Redondo’s International Boardwalk is experiencing a youth movement as new businesses bring a sense of optimism to an admittedly-overlooked part of the city’s waterfront
About a month ago, Redondo Beach Mayor Steve Aspel was at his city’s International Boardwalk, visiting constituents, when he began chatting with Laura Edwards, the captain of Redondo’s “Yellow Submarine,” the Looking Glass Bottom Boat. It wasn’t long before they were approached by Leontyne Love, of The Optical Department eyewear shop.
It wasn’t long before the conversation shifted to the area’s planned future, which would level the entirety of the waterfront — including the docks they were standing upon — and replace it with thousands of feet of new development.
“It was funny,” Aspel said. “They motioned over to the parking structure and said ‘Can you really imagine if that comes down and there’s a hundred room hotel there, and all this construction and all this new stuff?’” He replied “Well, what’s the problem with that?”
“Well, there’d be so many people,” one of the women said back to him.
Aspel, recounting the story, paused, narrowed his gaze, then turned his head slightly — a trademark gesture when he runs into a logical fault. “‘Well,’ I said to them, ‘We’ve been here on the Yellow Submarine for one hour, and not one customer has come by.’ The eyeglass shop owner also came over because she hadn’t had a customer in one hour. Granted,” Aspel conceded, “it was about 11:30 on a weekday morning. But I said ‘If you have a hotel there, what do tourists spend all their time doing? Shopping.’ They started nodding their heads,” he said. “‘Oh, that makes sense.’”
The International Boardwalk has long been a source of conflict along the Redondo Waterfront, tucked between the Redondo Beach Harbor and the Redondo Pier. Simultaneously a tourist attraction and a local eyesore, it’s ground zero for the planned CenterCal Waterfront Project, which would add 290,000 square feet of new development to the Boardwalk and the surrounding areas.
“It’s meant to give them business,” Aspel said of the proposed redevelopment. “People have to be educated on that,” he said, noting that the open storefronts are “slowly, but surely” being filled with new, varied businesses. “Getting rid of the place where you can buy the bong and the toe rings is my goal,” Aspel said.
The problem lies in the interim, where residents, business owners and city officials all wait for the CenterCal project to wind through the hallways of bureaucracy, with environmental impact reports, applications for development and public hearings in the path to development.
In that meantime, a few businesses have taken their opportunity to step into spaces along the boardwalk in the hopes of adding “new life” to the area. Each of those new businesses, such as R10 Social House, The Slip Bar and Grill, King Harbor Brewing Company’s new taproom, Pia, or A Basque Kitchen, are going in with their own set of goals, certainly — but as Aspel surmises, they also are looking to get in on the ground floor of the new development.
Fred Bruning, CEO of CenterCal Properties, has heard the same thing — that a lot of those newer, younger businesses “are wanting to prove themselves” so as to be a part of project, once it becomes active.
“People have heard the message of what we’re trying to create, and if we’re successful we’re going to have one of the more pleasant and vital waterfronts in the United States,” Bruning said, noting that business like R10 Social House have told him that “they want to prove that they’re a great outfit.”
“A lot of tenants are coming in and trying to plant a flag, which proves to me the viability of what we’re talking about,” Bruning said. “I find amazing demand to be on the waterfront if it can be developed in a way that is interesting and modern, and I think local tenants are catching that same vibe.”
One of CenterCal’s biggest challenges will be finding a way to integrate the waterfront’s legacy tenants, such as Naja’s Place and Quality Seafood, by giving them unique spaces within the project that will enable them to succeed for “another 50 or 60 years,” Bruning said.
“I don’t think you’ll see any chain restaurants or hotels in our entire project. We want it to be be unique and special — the last thing we want is for it to look like an existing project, like a Del Amo Mall.”
That perception of a “mall by the sea” has been the biggest challenge for CenterCal to overcome, and the inclusion of small, local, legacy businesses is a key to Bruning’s vision.
But first, as Bruning acknowledges, the waterfront is “run down — and it’s time to fix it,” he said.
Steve Shoemaker is an institution of the Redondo Beach Waterfront, beginning with his first business, the Sea Inn, a beer bar built in the 1960s. A decade later, sensing the need for entertainment along the Pier, Shoemaker built the Fun Factory, an amusement center that straddles the line between arcade and carnival midway.
As he recalls, the Boardwalk didn’t really exist until the 1970s, and became a destination in the ‘80s — until, of course, the pier was heavily damaged in fire of 1988. “After that, business dropped tremendously, and it never came back,” he said, complaining of the lack of destination businesses that drew customers in from all around.
In his mind, the Boardwalk has become a shadow of what it once was for one reason: the City of Redondo Beach, he argues, has let it deteriorate with the aim of allowing someone else to build over it.
“They just don’t care about the pier and certainly don’t care about the Boardwalk,” Shoemaker said. “They just don’t try to improve it. They’ve been trying to bring in a developer for 25 years, and I think they finally have one, but they have a developer [in CenterCal] that isn’t going to pay rent until they turn a profit.”
Technically, he’s right: According to the terms of the agreement with the City of Redondo Beach, CenterCal doesn’t have to pay rent for 30 years, unless it earns back 10 percent of its investment — a significant sum on what’s been estimated to be a $300 million project.
Among those opponents is District 2 City Councilman Bill Brand, who has long been opposed to what he has considered piecemeal development of the city’s waterfront properties. “I don’t support the more-than-doubling the development in King Harbor that seems to be moving forward,” he said, stating that he doesn’t believe the public supports those efforts. The March defeat of Measure B, which would have rezoned the land under the AES power plant to support a mixed-use development, bolsters his argument.
“We’ve been wasting time, working on large projects that are not supported by the public. We should’ve been working closely with business owners to support what we already have,” he said. “We can’t let current infrastructure degrade while we’re waiting for a giant project that may or may not happen — we have important businesses down there and an important stake in the success of the waterfront, regardless of the progress of future plans.”
Leslie Page, general manager of the Redondo Beach Marina, isn’t concerned about the area’s identity changing. “This is never going to be a mall, because of the heart of the people that are here,” she said. “These are not big corporations, these are small business people who want to be part of our waterfront because half them grew up here. This is a community of waterfront people who love the water.”
“The city is investing money in the boardwalk — not all the money in the world we can invest, because we have high tide issues, and until we can figure out what’s going to happen with revitalization, it’d be stupid to spend $5 million to do something that’s going to get torn out again.”
But, Page admits that the low-cost repair efforts (the aforementioned “investments”) such as the recent City Council motion to reseal the walkway, and efforts to install new lights are akin to fixes made with “duct tape and bubble gum.”
“You can’t keep putting lipstick on an old whore,” Page said.
That’s where Page’s excitement for new projects comes in. “I think that we’re on the road to recovery, and the new tenants that are coming in see it, and I think that some of your longtime tenants see it,” she said. She cautions that “we’ve been in this rodeo before” and that “it’s like we live in Groundhog Day,” but that it’s a good sign that young businesses are moving into spaces along the Boardwalk. “They’re little guys, like me and you, gambling their life savings in what they see to be somewhere they want to be,” she said.
Aspel seconds the need to improve the boardwalk. “No matter what we do, it’s going to need to be renovated,” he said, noting that the boardwalk “hasn’t been updated in years.”
“The city tries to keep it clean, but you can’t put in new walk paths there, because it’s going to be torn up anyway [during the CenterCal build]. It’s a matter of getting quality tenants that people will go down to see…but hopefully not so popular that locals at the Village Condos will have a hard time with, because that’s a noise issue,” he said.
Carlos Raygoza, of incoming business The Slip Bar and Grill (which looks to open in June), hopes that the business that he and his partners are creating will be able to match the popularity of nearby Boardwalk anchor Naja’s Place. Their plan is to provide the boardwalk with a place to get high-quality food for reasonable boardwalk prices — the kind of place, Raygoza hopes, will grow from word of mouth.
“When we come down here and have beers at Naja’s, we’ve found there’s no place here that has really good food. Everyone wants a decent meal, but there’s no place that has a casual atmosphere to eat and catch a game. There’s a need for this type of place here.”
“We had a concept and a vision to create what there’s a lack of here: Healthier, not-common bar food at a price point that’s not sky-high,” he said. “We want to create something cool and comfortable, in an environment where people want to come and have a good time, with good libations and good music.”
The goal, he says, is to take part in giving the boardwalk new life, and a bit of a “facelift,” he says — and if they can get in on the ground floor with Centercal, well, so much the better.
“I understand that it’s going going to be here a few years before [the CenterCal development] opens, but our idea was to come in and establish ourselves, and then get into the new space,” he said. “We’ll have a little infusion of life down here — it’s going to be nice. Hopefully we’ll change the demographic a little bit.”
George Soros, an owner of R10 Social House and Captain Kidd’s Fish Market, thinks that the injection of new life into the area is nothing but positive — though he’s cautiously optimistic.
“I think the challenge for [CenterCal] is to develop something that everybody in the city wants, something that’s conducive to the area from an aesthetic standpoint that’s great for residents and business owners,” he said. “Me being both, I don’t want a giant monstrosity mall that people are worried about, but I want an area I can walk to where my kids and family feel safe, and I could work at the same time. I think the ones that don’t want to grow, their reservation is that it’ll be too big, too much, too many.”
Page, a 25 year veteran of the Marina, doesn’t share that concern. “You can put up any structure in the world, but you’re never going to lose that human appeal. The human factor of our community that isn’t going to change.”
“I just get prouder and prouder of my waterfront,” she said. “I’m proud of everyone taking a gamble and everyone who knows how good we’re going to be.”
