Bookstore’s Move Ends Independent Era on Promenade

Retail

by Deborah Belgum

After nearly 20 years on the Third Street Promenade, Hennessey + Ingalls Art Bookstore will be moving off the Santa Monica pedestrian mall and around the corner to Wilshire Boulevard.

With independent bookseller Midnight Special moving from its long-time location next winter, there will be no independents left at the popular shopping street.

Mark Hennessey, owner of the store that specializes in art books, said high rent forced him to move his store next August when his lease expires.

Hennessey has been paying $5 a square foot for 7,500 square feet of space. But Wells Fargo Bank Trust Department, which manages the building owned by the Hunt Family, is raising the rent to match the $9 to $10 a square foot many landlords are getting on the Promenade.

Hennessey + Ingalls will move into a new 8,100-square-foot space on Wilshire Boulevard located between 2nd and 3rd streets, near a recently opened Houston’s restaurant. Hennessey wouldn’t disclose terms of his 15-year lease but said it was less than $5 a square foot.

“I really tried hard to stay,” he said. “Some customers probably won’t follow us no matter how many times we tell them we are only moving 100 yards away.

Sweat Equity

With a new co-director in Los Angeles, Sweatshop Watch plans to hold more retailers accountable for buying goods from garment sweatshops.

Victor Narro was recently named co-director of the organization formed in 1995 after 80 Thai immigrants were found working in slave-like conditions in El Monte.

The group will be monitoring how new free trade pacts that start in 2005 affect local garment workers and their employers. Some of the those pacts include the Free Trade Area of the Americas, which will extend the North American Free Trade Agreement to the tip of South America.

“We will be creating a stronger social watch program in L.A. and elsewhere,” Narro said.

Last fall, Sweatshop Watch backed a lawsuit filed by the Asian Pacific American Legal Center accusing Forever 21 Inc., a Los Angeles-based retail chain, of using a garment contractor who allegedly underpaid and overworked its employees.

The suit was dismissed earlier this year. Forever 21 turned around and filed a defamation lawsuit against the Garment Worker Center and the Coalition for Human Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles.

But Narro said Sweatshop Watch continues to monitor the garment contractors used by Forever 21. The advocacy group is also planning to organize a boycott of Forever 21 stores on the East Coast as well as resume demonstrations outside its Los Angeles stores.

Other projects include supporting enforcement of laws that protect garment workers and monitoring contractors to make sure they don’t break any labor laws.

Staff reporter Deborah Belgum can be reached at (323) 549-5225 ext. 228, or at

[email protected].