Published: October 30, 2011
(Page 2 of 2)
Much of the ire has been directed at Irving and Ryan Chase, a father-and-son team who own a large swath of buildings on the east end of Fourth Street that had long been called Fiesta Marketplace.
Monica Almeida/The New York Times
Business has slowed at older downtown businesses like Mina Bridal.
Monica Almeida/The New York Times
Several new tenants, including the American Barber Shop, are thriving.
Monica Almeida/The New York Times
Renovations to the area have resulted in more benches but the loss of a carousel.
Monica Almeida/The New York Times
Carolina Sarmiento, who is on the board of a community group, said she felt a sense of loss in some of the changes.
For decades, the area housed a carousel and small bandstand, which served as an impromptu gathering spot and occasionally as a more formal event space. When the Chases revamped the area, they removed the carousel and the kiosk, replacing it with a large tree and circle of benches. The project was partly financed by a $765,000 redevelopment grant from the city.
The Yost Theater, a former Spanish movie house that eventually became a home for a Pentecostal church, has now been transformed into a club and concert venue. Boosters hope that it will be one of the major draws for downtown, but detractors see it as a symbol of the immigrant community’s losing what it once had.
“You have this area that was something public and you have an owner who can just take it away without any input from the community that really relies on it,” said Carolina Sarmiento, a board member of El Centro Cultural de Mexico, a community group that was once housed in a downtown building but was recently kicked out, when owners said that the teenagers it attracted were damaging the building. That prompted a new round of criticism that the new projects were designed to get rid of Mexican culture in the area.
“They are only interested in making money for themselves, that’s it,” said Sam Romero, a longtime community activist who has run a Catholic book and gift shop for more than 40 years. Mr. Romero bristles at the suggestion he should modernize his store.
“I have one of the messiest stores in downtown, I don’t care,” he said. “If I go buy expensive new furniture and merchandise, people aren’t going to come here. And then I have a loan I can’t repay and they’ve succeeded in kicking me out.”
Irving Chase said that he had gone to great lengths to help many of the struggling businesses, reducing their rent by as much as 75 percent.
“They’re in business because I’m propping them up,” he said. “But I can’t do that forever. Some of them are going to make it because they are going to change, and others are just going to keep doing things the way they’ve always done, and they will fail.”
His son said he had purposely kept vacancies in his buildings for more than a year, waiting for just the right tenants. When one barber shop owner approached him, he initially said he was not interested, but when he looked at the Web site for the shop, he realized that the “cool retro vibe would be something totally different for the area,” Ryan Chase said. Now, the American Barber Shop has a prime corner of Fourth Street, with its vintage barber chairs clearly visible from the street.
At the west end of Fourth Street sits Calacas, a gift shop that has become one of the most popular new places. The owners, Jackie and Rudy Cordova, sell everything from tiles to papier-mâché skeletons.
For those who worry about gentrification, Rudy Cordova is seen as a born-and-bred native. For those eager to revitalize the district, he is seen as a brilliant entrepreneur. Mr. Cordova, a 38-year-old son of immigrants, thinks of himself as somewhere in between. His children are learning Spanish, he said, but his son is attending far fewer quinceañeras than he did at his age. He knows today’s teenagers are unlikely to shop in the discount stores along Fourth Street that his parents once favored.
“But can you really wipe out the culture of Santa Ana?” he asked. “No matter what changes, this city is going to be Mexican for a long time.”
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