Before the Mall Palls

Many a modern city is suffering from an epidemic known as the Downtown Disease, or Business Center Blight. There are three courses of treatment: 1) rerouting through traffic away from the business district; 2) cutting off vehicular traffic altogether, as Copenhagen did last month on its principal shopping street, the 2/3-mile-long Stroget; 3) performing major surgery known as "making a mall."

One of the most recent such operations was performed in Pomona, Calif., 28 miles east of Los Angeles, a fast-growing agricultural center of about 75,000 with a number of missile and aircraft equipment factories and four colleges. Though the patient is still not completely out of its bandages, the surgery seems to have been a brilliant success.

Bringing on the Bulldozers. A year ago, downtown Pomona seemed to be a terminal case. The main drag, Second Street, was a sorry sight; a third of its buildings were vacant, shops that once were elegant had become clustered holes-in-the-wall--paint peeling, screens rusted to holes. Businessmen and merchants who had not yet moved away were wondering if there was any future at all in the downtown area, and landlords were making things worse by forgoing repairs.

Since 1946 there had been talk about doing something about Second Street, but nothing came of it. A major obstacle was the possibility that if the mall did not work out, the businesses there could sue the city for sealing off the street to vehicular traffic.

In 1960 a committee of property owners talked the state legislature into pass ing a bill that gave merchants a chance to file in advance for the damages they thought they might suffer if the street were closed. And while this was going through the legislature, the committee was hard at work selling the mall idea to the Second Street business community. The result was that nobody filed a claim, and early this year the bulldozers went to work.

While the Spirit Lasts. Today, Second Street is a curbless vista of black concrete and pebbled surfaces, studded with trees and dotted with fountains. At its eastern end is a new $4,000,000 department store, and midway on its length a 7 1/2-story office building is under construction. Behind the stores the city had already built large parking spaces, considered by mall men to be a key factor in the success of pedestrians-only areas. In effect, downtown has been converted to an oversized shopping center. Pomona is also considering amplifying its parking facilities by building a monorail between the mall and the fair grounds, two miles away, which are used only 17 days of the year.

Downtown Pomona's physical face lifting has led to a new elan among storekeepers and their customers. Shops have been refurbished, stocks have been replenished, new businesses have moved in. "There's an air of excitement and pride," says one Pomonan. "I was downtown last Sunday, and there must have been 500 people just walking up and down the street looking in the store windows. I can't remember how long it's been since people came downtown on Sunday." Exclaimed a merchant: "Why, I came out of my store at midnight the other night and would you believe it, there were still people walking around the mall."

Mayor James S. Baker, 45, is well aware that Pomona's new civic excitement will taper off, no matter how successful the project is. Addressing one of the many delegations from other cities that have visited Pomona to study the pros and cons of malls, he warned: "We realize that this spirit can't last forever, but we are trying to get as much done as we can while the spirit lasts."

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