Once again the Beverly Center is under renovation. The shopping center is being remade for 2018— luxury retail alone is no longer enough. Has not been enough for some time. Walking around it today, mid-December, the pitch of the holiday season, the Center is morbid, moribund, nothing at all like the celebratory communal experience of its neighbor a few blocks down Third Street. There is no spirit to it, no reason to be there beyond humdrum commerce.
Long ago, at the very end of the last millennium, the Center was nirvana for a certain type of person, a class, those with a few kids and a German-manufactured sport utility vehicle with plenty of trunk space. On weekends they would trek up to the city from light beige homes built on light beige hillsides and spend a whole day grazing, Bed Bath & Beyond to Bloomingdale’s, maybe a movie in there somewhere if they got tired. They would come to Los Angeles to go the Center alone, no need to go anywhere else. The Center had it all.
To the kids it seemed like something out of science fiction: the size and shape of the thing, the inartful way it seemed to have been plopped down in the middle of everything, an alien ship landing with no consideration of its surroundings. There was no parking lot, no endless pile of black like at the South Coast Plaza. The parking was in the building itself, a soaring eight stories tall. It was all so futuristic, so novel, like the way airport terminals once felt. And those glass escalators climbing gently along the La Cienega and Beverly facades, and being deposited directly into the Center, and seeing the improbable mess below stretching out in every direction; a transcendent experience, as spectacular and signature as Space Mountain. And that was just the entrance.
Those escalators are still there, and they still impress. Little else does. The Center is quiet like death. Its patrons have vanished, tired or dead or just done shopping, their thirst for commodities finally slaked. There is neither music nor din, no hint of the hard midrange hum usually associated with capital.
It sounds emptier than it is, but it is still relatively empty. Wide promenades meant to convey throngs of shoppers toting strollers and Big Brown Bags are pleasantly clear, like boulevards in the Valley. Shoppers make eye contact as they pass, suspicious of one another’s intentions. Staff with nothing to do stare out the doors of their stores, straightening piles of sweaters that are already straight. With every brand it is the same — Tiffany, YSL, Ralph Lauren, Foot Locker. Top to bottom, upmarket to down, there is nothing to do, no client to serve. Only the Apple Store, tucked away in a corner next to the Ferrari Store (???), is ever at all busy, and that has far more to do with the color rose gold than the Center. Wetzel’s Pretzels seems to do an alright business.
But that is all ok, even by design. For the past year the Center has been undergoing an extensive remodel meant to bring it screaming into the second decade of the twentyfirst century. They are most of the way there already; scaffolding disappears by the day, enormous highresolution screens advertising Apple Music and underwear now dominate the intersections of Beverly and San Vicente, Beverly and La Cienega, La Cienega and Third. By next year, The Reimagining Of The Beverly Center will be complete.
This latest remodel is centered around the most thrilling thing in the world these days, the new rock and roll: food. Gone are the passé chains favored by Boomers, the California Pizza Kitchen and the Grand Lux Café and PF Chang’s. In their place, a whole host of Thrilling Dining Concepts: Michael Mina’s Cal Mare, “a celebration of coastal Italian cuisine with Mediterranean and California influences;” Farmhouse, “the brainchild of Laurent Halasz, who moved to Southern California from the South of France close to a decade ago, bringing with him a lifelong respect for quality ingredients and simple flavors;” and Yardbird, a “6,000 square foot house of worship to farm-fresh ingredients, classic Southern cooking, culture and hospitality.” There will be others too, including Eggslut, the city’s favorite seven dollar egg sandwich.
The remodel may well work; indeed, with a five hundred million dollar infusion of capital, it damn well better. Hungry millennials with relatively low fixed costs will dine on expensive, expertly-prepared branzino, and after they finish they may take a stroll upstairs and purchase a turtleneck at Uniqlo, or at least a cortado at a yet-to-be-announced progressive coffee shop. They can buy a new pair of Nike Free 5.0s at the Nike Store, a bag of disposable fast fashion from H&M. Shoppers will return to corridors now flooded with natural light via newly-installed skylights, and once again the Beverly Center will be A Place To Be. But only for so long. Some years hence, whenever the next generation begins to impose its passions on the world, it will find itself in a familiar position. All the Casually Prepared California-Provencal Cooking in the world will not save it from another reimagining.
And that is alright. The Beverly Center is one of the few constants in a city that prides itself on ephemerality. Regardless of the year, of the decade, it reflects the latest vision of Los Angeles back itself, is whatever we have decided to be at any given moment. It changes with the times, mostly.
Along its backside, behind an unassuming enclosure, oil drilling continues unabated. A century on, the Salt Lake Field still gives generously, silently, invisibly. One has a difficult time imagining any future renovation impacting the ability of the Plains Exploration & Production company to extract fossil fuel from the slate beneath the Center.
