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L.A. FARMER’S MARKET FERTILE GROUND FOR GROVE

By Donna Mitchell

The Grove at Farmer’s Market will have a 14-screen Pacific Theatre.

Not only is Caruso Affiliated Holdings bringing a unique retailing environment to Los Angeles, but the company also stands to benefit from the pull of one of the city’s most beloved historical institutions.

Santa Monica, Calif.-based Caruso Affiliated Holdings is building a lifestyle center in the vicinity of Third Street and Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles, called The Grove at Farmer’s Market. Wrapped around a Los Angeles establishment called Farmer’s Market, The Grove at Farmer’s Market will be an open-air lifestyle center that aims to be super-regional in its tenant base and size. Extending for 600,000 square feet, The Grove will contain 70 retail stores, arranged in mostly two-level buildings dispersed throughout the center.

Major retailers include Nordstrom, Barnes & Noble, J. Crew and all of Gap’s retail concepts.

A.F. Gilmore Co. of Los Angeles owns the 31-acre plot where Farmer’s Market sits, which includes the future site of The Grove at Farmer’s Market. Founded in 1934, Farmer’s Market is a landmark where residents buy fresh produce, congregate and occasionally spot celebrities prowling the produce aisles. Adjacent is the 17-acre site where The Grove at Farmer’s Market expects to open in March 2002. That area has been the site of many Gilmore milestones, where throughout the site’s history residents fueled their automobiles at the first self-service gasoline station in the United States, a 50-pump station called a gaseteria. They watched games hosted by the Hollywood Stars baseball team, which was owned at different times by Hollywood actors Barbara Stanwyck, Bing Crosby and film director Cecil B. DeMille.

So when A.F. Gilmore Co. decided to redevelop the area, the landowner took considerable heat from the local community.

“The belief among many was that the market was going to be razed to make room for development,” said David Hamlin, a spokesman for A.F. Gilmore Co. “There was a great cry over the loss of Farmer’s Market.”

Caruso Affiliated soothed some of those concerns by holding town meetings, and soliciting feedback from the community on what sort of shopping center they would prefer at the site. That said, The Grove at Farmer’s Market would offer strollers and shoppers alike a town center atmosphere within a large city. Major retailers like FAO Schwarz and Banana Republic are scheduled to open flagship stores in the area. Plans include a 14-screen Pacific Theatre cinema, with a seating capacity of 3,000, said Rick Caruso, CEO of Caruso Affiliated.

The surrounding trade area is very affluent, giving Caruso Affiliated more incentive to build the shopping center. Average annual household incomes for 2000 ranged from $70,000 to $166,000, according to Caruso Affiliated’s surveys. The Grove is also poised to benefit from a sizeable daytime population: About 200,000 workers stream into the neighborhood daily to work in major studios like CBS Television Network, Warner Bros. and Paramount. Caruso said the market lacks an upscale shopping center to serve those affluent surrounding communities.

“This market is very underserved. Certainly there is nothing to go to of any quality,” Caruso said.

Contrary to his assertion, at least two upscale shopping centers already serve the trade area. Beverly Center, for one, is three miles away and anchored by Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s. Westside Pavilion, anchored by Nordstrom and Robinsons-May, is located about five miles away in West Los Angeles. According to Steven Lurie, a partner at the real estate law firm Greenberg, Glusker, Fields, Claman Machtinger & Kinsella of Los Angeles, The Grove’s strength is in its positioning itself as a lifestyle center, the likes of which do not exist in the Los Angeles area.

“It is filling in a gap for new lifestyle types of centers,” Lurie said. “There really is nothing like it close by. I think it will be a big draw.”

The Grove at Farmer’s Market will emulate a small town. Dave Williams, senior vice president of architecture for Caruso Affiliated, supervised a team of consultants that each created the various design components of the center. Elkus/Manfredi Architects of Boston did most of the building designs, and architectural styles for the shops ranged from classic art deco to the traditional small-town styles seen in Boston and the Midwest. Each building will incorporate material suitable for its architectural style. For instance, a building with a classical facade will use limestone, and buildings reminiscent of New York City’s Soho will incorporate steel and custom castings.

“The thing that we are really trying to do is build authentic pieces of architecture,” Williams said. “The underlying philosophy is we don’t have just one big idea; there are hundreds of small ideas that create a sense of discovery and detail laced throughout.”

The rest of Williams’ design team included Covina, Calif.-based Bomel Construction, which designed the 3,600-car parking structure; Perkowitz & Ruth Architects of Long Beach, Calif., will produce the Pacific Theatre cinema; Lifescapes International, also of Newport Beach, created all the common area landscaping; Frances Kramer Associates of Laguna Beach, Calif., came up with the old-town lampposts; and Amalgamated Studios of Studio City, Calif., created the graphic designs for the signage and banner program throughout the center.

The center includes a park that will be a venue for concerts and other community activities. There is also a 300-foot-diameter man-made lake. It features a fountain at the center, with submerged mechanisms that shoot streams of water through the air timed to music, said Williams. If the buildings, park and lake don’t convince shoppers that they are in a town, then perhaps the fully operational trolley might. Each double-deck car can accommodate about 40 passengers, said Caruso. The Grove at Farmer’s Market will open with one operating car, but provisions are being made for a second, he said. The trolley will run along just over one-quarter of a mile of real metal tracks embedded in the ground.

There are several common features between the projects. Both facilities will share the 3,600-car parking area, said Hamlin of developer A.F. Gilmore. The end of the line is a short distance inside the old Farmer’s Market. The Grove’s main street also leads to Farmer’s Market, Williams said.

Rick Lemmo, vice president of corporate communications for Caruso, said some spaces in The Grove’s parking structure would be earmarked for Farmer’s Market.

A.F. Gilmore is sprucing up its landmark property to foster a sense of fluidity for the site as a whole, according to Hamlin. The company will place four new buildings on the site, which will contain storage over retail and restaurants, plus community amenities. The renovation will include a 600-square-foot, three-story building, with the original Farmer’s Market clock tower set on top. All the new buildings will be located in a plaza area that will be a transition from Farmer’s Market to The Grove, he said.

“What [Rick] Caruso has discovered is if you create shopping areas like town centers, people will come around and hang out for two or three hours, and even shop,” said Hamlin. “What they have at Farmer’s Market is something that is always there — a place where people have always hung out.”

The trolley, main street and proximity of The Grove at Farmer’s Market to the original landmark notwithstanding, the two areas are distinctly separate projects, according to Lemmo. While the produce landmark is singular in its offerings to the public, The Grove at Farmer’s Market will give shoppers something to discover with each visit to The Grove, he said.

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