Spotlight on Burbank
Restaurants, Movie Screens Create Vibrant Nightlife Lure
By DARRELL SATZMAN
Staff Reporter
It started on “Laugh In” and quickly made its way into Johnny Carson’s monologue on the “Tonight Show.” Before long the mocking phrase “beautiful downtown Burbank” had become a national joke.
With up to half the storefronts along San Fernando Boulevard shuttered at any given time, Burbank Village of the 1970s and 1980s lived up to that sleepy image. Times have changed, but the kidding still stings.
“It was pretty dismal in the ’70s but since then it has become quite a good venue,” said Robert “Bud” Ovrom, Burbank’s longtime city manager. “Now the question becomes how do we take it up a notch.”
The opening of the Media City Center mall and retail development in the late 1980s, along with an AMC Theatres multiplex, helped spark a downtown revival. Now city officials and downtown merchants are pinning their hopes for further economic growth on a larger AMC complex and the mall’s long-promised renovation.
“Nobody wants this to be Santa Monica Promenade or Old Town Pasadena,” Ovrom said. “You have to have a balance where you bring in enough people to make it economically viable but not so many that it becomes too hectic.”
Despite the loss of thousands of high-paying aerospace jobs in the 1980s and early 1990s, growth in the local entertainment industry has helped Burbank, a city of over 100,000 people, avoid the economic pain of other Southern California cities. A decade of slow but steady progress helped transform the once struggling city center into a healthy commercial district.
Burbank Village, which is also the city’s government center, is bordered by Burbank Boulevard on the west and Verdugo Avenue on the east, Glen Oaks Boulevard on the north and First Street on the south. The main commercial areas are along San Fernando Boulevard and in the Media City Center east of Magnolia.
With the opening of 28 AMC screens in three Village venues, along with the opening of a handful of national chains like Market City Caffe, Gordon Biersch Brewing Co. and Starbucks, the Village remains quiet during the day and bustles with diners, moviegoers and strollers on a typical evening.
AMC’s commitment to the neighborhood might have the greatest impact. “The AMC is going to be a huge catalyst for a lot of things,” Pillard said. “Downtown has its own charm and it’s own culture and that’s not something that can be recreated somewhere else.”
Scheduled to open in 2003, the new 16-screen AMC project, which will include space for three new restaurants, replaces an existing 14-screen complex that is one of the top grossing theaters in the nation, according to AMC officials.
At a time when many exhibitors are scaling back development plans, AMC is keeping the existing theater open while the new one is being built, said spokesman Rick King.
The new theaters are expected to add to the more than 2.4 million moviegoers who visited one of the Burbank Village AMC screens in 2001.
Meanwhile, Center Trust, the owner of the long-underperforming Media City Center mall, will undertake a renovation to make the mall entrance more accessible to San Fernando Boulevard. The mall is anchored by Macy’s, Sears and Mervyn’s.
A spokeswoman for P.F. Chang’s China Bistro said the chain had reached an agreement to build a new restaurant at the front of the mall along Magnolia Boulevard that is tentatively scheduled to open in spring 2003.
While positive signs abound, there are challenges. Tax receipts for Village area dining grew only slightly in 2001, increasing by 5 percent over the year before. That followed two years of exponential growth 21 percent in 2000 and 29 percent in 1999. Stephanie Pillard, executive director of the Burbank Downtown Stakeholders Association, which manages the area’s Business Improvement District, attributed the slowdown in growth to the terrorist attacks.
Competition from the Empire Center at Victory and Burbank boulevards, a new Burbank development that boasts several big box retailers and chain restaurants, has put more pressure on the Media City Center mall. And several merchants complained about a lack of parking and overly aggressive parking and traffic enforcement driving customers away.
City officials reject those claims, however, pointing out that there are 8,000 parking spaces in the Village, almost all of them free.
