When did California become so terrible at protecting what makes California, California?

It seems that every week, and sometimes every day, Californians get news of yet another beloved institution closing its doors. Today alone the Bay Area news site SFGate has four stories about local businesses closing, including a plant shop in San Francisco, an Italian restaurant in Vallejo, a brewery and taproom in Alameda and a bakery-pizzeria in Berkeley.

Two weeks ago, SFGate reported that Corsagna Deli in San Francisco’s Cow Hollow neighborhood is closing after 46 years. I frequented Corsagna when I lived in San Francisco in the early 2000s and have fond memories of the Mr. Americano and Prosciutto di Parma sandwiches. Arrivederci, amico.

Earlier this year, Andersen’s Pea Soup off Highway 101 in Buellton, which served hearty fare to hungry travelers in a tudor style building, closed after 100 years. In San Diego, craft beer stalwart Stone Brewing is closing its restaurant and taproom. Santa Monica’s beloved Tar & Roses restaurant shuttered.

It’s gotten so bad that the San Francisco Chronicle has a web page dedicated to restaurant closures, and eater.com has a  monthly feature titled “The Saddest Restaurant Closures in L.A. This Month.”

When did we get so bad at protecting what makes our cities and our state special?

More than businesses closing

When a place like Taix Restaurant in Hollywood closes, L.A. doesn’t just lose one of the last places to get a traditional steak frites and haricots verts. It loses a place where parents took their kids and those kids took grandkids. It loses a place where countless thousands of Angelenos went on their first dates with their future spouses, celebrated birthdays and anniversaries and graduations and promotions, and mourned lost loved ones over meals prepared with love. The city loses another small business where waiters earned a living wage.

It loses a piece of its soul.

California has always been known for turnover. For more than a hundred years we’ve been a place to which newcomers flocked to chase their dreams. Transformation was currency. The new elbowed aside the established old. Just ask Norma Desmond, before she shoots you in the back.

Despite this history, the last few years feel different. The restaurants and businesses we’re losing aren’t going away naturally, fading quietly into the past after a good run. Something about what’s happening feels … predatory.

Many of the closures are the result of landlords either drastically raising rents or evicting tenants in order to sell their properties to developers or redevelop the properties themselves. There’s example after example after example after example. When developers make the owners of the 76-year-old art deco Bowlmor bowling alley in Santa Monica an offer they can’t refuse, it signals that everything that makes a community a community has a price tag. Everything’s for sale, including your city’s heart, the reason you moved there, here, in the first place.

All that’s left of the Bowlmor is the sign. It reminds me of how, in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, tract home developers would level a forest and then name the resultant development something like Trembling Pines.

California has created a predatory economy

Another prime example is Pickwick Bowl and Banquets in Burbank, which closed in 2023 after 65 years to make way for a townhome development. I went there with my friends as a kid. A few years ago a childhood friend told me about taking his kids there for a birthday party. The business wasn’t struggling. Like Taix, it was a place that had hosted generations. It was thriving. But new state housing laws and mandates made the property more valuable as housing than a cherished local gathering place. Like the owners of Bowlmor, the property owner saw an opportunity to cash in, and they did. Another anchor of another community will be weighed and cast aside to make way for housing that will almost certainly have the soul of flypaper.

Just up the road in Sherman Oaks, the Pineapple Hill Saloon and Grill is confronting the same possible fate after serving locals for nearly half a century.

Though I’ve studied and written about the laws and their (almost always negative) effects, until recently I hadn’t paid as much attention to the effects of YIMBYism on our collective spirit. There’s a strange sort of Vertigo effect at work. For the eponymous movie, Alfred Hitchcock’s film crew invented a filming technique they called the “Hitchcock zoom.” Operators move the camera physically in one direction while zooming in the opposite direction. The subject, in the case of Vertigo itself, Jimmy Stewart, appears suspended in space as the world either closes in or plummets away from him.

That’s kind of what’s happening in California communities these days. Regular people, residents, are in the same spaces we’ve been for years or decades. Yet the world around us is being rent asunder — pun intended. Suddenly we’re all Johnny O, clinging to the gutter atop the seven story building and watching the world fall away.

The Santa Monica gallery collective that changed art in Southern California and beyond

Which brings us to Santa Monica’s Bergamot Station. It was the first gallery collective in Southern California and remains one of the biggest. The independently leased spaces are home to contemporary painters, muralists, pop artists, sculptors and photographers. Bergamot is also home to an actors’ theater and a comedy troupe. Le Great Outdoor serves up seasonal California fare on an intimate outdoor patio.

Bergamot it the beating heart of Santa Monica’s creative scene, for which the city once was world famous. Rather than help it continue to recover from the pandemic and prepare for a new era, city officials are considering evicting the artists and entering into a long term lease agreement with a developer. Plans call for at least 700 units. The city would offer current artists a “right of return,” little comfort to those facing years of displacement.

As Santa Monica Sustainability Commissioner and city council candidate wrote in the Westside Current on Sunday, Santa Monica has plenty of other places to build housing (disclosure: I work on Oelsen’s campaign). Based on publicly available building and planning information, as well as an interactive development map maintained by UrbanizeLA, Bay City may be as far as 80% or more toward reaching its state mandated housing targets.

Going after a beloved local business or restaurant is bad enough. There’s a particular cruelty in the mindset of people who think nothing of demolishing a place where art, creativity, music and laughter thrived for decades. In the era of social media vapidity and cheap, quick serve entertainment, places like Bergamot Station are more crucial than ever.

To me, the fate of Bergamot feels like a turning point, or perhaps a tipping point. If we allow it to be destroyed, if we allow a place where the creative spirit flourishes to be replaced by soulless stack and pack apartments so that developers and investors can make millions, we will have made a decision that we can never unmake. That’s not sentimentality. Art isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity. A society that turns its back on the arts turns its back on itself.

Santa Monica has a choice. It can preserve and continue to revitalize Bergamot Station. Doing so would be an act of defiance. It would send a message that not every place is up for sale, and that some places are worth saving. Given its visibility and history, the message would resonate statewide.

Do the right thing, Santa Monica. Make an example. Take a stand. Nothing less than our souls are at stake.

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