo building under construction at the old Shelby’s Bar & Grill site.
Courtesy of Amacon
Construction is underway at the old Shelby’s Bar and Grill site, at 18th and Glenarm streets, where Canadian developer Amacon is building a two-tower building with 461 for-sale units.
The homes, a mix of studios, one-, two- and three-bedrooms, start in the low-$400,000s, well below the median price of a home in the metro. But there will also be penthouses for those who can afford them.
The building will rise 400 feet tall.
A rendering of the Upton Residencies tower at the old Shelby’s Bar & Grill site. Courtesy of Amacon
“While downtown Denver has no shortage of rental units, Upton Residences is opening up new doors for homeownership in the heart of the city,” said Stephanie Babineau, VP of marketing and sales for Amacon, in a statement. “Upton will transform the Upper Downtown neighborhood into a vibrant hub, bridging Downtown Denver and the Uptown neighborhood. With the unique mix of residences, retail, and hotel-styled amenities spaces, we believe the development will bring new energy to the area and enrich the neighborhood.”
Units in the towers will start in the low $400,000s. There will be a mix of typical apartments and penthouses with floor-to-cieling windows offering a mix of city and mountain views.
“Upton will be a game-changing landmark that will redefine the Denver skyline,” said Steve Featherston, Vice President of Development and Construction at Amacon, in a statement. “It will stand as a tribute to the city and set a new standard for luxury living. This visual focal point is spotlighting how to effectively bring together residential, retail, and hospitality, for residents and the community to enjoy.”
The building broke ground in spring of 2022, and it’s slated to open in mid-2025.
Longtime Denverites will be stunned to see the towers rise where Shelby’s dished out drinks and food to neighbors.
The Chicago location of Smith & Wollensky remains closed after a small Friday, April 5 fire in the steakhouse’s kitchen. A firefighter was seen taken off in a stretcher. No customers or staff were hurt, according to the steakhouse.
The cause of the fire remains under investigation. The steakhouse, via social media, apologized to customers and vowed for an update ASAP. Smith & Wollensky, a chain with 10 locations, opened its Chicago steakhouse in 1998, off the Chicago River in the Marina City complex.
Marshmello fans lineup in front of Wiener Circle
Before his Saturday performance at the Aragon Ballroom, Marshmallo, a DJ and electronic music producer, played a surprise set on top of the Wiener Circle — turntables were installed on the roof. Hundreds flooded toward the restaurant. No ketchup stains harmed the DJ’s glorious white visage.
Thank you to the security team for keeping traffic moving and for @cta for showing your passengers on the 22 Clark bus a good time! pic.twitter.com/BWNsqYfFg0
— The Wieners Circle (@TheWienerCircle) April 7, 2024
Chart-topping musician visits River North restaurant
If music doesn’t work out for singer-songwriter Benson Boone, maybe working in a restaurant will.
Boone, whose album — Fireworks & Rollerblades — released last week was in Chicago where he played two shows at the Salt Shed. In between the concerts, he joined a growing contingent of musicians who arrange to work at a restaurant for publicity. Pizzeria Portofino in River North was the venue of choice. While the Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises’ restaurant along the Chicago River isn’t exactly a magnet for Boone’s Tik Tok-obsessed fanbase, the singer still shared a pizza (topped with marinara, Italian sausage, red onions mozzarella cheese, artichoke hearts, and parmesan) he baked alongside Pizzeria Portofino’s Pizza Chef Jeff Smyl with guests. Boone’s single, “Beautiful Things,” has been No. 1 on global charts since mid-February.
SAN JOSE — The decision by two tenants to exit downtown San Jose might worsen the maladies that already afflict the urban core’s economy in the wake of the coronavirus.
PwC, a professional services titan, and its recently purchased tech company, Surfaceink, are poised to leave downtown after PwC signed a lease for a big chunk of space in a new office building at Santana Row in west San Jose.
The prospect of tenant departures comes at a time when downtown San Jose already struggles with office vacancy levels that have soared to worrisome heights.
“This is going to raise the vacancy rate in downtown San Jose,” said David Taxin, partner with Meacham Oppenheimer, a commercial real estate firm. “With the amount of vacancy downtown, this won’t help the cause.”
At the end of 2023, downtown San Jose’s office availability rate was at an all-time high of 35.7%, according to a report from Savills, a commercial real estate firm. Office availability measures the combination of empty office space offered directly by building owners and space that tenants are offering through sublease.
As further evidence of a feeble real estate market in downtown San Jose, within the last four months, two large office properties were sold at a big loss compared with their prior sales.
In December 2023, an office tower at 303 Almaden Boulevard was bought for slightly under $23.8 million — which was 70% below the price paid for the highrise at the time of its prior sale in 2017 for $80.2 million.
In February 2024, a two-tower office complex at North Market Street and West St, John Street was bought for $34.2 million — a nosedive of 77% compared with the $141.4 million paid in 2019 for the highrises.
While the price declines are jaw-dropping, experts such as David Sandlin, an executive vice president with Colliers, a commercial real estate firm, point out that the newly established prices at least set a current value for office buildings for office buildings in downtown San Jose.
“We now know the price that a Class A building in San Jose will trade for,” Sandlin said in a prior interview with this news organization on the topic.
The price for the 303 Almaden tower worked out to $151 a square foot while the price for the 111 Market Square tower was $105 a square foot. Some experts note that the 303 Almaden highrise is deemed to be of greater quality than the two-tower office complex.
Also of interest with these deals is that the buyers of each of the office properties are separate groups that both are headed up by George Mersho, chief executive officer of Morgan Hill-based retailer Shoe Palace.
PwC, as a result of its decision to move to Santana Row, a destination mixed-use neighborhood in San Jose, will also shift its new subsidiary, Surfaceink, into the same One Santana West office building near the corner of South Winchester Boulevard and Stevens Creek Boulevard.
“The great thing about the PwC deal is that they stayed in San Jose,” said Bob Staedler, principal executive with Silicon Valley Synergy, a land-use consultancy. “With the amenities at Santana Row, it’s understandable why PwC would go there.”
About 1,200 PwC employees will be located at the One Santana West office building. That move is slated to occur in 2026.
Still, downtown San Jose appears more than capable of being a vibrant host for office tenants and conventions.
The recent Nvidia artificial intelligence convention, in addition to compelling keynotes and packed events, was also the catalyst for lively crowds that poured into the downtown in search of meals, drinks, or entertainment.
“The activation of downtown San Jose and the energy downtown is what is going to appeal to companies with younger employees,” Staedler said. “Having a constant stream of events and activities such as jazz festivals, live performances and other exciting events is the way to attract companies to downtown San Jose.”
PwC is expected to vacate 80,000 square feet at an office tower in downtown San Jose, property experts say. Surfaceink leased 7,000 square feet on Stockton Avenue on the western edges of the downtown.
“You could get a new AI company or software company that wants to be in an urban environment in the PwC spaces,” Staedler said.
Political and city leaders will need to adjust their thinking regarding the downtown in order for the city’s urban core to truly rebound.
“Antiquated dreams of a Trader Joe’s or a Safeway in the heart of downtown are days gone by. They are over,” Staedler said. “Downtown needs to focus on vibrancy.”
On Tuesday, Jan. 30, LAPD Central Area officers responded to a vandalism call on South Figueroa Street, where a Tactical Flight Officer observed over a dozen suspects trespassing and potentially spray-painting in a building.
Two suspects, Victor Daniel Ramirez and Roberto Perez, were arrested and issued Release From Custody Citations for trespassing.
On Thursday, officers responded to another vandalism call near West 11th Street and South Flower Street, where suspects were reported spray-painting on the 30th floor of a construction building.
Despite attempting to flee in a vehicle and failing to yield to officers, the suspects were promptly located.
A routine traffic stop was carried out where the driver was cited for Failure to Yield to an Officer and the passenger was questioned and released.
Central Division detectives are continuing their investigation into the vandalism that has occurred over the last few days at the unfinished high-rise building in downtown LA.
Once billed as a downtown renaissance jewel, the plaza has been unfinished since 2019. It was supposed to serve as a five-star hotel with condominiums available for purchase.
“Between (Tuesday) and (Wednesday), there’s probably another like, 20 floors have been blasted. They are going at a pretty fast rate,” said Daron Burgundy, who lives near the plaza.
On social media, the Los Angeles Police Department said it’s been made aware of the vandalism.
“Today, Central Division personnel met with the property management and CD 14 representatives to collaborate on better securing the property and adding additional security measures,” the department said in its post. “The measures will be implemented immediately and the graffiti will be removed.”
In a statement to NBC Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass’ office said it is working to resolve this issue.
“The Mayor’s Office is aware and working to address this issue but the City can’t immediately clean the graffiti because of legal constraints relating to private property,” the statement read. “The Mayor’s Office is working closely with the city attorney and several city Departments to put forward a solution that resolves this.”
Dozens of digital billboards are poised to go up above Los Angeles freeways and boulevards, marking the largest expansion in the city in nearly two decades.
Despite opposition from more than a dozen neighborhood groups, the City Council backed a plan on Friday to allow 71 digital billboards to be installed on property owned by the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Eleven council members approved the plan, with Traci Park, Nithya Raman and Katy Yaroslavsky voting no.
Opponents argued that the influx of new signs, which would change images every eight seconds, would make L.A. streets even deadlier by distracting drivers, while adding a new source of blight to the cityscape.
“Our shared open space should not be for sale to commercial messaging,” said Barbara Brodie, co-president of the Coalition for a Beautiful Los Angeles, an advocacy group that has opposes billboards. “They will cause unnecessary injury and death, pollute our visual environment and harm wildlife.”
The largest sign, at 1,200 square feet, will be alongside Union Station flashing at commuters along the 101 freeway as they head downtown from East Los Angeles and Boyle Heights. The stark visual changes the illuminated signs will bring to the landscape could scare Hollywood filmmakers away, actor Stacey Travis told the City Council.
“For lucrative one-hour shows and features, L.A. rarely plays itself,” said Travis, SAG-AFTRA’s chair of government and public policy in Los Angeles. “They will simply move productions elsewhere, and (the city will) lose the jobs, revenue and tourism that brings in millions of millions of dollars.”
But city and county officials say the new billboards will be a lucrative source of revenue while also offering traffic alerts. Seven out of every eight images are expected to be ads.
Holly Rockwell, a Metro executive who is overseeing the program, said the billboards will provide “real-time transportation messaging” and money that can be used for transportation projects, while also replacing “old and dilapidated static signs.”
During events like the Olympics, the billboards will be used to help direct traffic, she said.
The city and county will split the revenues, which were at one point projected to reach $300 million to $500 millionover 20 years. As many as 300 nondigital billboards throughout the city could be removed through the program.
Metro’s plan now calls for 52 freeway-facing digital billboards, which can operate nearly 24 hours a day from 5 a.m. to 3 a.m. Another 19 billboards along major boulevards will operate from 5 a.m. to midnight. Before the latter group of signs can go up, they must go through a city permitting process.
Since all are on Metro property, many are near rail stations or along large thoroughfares, for example Westchester at Century and Aviation Boulevards near Los Angeles International Airport.
The fight over digital billboards harks back more than two decades, when the city blocked the widespread use of billboards that shone into people’s homes, confining them to certain areas. The legal battle between the city and outdoor advertising companies played out in court for years. Since then, the city has restricted digital signs to special districts in commercial areas.
Most digital billboards in the city have been concentrated downtown. Friday’s vote allows them in many more neighborhoods across L.A.
Since the vote was not unanimous, the billboard plan will requires a second vote next week. Groups such as Scenic Los Angeles, which has fought the proliferation of billboards, still hope to thwart the plan.
“There has been zero transparency on the financial aspects of this. When we did our own analysis, it looks horrible for the city and Metro,” said Dustan Batton, executive director of Scenic Los Angeles. He said thousands of his members oppose the plan, and he hopes that their pressure will convince some City Council members to change their minds.
The plan originally included 93 billboards but was watered down as it wound its way through city committees, with several council members opposing billboards in their districts.
Raman, who doesn’t have any billboards in her district, said she opposed the plan because of the hours of operation and concerns that billboards could be too close to housing. She said there has not been enough research into the effects of the billboards on traffic safety.
Times staff writer David Zahniser contributed to this report.
You can sense it in the ubiquitous “Help Wanted” posters in artsy shops and restaurants, in the ranks of university students living out of their cars and in the outsize percentage of locals camping on the streets.
This seaside county known for its windswept beauty and easy living is in the midst of one of the most serious housing crises anywhere in home-starved California. Santa Cruz County, home to a beloved surf break and a bohemian University of California campus, also claims the state’s highest rate of homelessness and, by one measure based on local incomes, its least affordable housing.
Leaders in the city of Santa Cruz have responded to this hardship in a land of plenty — and to new state laws demanding construction of more affordable housing — with a plan to build up rather than out.
Many Santa Cruz business owners back the city’s plan for high-rise development, saying the city needs more affordable housing for servers and retail workers.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
A downtown long centered on quaint sycamore-lined Pacific Avenue has boomed with new construction in recent years. Shining glass and metal apartment complexes sprout in multiple locations, across a streetscape once dominated by 20th century classics like the Art Deco-inspired Palomar Inn apartments.
And the City Council and planning department envision building even bigger and higher, with high-rise apartments of up to 12 stories in the southern section of downtown that comes closest to the city’s boardwalk and the landmark wooden roller coaster known as the Giant Dipper.
“It’s on everybody’s lips now, this talk about our housing challenge,” said Don Lane, a former mayor and an activist for homeless people. “The old resistance to development is breaking down, at least among a lot of people.”
In recent years, Santa Cruz has approved development of modern multistory housing complexes, part of a broader effort to add housing stock.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Said current Mayor Fred Keeley, a former state assemblyman: “It’s not a question of ‘no growth’ anymore. It’s a question of where are you going to do this. You can spread it all over the city, or you can make the urban core more dense.”
But not everyone in famously tolerant Santa Cruz is going along. The high-rise push has spawned a backlash, exposing sharp divisions over growth and underscoring the complexities, even in a city known for its progressive politics, of trying to keep desirable communities affordable for the teachers, waiters, firefighters and store clerks who provide the bulk of services.
A group originally called Stop the Skyscrapers — now Housing for People — protests that a proposed city “housing element” needlessly clears the way for more apartments than state housing officials demand, while providing too few truly affordable units.
City officials say the plan they hope to finalize in the coming weeks, with its greater height limits, only creates a path for new construction. The intentions of individual property owners and the vicissitudes of the market will continue to make it challenging to build the 3,736 additional units the state has mandated for the city.
“We’ve talked to a lot of people, going door to door, and the feeling is it’s just too much, too fast,” said Frank Barron, a retired county planner and Housing for People co-founder. “The six- and seven-story buildings that they’re building now are already freaking people out. When they hear what [the city is] proposing now could go twice as high, they’re completely aghast.”
Frank Barron is among the activists who say the City Council’s development plans are out of character for the laid-back beach town.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Susan Monheit, a former state water official and another Housing for People co-founder, calls 12-story buildings “completely out of the human scale,” adding: “It’s out of scale with Santa Cruz’s branding.”
Housing for People has gathered enough signatures to put a measure on the March 2024 ballot that, if approved, would require a vote of the people for development anywhere in the city that would exceed the zoning restrictions codified in the current general plan, which include a cap of roughly seven or eight stories downtown.
The activists say that they are trying to restore the voices of everyday Santa Cruzans and that city leaders are giving in to out-of-town builders and “developer overreach laws.”
The nascent campaign has generated spirited debate. Opponents contend the slow-growth measure would slam on the brakes, just as the city is overcoming decades of construction inertia. They say Santa Cruz should be a proud outlier in a long string of wealthy coastal cities that have defied the state’s push to add housing and bring down exorbitant home prices and rental costs.
Diana Alfaro, who works for a Santa Cruz development company, said many of the complaints about high-rise construction sound like veiled NIMBYism.
“We always hear, ‘I support affordable housing, but just not next to me. Not here. Not there. Not really anywhere,’ ” said Alfaro, an activist with the national political group YIMBY [Yes In My Back Yard] Action. “Is that really being inclusive?”
Zav Hershfield, a renters’ rights activist, advocates rent control caps and housing developments owned by the state or cooperatives.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
The dispute has divided Santa Cruz’s progressive political universe. What does it mean to be a “good liberal” on land-use issues in an era when UC Santa Cruz students commonly triple up in small rooms and Zillow reports a median rent of $3,425 that is higher than San Francisco’s?
Beginning in the 1970s, left-leaning students at the new UC campus helped power a slow-growth movement that limited construction across broad swaths of Santa Cruz County. Over the decades, the need for affordable housing was a recurring discussion. The county was a leader in requiring that builders who put up five units of housing or more set aside 15% of the units at below-market rates.
But Mayor Keeley said local officials gave only a “head nod” to the issue when it came to approving specific projects. “Well, here we are, 30 or 40 years later,” Keeley said, “and these communities are not affordable.”
Santa Cruz County, known for its windswept beauty and easy living, is in the midst of one of the most serious housing crises anywhere in California.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Today, with 265,000 residents, the county is substantially wealthy and white.
An annual survey this year found Santa Cruz County pushed past San Francisco to be the least affordable rental market in the country, given income levels in both places. And many observers say UC Santa Cruz students contend with the toughest housing market of any college town in the state.
State legislators have crafted dozens of laws in recent years to encourage construction of more homes, particularly apartments, across the state. While California has long required local governments to draft “housing elements” to demonstrate their commitment to affordable housing, state officials only recently passed other measures to actually push cities to put the plans into practice.
Under the new regulations, regional government associations draw up a Regional Housing Needs Assessment, designating how many housing units — including affordable ones — should be built during an eight-year cycle. The state Department of Housing and Community Development can reject plans it deems inadequate.
For years 2024 to 2031, Santa Cruz was told it should build at least 3,736 units, on top of its existing 24,036.
For decades, Santa Cruz culture has centered on quaint shops and restaurants along sycamore-lined Pacific Avenue.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Santa Cruz and other cities have been motivated, at least in part, by a heavy “stick”: In cases when cities fail to produce adequate housing plans, the state’s so-called “builder’s remedy” essentially allows developers to propose building whatever they want, provided some of the housing is set aside for low- or middle-income families. In cities like Santa Monica and La Cañada-Flintridge, builders have invoked the builder’s remedy to push ahead with large housing projects, over the objections of city leaders.
The Santa Cruz City Council resolved to avoid losing control of planning decisions. A key part of their plan envisions putting up to 1,800 units in a sleepy downtown neighborhood of automobile businesses, shops and low-rise apartments south of Laurel Street. Initial concepts suggested one block could go as high as 175 feet (roughly 16 stories), but council members later proposed a 12-story height limit, substantially taller than the stately eight-story Palomar, which remains the city’s tallest building.
City planners say focusing growth in the downtown neighborhood makes sense, because bus lines converge there at a transit center and residents can walk to shops and services.
“The demand for housing is not going away,” said Lee Butler, the city’s director of planning and community development, “and this means we will have less development pressure in other areas of the city and county, where it is less sustainable to grow.”
Santa Cruz planning director Lee Butler advocates concentrating new development downtown, rather than building in areas where growth is less sustainable.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
A public survey found support for a variety of other proposed improvements to make the downtown more attractive to walkers, bikers and tourists. Among other features, the plan would concentrate new restaurants and shops around the San Lorenzo River Walk; replace the fabric-topped 2,400-seat Kaiser Permanente Arena, which hosts the Santa Cruz Warriors (the G-league affiliate of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors), with a bigger entertainment and sports venue; and better connect downtown with the beach and boardwalk.
Business owners say they favor the housing plan for a couple of reasons: They hope new residents will bring new commerce, and they want some of the affordable apartments to go to their workers, who frequently commute well over an hour from places such as Gilroy and Salinas.
Restaurateur Zach Davis called the high cost of housing “the No. 1 factor” that led to the 2018 closure of Assembly, a popular farm-to-table restaurant he co-owned.
“How do we keep our community intact, if the people who make it all happen, the workers who make Santa Cruz what it is, can’t afford to live here anymore?” Davis asked.
One opponent calls the plan to add high-rises to the city’s picturesque downtown “out of scale with Santa Cruz’s branding.”
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
The city’s plan indicates that 859 of the units built over the next eight years will be for “very low income” families. But the term is relative, tied to a community’s median income, which in Santa Cruz is $132,800 for a family of four. Families bringing home between $58,000 and $82,000 would qualify as very low income. Tenants in that bracket would pay $1,800 a month for a three-bedroom apartment in one recently completed complex, built under the city’s requirement that 20% of units be rented for below-market rents.
The people pushing for high-rise development say expanding the housing supply will stem ever-rising rents. Opponents counter that the continued growth of UC Santa Cruz, which hopes to add 8,500 students by 2040, and a new surge of highly paid Silicon Valley “tech bros” looking to put down roots in beachy Santa Cruz would quickly gobble up whatever number of new units are built.
“They say that if you just build more housing, the prices will come down. Which is, of course, not true,” said Gary Patton, a former county supervisor and an original leader in the slow-growth movement. “So we’ll have lots more housing, with lots more traffic, less parking, more neighborhood impacts and more rich people moving into Santa Cruz.”
Leaders on Santa Cruz’s political left say new construction only touches one aspect of the housing crisis. Some of the leaders of Tenant Sanctuary, a renters’ rights group, would like to see Santa Cruz tamp down rents by creating complexes owned by the state or cooperatives and enacting a rent control law capping annual increases.
“No matter what they build, we need housing where the price is not tied to market swings and how much money can be squeezed out of a given area of land,” said Zav Hershfield, a board member for the group.
The up-zoning of downtown parcels has won the support of much of the city’s establishment, including the county Chamber of Commerce, whose chief executive said exorbitant housing prices are excluding blue-collar workers and even some well-paid professionals. “The question is, do you want a lively, vital, economically thriving community?” said Casey Beyer, CEO of the business group. “Or do you want to be a sleepy retirement community?”
The town clock is one of several landmarks in the beach town.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Just days after the anti-high-rise measure qualified for the March ballot, the two sides began bickering over what impact it would have.
Lane, the former mayor, and two affordable housing developers wrote an op-ed for the Lookout Santa Cruz news site that said the ballot measure is crafted so broadly it would apply to all “development projects.” They contend that could trigger the need for citywide votes for projects as modest as raising a fence from 6 feet to 7 feet, adding an ADU to a residential property or building a shelter for the homeless, if the projects exceed current practices in a given neighborhood.
The authors accused ballot measure proponents of faux environmentalism. “If we don’t go up,” they wrote, “we have less housing near jobs — and more people driving longer distances to get to work.”
The ballot measure proponents countered that their critics were misrepresenting facts. They said the measure would not necessitate voter approval for mundane improvements and would come into play in relatively few circumstances, for projects that require amendments to the city’s General Plan.
While not staking out a formal position on the ballot measure, the city’s planning staff has concluded the measure could force citizen votes for relatively modest construction projects.
The two sides also can’t agree on the impact of a second provision of the ballot measure. It would increase from 20% to 25% the percentage of “inclusionary” (below-market-rate) units that developers would have to include in complexes of 30 units or more.
The ballot measure writers say such an increase signals their intent to assure that as much new housing as possible goes to the less affluent. But their opponents say that when cities try to force developers to include too many sub-market apartments, the builders end up walking away.
Santa Cruz’s housing inventory shows that the city has the potential to add as many as 8,364 units in the next eight years, when factoring in proposals such as the downtown high-rises and UC Santa Cruz’s plan to add about 1,200 units of student housing. That’s more than double the number required by the state. But the Department of Housing and Community Development requires this sort of “buffer,” because the reality is that many properties zoned for denser housing won’t get developed during the eight-year cycle.
As with many aspects of the downtown up-zoning, the two sides are at odds over whether incorporating the potential for extra development amounts to judicious planning or developer-friendly overkill.
Joyful, left, and Valerie Christy, right, jam for fun and a few dollars in downtown Santa Cruz.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
The city’s voters have rejected housing-related measures three times in recent years. In 2018, they decisively turned down a rent control proposal. Last year, they said no to taxing owners who leave homes in the community sitting empty. But they also rejected a measure that would have blocked a plan to relocate the city’s central library while also building 124 below-market-rate apartment units.
The last time locals got this worked up about their downtown may have been at the start of the new millennium, when the City Council considered cracking down on street performers. That prompted the owner of Bookshop Santa Cruz, another local landmark, to print T-shirts and bumper stickers entreating fellow residents to “Keep Santa Cruz Weird.”
Santa Cruzans once again are being asked to consider the look and feel of their downtown and whether its future should be left to the City Council, or voters themselves. The measure provokes myriad questions, including these: Can funky, earnest, compassionate Santa Cruz remain that way, even with high-rise apartments? And, with so little housing for students and working folks, has it already lost its charm?
It’s late 1937, and you’re F. Scott Fitzgerald, the once-celebrated writer, and you’re getting paid $1,000 a week, which, especially during the Depression, and even for the gilded coffers of MGM, isn’t toy money.
From your place at the Garden of Allah apartments on Sunset, in what is now West Hollywood, you might decide to amble the couple of miles to Hollywood Boulevard, to the Stanley Rose Book Shop, knuckled right up against Musso and Frank. There, you might find other scribblers, with names like Saroyan and Steinbeck, to share a convivial drink nearby; some of Hollywood Boulevard’s many bookshops are open almost as late as the bars.
Or you’re Ray Bradbury, and on a late April day in 1946 — April the 24th, if you must know — you head downtown, to Booksellers Row, centered on 6th Street between Hill and Figueroa. You’d get there by bus or Red Car, or on your bicycle, because you do not drive, not even one single block, not since you saw that gory accident about 10 years earlier.
You walk into Fowler Brothers bookstore, which opened in 1888 as a church supply shop, and by the time it would close its doors for good in 1994, it was the oldest surviving bookstore in the city. On that day, a brilliant and fetching book clerk named Maggie McClure caught his attention; Bradbury caught hers because she thought he was shoplifting books into his vast trench coat. They married not quite 18 months later.
L.A. is a universe where you can twinkle in the galaxy of your choosing — farming, tech, academia, movies, and, for much of the 20th century, bookshops. Whole solar systems of bookstores — new, used, rare, secondhand, antiquarian — clustered in certain cities: in Glendale, along Brand Boulevard; on Ventura Boulevard in the Valley; in Pasadena, on Colorado Boulevard, from Old Town to Vroman’s, still the oldest book-seller in Southern California; on and near Hollywood Boulevard; in Long Beach, orbiting around the legendary Acres of Books, founded the year after the 1933 earthquake, with miles of shelves where Bradbury went to shop, even though the science fiction section bore the label “screwball aisle.”
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L.A. in the 1920s and ‘30s was beginning to shake off its reputation for hayseed Babbittry, or at least to acquire a critical mass of urban sophisticates possessing expansive tastes and sometimes the wallets to indulge them. The Zamorano Club, a men’s group named for the man who brought the first printing press to California, welcomed bibliophiles, oenophiles, foodies, collectors, art patrons, conversationalists, and tastemakers. Colleges and universities needed libraries to match the reputations they wanted to attain — and bought accordingly.
The movie studios needed research libraries so directors and producers could find out what Daniel Boone wore and what Cleopatra ate, and those libraries had huge budgets and farsighted librarians. California historian Kevin Starr once wrote that Jake Zeitlin — a pioneering rare-book seller and publisher — calculated that over 20 years, MGM alone spent $1 million bulking up its library.
Department stores ran book departments as big as modern-day bookstores, and in its column “Gossip of the Book World,” The Times let readers know when authors were due in town for book signings. Amelia Earhart would be at Robinson’s on Aug. 8, 1932, signing copies of her book “The Fun of It,” and as a bonus, her Lockheed-Vega plane had been dismantled, brought downtown from Burbank, and reassembled right in the store.
If you’ve seen the great 1946 L.A. noir film “The Big Sleep” — and if you haven’t, shame on you, go watch it at once, after you’ve finished reading this — one scene may have eluded your notice: Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe walks out of one bookstore and heads right across the street to another, in search of a particular book, just as a rainstorm gears up. It is the rainstorm, not two neighboring bookstores, that was the Los Angeles rarity.
Even without today’s enticements of fluffy coffees and lounging sofas, book lovers of yore managed to endure the rigors of strolling from store to store in these neighborhoods. And, like moons to the bigger stores’ planets, specialty bookshops found bibliophiles’ markets for volumes about art, fitness, science, ethnic interests, photography, erotica, comics, sports, mystery and horror, architecture, and the spiritual. The glorious Bodhi Tree on Melrose Avenue was founded in the groovy year of 1970, extolled by Shirley MacLaine’s autobiography in the 1980s, and put out of business in 2011 by the usual suspects: online book sales and metaphysical books going mainstream in chain bookstores. The Thomas Bros., makers and sellers of those seminal Southern California map guides, once had stores in Los Angeles and in Long Beach — killed off by GPS and by a consequent public indifference to knowing all by yourself which way is north.
Beyond its Hollywood mother ship, Pickwick Books, in its flush years, operated branches in Canoga Park, Costa Mesa, San Diego, San Bernardino, Bakersfield, Montclair and on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Dutton’s books reached readers in North Hollywood and Brentwood. The Martindale’s chain flourished in Century City, Santa Monica, the Wilshire District and in Beverly Hills, where its clientele was so flossy that the store carried Paris Match and an Arabian-horse magazine.
Fowler Brothers’ last move was to 7th Street, among the department stores and high-end shops. Fowler Brothers had sold books to Charles Lindbergh, Bobby Kennedy, John Philip Sousa, Irving Stone and of course Ray Bradbury. Marie Leong worked there for something like 25 years, full- and part time, and loved it partly because the owners were a family, and so was the feeling of the store; “when I wanted to do something with my daughter, like something at school, they’d let me come in late or leave early — so nice.”
Fowler Brothers’ location seemed ideal. Judges and jurors came in on their lunch breaks, as did workers in need of office supplies. Weekends, downtown was still a desert, but the weekdays were hopping. And then L.A. started digging up the street for a subway. Customers couldn’t navigate their way through the chaotic breaks in the street and stopped coming. The sidewalk out front collapsed from a construction leak. “My boss said, ‘I’ve had enough; we have to close this,’ ” Leong remembered. And in March 1994, that was the end. Ray Bradbury made a swan-song visit on the last day.
Online book shopping tends to herd you further and further down a rabbit hole of your known tastes and shopping habits. Wandering through a real bookstore promises the element of surprise, and lets you discover and cultivate interests you never knew you had.
A vintage postcard from Patt Morrison’s collection shows the Spell occult bookstore in Torrance. Its Pacific Coast Highway address is today home to a strip mall with an Italian restaurant, a liquor store and a massage parlor.
Phil Mason ran a used bookshop on Western Avenue, marked by a distinctive red door. Magnificent Montague shopped there often, on the lookout to add to his enormous archive of black Americana books and ephemera. Montague was the Los Angeles R&B disc jockey whose joyous catchphrase for some especially fabulous recording was “Burn, baby, burn!” In 1965, young men and women took up Montague’s chant with a different meaning during the Watts riots.
Mason once assured me that he was the only registered monarchist on the L.A. County voter rolls. After he died, his books were sold off at a dollar each. I made two trips there, buying all that my yellow Civic hatchback could hold, and slowly driving my treasures home.
In Pasadena, there’s a boutique coffee place, part of a chain, where Prufrock Books once stood. As a poor student, I yearned after its treasures and still wonder what became of a book I coveted fiercely, one whose title I’ve forgotten but which had been signed by all of the Hollywood Ten.
As happens so often, just when something has almost vanished, we rediscover its virtues. So it promises to be these days, with new independent bookstores bursting upon us in Pasadena, Santa Monica, Highland Park. Barnes & Noble, originally the superstore scourge of independents, must be hoping for a joyous and prosperous welcome when it returns to Santa Monica next year.
It’s a delight to see all of these, of course, but the city can’t ever regain the deep bench of booksellers so many had before the Internet Age. Certainly since then, L.A. has registered often, by many metrics, as the biggest book-buying market in the nation, undented by the arch mockery from that 212 island.
We have serious readers now, as we had before — and we had the serious antiquarian bookshops for them and for serious collectors. In 1969, The Times described the ambience of Zeitlin and his partner’s legendary rare bookshop in a red barn on La Cienega as “that of a cathedral or a museum, or at least a temple for culture with a capital ‘c.’ ” Just a few years before he died, in 1987, Zeitlin sold 144 illuminated manuscripts, some dating to the 700s, to the Getty Museum for $30 million.
Their store names are still redolent of the aroma of fine books and manuscripts, of old paper and ink and leather on their vanished shelves: Caravan; Argonaut; Heritage; Aquarian Book Shop, the oldest Black bookstore in town. A few, like Heritage books and Michael R. Thompson, still do business, but by appointment only, on private premises.
And then we come to Dawson’s, once the oldest bookstore in the city. Michael Dawson is a third-generation Los Angeles bookseller from the celebrated antiquarian book and photography sellers. It’s been a family business since 1905, and still is, with appointment clients only since the Larchmont store closed in 2010. In those great ages of L.A. bookshops, “every bookseller sort of knew each other. There was the [Larry Edmunds] film bookshop [still on Hollywood Boulevard.] I worked for Heritage bookshop in the late ‘70s before they moved to La Cienega, then to Melrose, then closed. It was a very active community.”
Rare booksellers published catalogs of their treasures and sent them to their mailing lists of collectors. Collectors came to them with wish lists for the booksellers to track down.
A vintage postcard from Patt Morrison’s collection shows Bethany Bookstore on Los Feliz Boulevard in Atwater Village. Today the building is home to an Indian restaurant and grocery.
And then, said Dawson: “The thing that was really hard for the out-of-print book trade was the advent of the internet.” Sites like AbeBooks made it easy for people who “were looking for books at the best possible price. That made bricks-and-mortar shops less competitive.” The online sellers didn’t have to factor in overhead or as many employees, for example.
In the pre-internet age, “that one book you wanted that was out of print, that you might have gone to Chevalier to find — now you can find a hundred copies online instantly and you pick the cheapest one.” Dawson’s got online early, “and for about two years there was an uptick in our business. We were selling about $15,000 a month.” Then came a downturn, as more people calling themselves booksellers appeared online — “You just need a room and a hundred books. The value of everything just declined.”
Even rare books declined in value, because they might not have been so rare after all. “Some things you thought were always going to hold their value, but you go online and you see 10 copies of something you used to consider rare,” he said.
Dawson’s buyers “were always more or less collectors,” who “really valued the book as an object, not just for information.” He hopes — just a hope, mind you — that there’s a glimmer of this in people who grew up with the internet as their bookstore. He hears anecdotally that “they are intrigued by the book as an object. They enjoy the tactility of it. They don’t just want an e-book.” Similar to the people buying vinyl records again.
But there just aren’t many shops like Dawson’s around for them anymore. “I have thoughts about 30 or 40 years from now, people would pay money — like a cigar bar — for a place where you could go sit in an armchair and take an 18th century book off the shelf, one bound in leather, with rag paper — and live the experience of being in a rare bookshop.”
For that is the kind of thing that a bookstore must offer these days to survive — like downtown’s Last Bookstore’s slumber parties: not just a book, but a book experience.
Explaining L.A. With Patt Morrison
Los Angeles is a complex place. In this weekly feature, Patt Morrison is explaining how it works, its history and its culture.
State Assemblymember Wendy Carrillo, who is running for an Eastside seat on the Los Angeles City Council, was arrested in Northeast Los Angeles early Friday morning on suspicion of drunk driving, authorities said.
Carrillo, 43, was apprehended at 1:35 a.m. and was booked a few hours later, according to inmate records posted by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
Police responded around 1:30 a.m. to the 6200 block of Monterey Road, where a motorist had struck two parked cars, according to a law enforcement source familiar with the incident but was not authorized to speak publicly about it and requested anonymity. A spokesperson for the LAPD issued a summary of the arrest that said Carrillo was booked on suspicion of driving under the influence and being involved in a traffic collision while having a high blood-alcohol count.
LAPD Capt. Kelly Muniz said that the charge of having a high blood-alcohol count indicates the suspect’s alcohol level was “double the legal limit or more.”
In a statement later Friday, Carrillo expressed thanks that no one was harmed in the crash, and said she is cooperating with law enforcement.
“As a public servant, I am aware that I must adhere to a higher standard that demands personal accountability for my conduct and I accept responsibility for my actions,” Carrillo said. “I sincerely apologize to my family, constituents, colleagues and staff for any actions of mine that have fallen short of that expectation. I intend to seek the necessary help and support. As I do so, I remain dedicated to my family, my constituents and the community that I grew-up in and am proud to represent.”
Carrillo was elected in 2017 to represent an Eastside Assembly district. She is now one of about a dozen people running in the March city election to unseat Councimember Kevin de León in a district that stretches from downtown to El Sereno and Eagle Rock.
The incident comes about six months after another state legislator was arrested on suspicion of drunk driving. In May, state Sen. Dave Min (D-Irvine) was arrested on suspicion of drunk driving and released from Sacramento County jail.
Min later confirmed that he was cited with a misdemeanor DUI, saying his behavior was “irresponsible.”
Members of Unite union and supporters protested outside a Victoria St West hotel in Auckland on Thursday afternoon, claiming management had pressured staff to opt out of fair pay agreements. Photo / John Weekes
Members of Unite union and supporters picketed a hotel in downtown Auckland today, claiming management pressured workers into opting out of fair pay agreements.
But a manager said staff were “perplexed” at the protest outside the President Hotel and rejected claims any such directive about fair pay agreements existed.
“We’ve been notifying employers about the hospitality fair pay agreements (FPA),” Unite national secretary John Crocker said outside the Victoria St West hotel this afternoon.
Unite said it had evidence of hotel management “pressuring” workers to opt out of the FPA.
Crocker said employers in the sector received a letter from the union and a Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) form outlining how the new agreements worked.
“It’s a very big sector and we’ve just got a breadth of employer attitudes,” Crocker said.
He said some companies engaged constructively with staff and wanted to find common ground.
“Some actually want to treat their employees well, which is good. Others will just grind whatever they can out of their workers, bully them, push them down.”
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