Terry Heller used to stroll around Fairfax Avenue as a child, walking with his grandparents to Canter’s Deli and visiting the tchotchke stores and kosher bakeries.
Canter’s remains along with a few other holdouts, but many of the old Jewish shops on Fairfax between Beverly Boulevard and Melrose Avenue have moved out. Moving in: streetwear shops and trendy eateries, creating an incongruous amalgam of old world and hip-hop cultures that has created both opportunity and tension.
Heller, while waxing nostalgic for the old days and old ways, is nevertheless taking advantage of the opportunity in the evolution of the half-mile strip, opening Plan Check Kitchen and Bar, a 4,000-square-foot restaurant and bar serving a modern take on fried chicken and burgers.
Plan Check is one of three restaurants that opened up on Fairfax in the last three months – another is expected to open soon – all drawn by the traffic generated by popular streetwear stores that have popped up on that stretch in recent years.
James Starr, an owner of burger shop Golden State, was a pioneer of the new wave of eateries, opening five years ago in response to the emerging cultural scene. Now, he welcomes the two new neighboring burger shops in hopes that it will create a larger restaurant district.
“We look at it as a positive with all the restaurants coming in and cultivating the area as a food destination,” Starr said. “It’s almost like it has become hamburger row.”
But the idea of Fairfax as a foodie paradise and youth apparel zone has created tension with the old businesses and residents.
“The shops that came in no longer catered to the area,” said Simon Rutberg, who used to own a Jewish music shop on Fairfax. “Now it’s a rough crowd. There’s graffiti everywhere and stickers on the lamp posts and parking meters. There are times you walk down there and you wonder where you are.
“Is this what they want? They already have to pay high rent. It’s horrible and it’s disgusting.”
Rutberg added that in addition to new businesses moving into the area and increasing the rent, the Jewish population has been slowly moving out of the area and into the San Fernando Valley.
Diana Plotkin, president of the Beverly Wilshire Homes Association, said that while her group objects to restaurants staying open past 11 p.m. and serving alcohol, it is even more concerned with a lack of parking needed to accommodate all the additional activity generated by the restaurants.
“Our major concern is the parking issue. We have no parking, and that is crucial because they end up parking on our streets,” she said. “We have a lot of problems along that area and that does not make for a great relationship.”
Heller has secured his own 44-space parking area nearby, but other local restaurateurs agree parking is one of the biggest problems the area faces.
Jacqueline Canter, a manager at Canter’s and chairwoman of the Fairfax Business Association of Los Angeles, said her employees and customers have difficulty finding parking, especially when shops draw an influx of shoppers on days they offer limited-edition apparel.
Starr said that the lack of parking would it make it difficult for future restaurants wanting to come to the district.
“There’s no good public parking options at all,” he said. “The restaurant and bar parking spaces are what they are. It’d be hard for someone to start from scratch.”
Natural transition
The influx of restaurants has, by some measure, been a long time coming.
Nicole Mihalka, a Jones Lang LaSalle senior vice president who works with properties around Hollywood, said the area has flourished for the past decade because of the dense residential areas and surrounding the street as well as the arrival of the Grove not far to the south in 2002.
“When the Grove came in, you saw high-end retailers start to move into the area,” Mihalka said. “Then the rent started going up and there were quite a bit of businesses that had been on Fairfax (near the Grove) for 30 years that were priced out.”
The traditionally less expensive storefronts near Canter’s began to be squeezed from the north as well.
Ed Sachse, executive managing director at Kennedy Wilson Inc.’s brokerage group in Beverly Hills, said cheaper rent led shops catering to youth culture to Fairfax a decade ago.
“Streetwear companies were attracted to areas like Melrose Avenue,” Sachse said. “But the rents on Melrose grew higher and the economics drew the shops to Fairfax.”
Even as rents have risen to as high as $3.25 a foot a month, nearly twice the levels of 10 years ago, the strip is still cheaper than nearby Melrose Avenue, which Sachse said costs about $5 to $6 a square foot each month for a boutique shop.
Streetwear stores like New York’s Supreme, which opened in 2004, was one of Fairfax Avenue’s early adopters. San Francisco’s Diamond Supply Co. and hip-hop group Odd Future’s retail shop, Golf Wang, both opened in 2011. Crooks & Castles, another streetwear shop, arrived in October.
Rappers and skaters are often seen sporting such brands as Diamond, Supreme and Crooks & Castles, and frequently collaborate with the brands for exclusive lines. It is not uncommon for shoppers to camp outside of the Fairfax stores for an exclusive release of an apparel line.
But the arrival of the hip-hop fans and skaters, along with the higher rents, pressured the older Jewish businesses.
Rutberg, who complained about the “rough crowd,” closed his Hatikvah Music International in 2006 after a half-century on Fairfax. He said his business was doing fine at the time, but he was shocked by the rent hikes. He now sells music online.
“I got a notice that rent was being raised 300 percent,” he said. “The reason we could do well was because the rent was reasonable. Business is good until someone overcharges you. In this desire to accumulate wealth, they destroyed something.”
Indeed, the mood of the business district has dramatically changed.
“I grew up on Fairfax as a kid. I remember all these seniors speaking Yiddish on the street,” said Canter, whose grandfather started the eponymous restaurant. “It has now evolved to skateboard shops and there’s a different demographic.”
The legacy merchants have, in some ways, contributed to the changes by pouring money into sprucing up the strip.
Using grants from the Los Angeles Neighborhood Initiative, Canter said, the Fairfax Business Association has spearheaded more than $300,000 in improvements to street lights, sidewalk paving, a median and decorative tree grates to make the street more walkable.
“It feels like the Lower East Side in New York,” Heller said. “I’m hoping we don’t lose this community’s texture, but it’s inevitable.”
With a younger, hipper demographic taking hold – especially one with disposable income for designer clothes – it was perhaps inevitable that other businesses catering to that crowd would join the fray.
Heller’s restaurant follows burger joint Twins Sliders, which debuted in September, and a nameless club and restaurant run by Bryan Ling and Jordan Buky that opened in November.
Animal, a five-year-old new-American cuisine restaurant on Fairfax known for catering to Jimmy Kimmel and Drew Barrymore, expanded its presence on Fairfax by taking over Damiano’s Pizza for a new unnamed concept.
“There’s a lot of focus and interest in this neighborhood,” Heller said. “You have so many shoppers. It’s centrally located. There are a lot of residents that can access us by bike and foot, so that’s the motivation to open here.”
As a result, space is tough to find.
Sachse said his storefronts on Fairfax are fully leased out and noted that some properties on the street are leased out before they even hit the market.
Heller said he understands the difficulties of entering the area.
As he tells it, he stumbled into the listing for 351 N. Fairfax, the site of Plan Check, browsing the Internet. After striking a deal to lease there, an unnamed chef approached Heller to purchase the rights to the space.
He refused to flip it.
“Where else could you find this dichotomy in Los Angeles?” Heller said as he pointed out the Yiddish signs on storefronts next to a streetwear shop. “I was dying to do something here.”
