I’m lucky that when walking from my downtown office to my home in the Alamitos Beach neighborhood, I can detour just half a block to reach a grocery store and pick up daily essentials. This store—the Vons at the intersection of Broadway and Atlantic—is not a full-service supermarket, but does carry most of our regular necessities. Until 2002, when a full-service Albertson’s opened a quarter mile away, this quaint Vons was the largest market in the area. Additional competitors have appeared since that time, particularly given the expansion of the Ralph’s at 4th and Orizaba, as well as the opening of a Fresh and Easy Neighborhood Market at 7th and Nebraska.
The Vons building had featured a façade with floor-to-ceiling windows and an arched ceiling with laminated wood beams; such elements are common in grocery store buildings designed in beach towns in the 1960s (another example is the Big Lots store at 7th Street and Junipero). But in response to the growing competition, this past January the Vons Corporation began transforming the Broadway and Atlantic building into a full-service grocery store—complete with deli counter, bakery, and built-in Starbucks. Slated to take nine months, this renovation and expansion is so extensive that the result will be, in effect, an entirely new store.
Image credit: KKE Architects
One of the most striking changes to be wrought by this transformation will involve parking. The plot of land on which the Vons lies takes up half of a city block; since the expanded supermarket will cover nearly the entire property, it will feature a rooftop parking lot. In doing so, Vons will bring a kind of urbanism to the corporate retail box, one with few precedents in Long Beach. However, for the past decade medium- and large-scale retailers like Best Buy, Home Depot, and Target have begun to explore smaller and denser development sites in southern California. In so doing, they have recognized that massive singe-story retail boxes set behind expansive fields of parking require large properties no longer readily available in the area. They have, in effect, started thinking “out of the box” regarding parking for the retail box itself.
City Place, Long Beach’s downtown six-block retail zone, illustrates the more conventional approach to locating big-box retail in urban centers, an approach that can be seen in area cities like Huntington Beach, Brea, and Burbank. Such sites are large enough for retail chain stores to build according to their standard floor plans. Parking is then located in adjacent structures, with capacity similar to that of the standard lots stretching in front of suburban stores. This approach typically works well because the first level of the parking structures has sufficient capacity for most of the year.
Another approach, one encountered in some cases of more dense retail development and the approach chosen by Vons for their renovation at Broadway and Atlantic, is to provide parking on the roof (or underneath) the retail box. This solution can be more complicated, as the buildings in question must be designed to accommodate the dynamic load of moving cars on the roof. Few know that the Ralph’s Market and Best Buy at the Marina Pacific on Pacific Coast Highway have a level of parking below.
The most extreme cases of this design involve stacking multiple retail boxes on top of each other to create a multi-level retail center. The current economic troubles have halted some planned retails centers of this nature in Los Angeles and San Diego, but one that has been built is the West Hollywood Gateway. This development includes a Beverages and More and Best Buy on the ground floor, with a Target department store above. These multi-level retail centers require significant creativity and coordination to address issues ranging from multiple loading docks to “branding” the architecture to fit the needs of each store.
Multi-level retail centers are the most complicated, expensive, and rare examples of “out of the box” retail development, but are increasingly being considered in contexts where shifting urban demographics have created underserved communities with more disposable income. Even other possibilities arise in urban environments like San Francisco or Chicago, where pedestrian-intensive environments with strong public transit make parking less essential. But even the smaller-scale vision of a Vons grocery store with parking on top represents an important example of thinking “outside the box” that holds great promise for more vibrant urban life—in Long Beach and beyond.