Pining for the past
To mangle a quote from Heraclitus, “Nobody steps on the same Pine Avenue twice.”
Like a river, it constantly changes, rushing from glamour and crazed busy-ness to squalor and a somewhat sinister quietness and to a myriad combinations in between.
I’ve been working on or very near Pine, Long Beach’s original Main Street, for half a century.
In the mid-to late-1970s it was well past its prime but had yet to hit rock bottom. It somewhat bustled with plenty of places to shop, including the massive Grand Dame of old Long Beach business, Buffums Department Store, which began its reign well before my time, starting as Wm. Schilling & Sons in 1892 before being purchased by Charles and Edward Buffum in 1904 and growing into the giant six-floor mercantile palace in 1924.
The place lasted at that location until it was demolished in 1985 to be replaced by the WeWork building.
But that wasn’t the end of Buffums. It opened a two-story store as one of the anchors for the Long Beach Plaza, a center built to be one of the renaissances of Downtown Long Beach, with the intent to deliver to shoppers several Pine Avenue standbys that had disappeared or were crippled by declining shopping habits of the city’s residents who had taken to bringing their business to dazzling new shopping centers in the 1950s to Lakewood and Los Altos. Gone or going were big stores like Kress, Walker’s, Woolworth and Sav–On. The Long Beach Plaza was also meant to hijack some of those stores’ customers by bringing in, besides Buffums, Montgomery Ward and J.C. Penney as anchors.
The Plaza had a breathtakingly short life, opening in 1982 and demolished less than 20 years later in 2000.
In its more robust days in the 1960s and the 1970s, a stroll down Pine would take you past bookstores, Morey’s Music, See’s Candy, pawnshops, jewelry stores, Hubert’s Cafeteria, watering holes such as the Press Club and the Turf Club, hat stores, shoe stores and fur shops.
The avenue was pretty dead, however, as it neared the 1990s.
In 1988, longtime hospitality entrepreneur John Morris, took on the role of pioneer, launching his bar/restaurant Mum’s at 144 Pine Ave., adding Cohiba on the second floor a couple of years later, both establishments brought a spark of life to Downtown.
“I was like the Lone Ranger,” he recalls now, from his Alamitos Landing restaurant The Boathouse.
“There was nothing down there at the time. King’s Fish House was under construction, the Blue Line was under construction.” Mum’s (named in honor of Morris’ mother) began doing a good business, mostly thanks to Morris’ connections in Long Beach and in the world of sports. You could usually find someone with a championship ring sitting at his table out front.
He brought some creative events to the street, including Thunder on Pine for the Grand Prix and New Year’s Eve on Pine with live bands playing on the avenue and special seating for diners and partiers. “We sat 300 people that night. You can’t imagine how happy that made me,” he recalls.
Morris, like others before and after him, became disillusioned with the politics surrounding Downtown and, after running Smooth’s, a reworked version of Mum’s, from 2004 to 2008, he made the move to the Boathouse, where he continued to bring special events to business with the annual July 3 Big Bang on the Bay fireworks show and block party.
Pine has once again reverted to its struggling days, continuing to feel the aftereffects of COVID.
“I remember Jimmy (Loizides, owner of George’s Greek Cafe on Pine) telling me that in the days before COVID, when all the businesses Downtown were still open, he would do 500 customers a day, seven days a week, and I was terribly jealous. Then after the epidemic he would go nuts if he ever did 100.
“But there is still something like 70 percent of Downtown people working from home,” he said, “You have to do a lot more to get business. You need to bring Thunder on Pine back, you need to bring New Year’s Eve on Pine back, the city and the business district has to do more. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. You just need to get creative.”