Santamonica/22/dp1st/mark2nd

By ELIZABETH HAYES

Staff Reporter

For the last few years, Harvelles Blues Club was one of the few places along Fourth Street in Santa Monica that drew visitors away from the booming Third Street Promenade.

But the more sedate street east of Third has been steadily emerging as a happening spot in its own right. A number of new shops and restaurants have opened and more appear on the way.

“Fourth Street is certainly an up-and-coming street,” said John Warfel, a principal at Metropolitan Pacific, which is renovating a 20,000-square-foot building at Fourth and Wilshire Boulevard. “But it’s still in its infancy.”

Indeed, Third Street Promenade remains the undisputed shopping hub, with a huge concentration of well-known clothing boutiques and bookstores and about 8 million visitors a year.

By comparison, Fourth Street boasts an eclectic mix of big-box retailers like Michael’s and Toys R Us; several hip restaurants, including La Serenata de Garibaldi; a Rizzoli bookstore; the ever-popular Harvelles and a new magic club called Magicopolis.

Border Grill, one of L.A.’s most well-known restaurants thanks to its owners, celebrity chefs Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken, has survived for 10 years on the street. A year ago it began offering lunches on weekdays to cash in on the growing foot traffic.

Matthew May, a retail broker at Madison Partners, said that streets adjacent to major retail areas tend to be more service-oriented, with an emphasis on furniture stores and restaurants. (He cited Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills as another example.)

“(The Promenade) is having significant spillover, primarily onto Fourth Street,” said Robert York of Fransen Co., a retail consultant to Bayside District Corp., a public/private partnership that maintains the downtown Santa Monica area and runs special events and promotions. “While Second and Fourth will never be like Third, they are more dynamic today than Third was five or six years ago.”

Part of the interest in Fourth is simple economics. Promenade rents have skyrocketed to $9-$10 per square foot while rents on Fourth range from $2 to $4.

“I see potentially more restaurants from the Promenade, looking at possibly relocating as rents go up,” said Vince Muselli, president of Muselli Commercial Realtors, which is working with owners of several buildings wanting to renovate or replace their properties.

“We’re definitely getting more walk-ins these days,” said Daphne Ford, office manager for furniture designer ICF Group, which moved to Fourth Street about two years ago from the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood.

Second Street, which flanks the Promenade to the west, is also seeing some action. The architectural firm RTK & Associates has four new building projects under design, including the former Pussycat Theater, which will become a Bucca di Beppo Italian eatery.

Several landlords on Fourth are rehabilitating old buildings to attract new retail and office tenants. RTK has built or rehabbed a row of three properties at the northeast corner of Fourth and Santa Monica, with ground-floor shops and post-production spaces on upper floors that are fully occupied.

Also, Santa Monica architect Johannes Van Tilburg bought a former parking lot near the corner of Wilshire two years ago and designed a new five-story building that will offer retail and office space along with three penthouse apartments.

Still, attracting a critical mass of retailers could be tough.

“There seems to be a focus on the city’s part to try to make Fourth and Second become more integrated parts of Third, but in the retail community, they’re not willing to accept it,” said Shaul Kuba of CIM Group LLC, the biggest property owner on the Promenade.

He said retail tenants who spend a lot of money renovating shop spaces want some sort of guaranteed return to justify their investment.

“If you’re not a substantial destination, it’s a very risky business getting off the main drag,” Kuba said. “A lot of work needs to happen for (Fourth Street) to become more friendly, but it’s certainly got the potential to have additional retail.”

Rainer Beck, who owns Harvelles, said he has long clamored for the area to pay more attention to the outlying streets.

“The Bayside District has placed too much emphasis on the Promenade at the expense of the streets that need help,” Beck said. “It’s changed gradually.”

For example, lights have been placed on every other tree on Fourth Street, which helps encourage foot traffic at night. “It’ll never be the Promenade, but the more pedestrian traffic can be encouraged, the better,” he said.