FIRST LOOK: BELLFLOWER TURNS A PAGE—IS IT ENOUGH TO CHANGE ITS STORY?

FIRST LOOK / LAST LOOK: During the final week on the calendar, the point at which we pivot away from one year and toward another, GreaterLongBeach.com is examining a small assortment of people, events and trends—last looks at some that made 2011 memorable, first looks at others that promise to make 2012 interesting.

Today, a first look at the City of Bellflower’s initial step toward a new-look downtown, which hasn’t noticeably changed in more than a half-century. But one of  first things reporter Theo Douglas noticed about the plans for Belmont Court, a $7 million,  mixed-use project that will stack condominiums atop street-level retail shops,  is that it’s not very  conceptually different than what’s already there.

BELLFLOWER—If you Google “downtown Bellflower,” the map that appears will probably show the intersection of Woodruff Avenue with Flower and Flora Vista streets—a former railroad crossing-turned-confusing commuter crossroads, with nothing downtown-y about it at all.

The real nexus of downtown is Bellflower Boulevard and Flower Street, still a proud fount of glassy, square 1950s-era commercial architecture, where regulation 50-foot-wide storefronts were built out to the sidewalks, and cars were parked dutifully behind.

The fact that many of these storefronts have tended to be vacant at the same time, and some for a very long time, seems to at last have convinced city officials something must be done if Bellflower’s historic downtown is to ever regain the hustle and bustle it enjoyed during the race to the moon.

“You’ve got a few retail buildings and facades that have been freshened, but a lot of it is 1960s-era buildings that have not aged well,” said Leo L. Mingle, scanning Bellflower Blvd.’s midcenturyness from a recently cleared swath of bare dirt, as well as the perspective of the 16 years and nearly as many jobs he’s worked at City Hall. He was interim City Manager on this November day, as history finally prepared itself to be rewritten.

After a mariachi band had belted out Freddy Fender’s classic “I Love My Rancho Grande,” city staffers broke ground at Bellflower Boulevard and Belmont Street in downtown’s left ventricle, on a project they say will be key to reviving the shopping district. Or in the words of Councilman Randy Bomgaars, who enjoys a local reputation as an orator, “I think it will be a jewel on the Boulevard.”

That’s high anticipation for Belmont Court, the $7 million, three-story, condos-above-retail project that could, finally, revolutionize this part of the city by expanding upon the very old idea of people living where they shop.

Residential square footages for the development vary from 1,000 to just under 1,300, and the developer describes all 30 units as “two-story-style townhouses,” available with  two or three bedrooms, depending upon the size of your wallet. Eleven of the units will be city-subsidized affordable housing; prices for the remaining 19 are reportedly in the high-$200,000 range—which is currently the median home value for the city.

This may sound like a lot of money for a condominium on a busy street, but there’s a little more to it. Belmont Court also promises secured parking, an interior courtyard with an outdoor fireplace and barbecue area, along with the promise of new trees and landscaping on Bellflower Boulevard.

This is more-or-less standard developer procedure, as is the development’s architectural style, an update on midcentury modern—which some like Mingle credit with depreciating the area in the first place. But the designers behind the project say that won’t happen this time.

“You have to take themes and update them,” said Damian Taitano of Summa Architecture, the firm that designed Belmont Court, as the mariachis played on the very earth where Belmont Court will rise by summer 2012.

Nondescriptly midcentury buildings are what had been standing on this land for decades, until the city demolished them about a month before the groundbreaking, and as we gazed south at the empty lot, Taitano gave a name to the architectural style we’ll see rise up.

“I would call it a midcentury with a contemporary feel,” he said.

Maybe we will see the authentic International Style Moderne of, say, Long Beach Polytechnic High School—square, boxy, stucco with many extruded aluminum windows—in this project, which is itself square, and a mixture of stucco and stone, albeit with fewer windows than the high school. And just maybe the exaggerated “crown molding” across the top of Belmont Court—an extension which, no doubt, will hide flat roofs and any central air accoutrements—will read visually like the blocky, monolithic Lakewood Center, one of postwar Southern California’s pioneering malls.

But as prominent midcentury architecture archeologist Alan Hess points out, there’s not a lot of interest in Belmont Court from an architectural standpoint.

“The architecture, from those drawings—nothing’s too terribly inspiring or creative,” said Hess, whose books on architecture explore the careers of such luminaries as John Lautner, Oscar Niemeyer, and Frank Lloyd Wright, with a specialty in midcentury American buildings.

Hess does like the idea of grouping the homes around, well, a court—in this case, that 1,400-square-foot public plaza. But he finds most of downtown Bellflower as dull as Belmont Court.

“I Google-mapped it and looked up and down the street, and there’s not a whole lot that’s strikingly designed,” Hess said. “It’s good background architecture, but for a city, is this the center of Bellflower? What a city depends on are things like Hosanna Chapel, which was an old theater. That’s a real center, a real showpiece, which the town needs.”

It may have great architecture—and a terrazzo entryway—but Hosanna Chapel is emblematic of Bellflower’s financial struggle: a 900-seat entertainment palace constructed in 1929 with an orchestra pit and dressing rooms for vaudeville and a big screen for movies that since 1986 has been a church… and churches don’t pay taxes.

Belmont Court should unquestionably help the city’s tax base in that regard, for the concept of residential-over-retail is an old one that has actually worked beautifully at various times in history.

“It’s not unlike what a lot of other cities have done,” said developer Paul Feilberg of HQT Homes, which is building Belmont Court. “You can turn to Long Beach—you’re probably familiar with Pine Avenue—and downtown Pasadena, they’ve done a wonderful job.

“A lot of people look at this as a new concept, but it’s really an old concept coming back into vogue. When you look at it, this wasn’t unheard of,” Feilberg said. “The nice thing is, the residents are built-in patrons for the commercial” spaces. (Except, of course, in downtown Long Beach, where the idea is sometimes still a theory.)

Call it mixed-use, or residential-over-retail—either way, it’s an idea that harkens back to a time when people really did live in second-floor units above retail shops, most films were still black-and-white, and no one ever dreamed automobiles would travel as many as 40 miles on one gallon of gas. In other words, it’s old.

Bellflower incorporated in 1957, the year the Russians successfully orbited Sputnik, and the new city’s shopping district was already something of an anachronism. By the late 1950s, traditional downtowns like this one—a mix of one-and two-story retail and mixed-use buildings—already were being supplanted by mammoth shopping centers like Lakewood Center, built in 1951, and still one of the nation’s largest retail shopping malls.

That sea change never happened in Bellflower, where one can vividly imagine shopkeepers still living over their shops. Downtown Bellflower shrugged off the advent of shopping centers, then malls and then, in the 1970s and 1980s, the terrifying trend of building office towers in downtowns across America. Long Beach and Los Angeles both tried this tack, before realizing that office workers go home at night, to suburbs like Bellflower, and—belatedly—trying to fix the problem with their own loft and residential-retail mixes.

Time stood still in Bellflower, largely because most civic—and social—changes seem to happen here with glacial speed. Only this year did Bellflower voters elect the city’s first-ever non-white representative to the city council, Sonny Santa Ines, who was born in the Philippines. And city business, like a recent water rate hike, is debated so furiously that, if you’re a reporter, Bellflower-ites will air their opinions with you apropos of nothing. Really—nothing.

That certain clay-footed sticktoitiveness has left Bellflower Boulevard looking like something out of an Andy Hardy movie, but public officials—longtime public officials—say the times are finally changing.

“Bellflower Boulevard for so long has just been a hodgepodge of whatever, but the council is committed to raising the bar, raising the standards, raising property values,” said Bomgaars, who blamed the situation in part on “in-town and out-of-town property owners who have just used properties as cash cows. We need to change that mindset.”

Bomgaars’ own Bellflower roots run deep, but he finds a surprising source of inspiration for Belmont Court.

“One of my ideas and concepts for many years—I’ve been on the council for 22 years now—I really believe Bellflower Boulevard can be a Second Street in Belmont Shore,” Bomgaars said. “People say, ‘Oh, it’s the beach.’ No, it’s not the beach. You can go there any time of year and there’s just something about the feel as you make your way down the street. You’ve got the eateries, the unique shopping. And I really believe that we can make something like that happen here.”

Belief could pay off. By next summer, Bellflower-ians (Bellflorists?) should have an actual development to begin populating—and at least two new restaurants in which to dine. (City officials declined to say which restaurants, because leases have not yet been signed.) The development’s long-term success, however, is something no one can predict.

“This end (of town) is not going to turn around all of Bellflower Boulevard, but hopefully this is the right start, the right direction,” said Feilberg, the developer. “We’ve seen, over the last 10 years, the boulevard improve, and we think this is the right time for our new project.”