Shameless Self Promotion

Robert Sommers owns the Blue Heron Gallery in Fallbrook. (Renee Haines - For the North County Times)


Main Street, North County: Fallbrook capitalizes on the quaint.

By RENEE HAINES - For the North County Times | Monday, September 8, 2008 8:10 PM PDT ∞


Editor's Note: In this four-part series on North County main streets, downtown business owners share their strategies for survival in a tough economy.

FALLBROOK ---- At the downtown Swirlz Candy & Party Emporium, owner Maribel Moran has created a colorful circus room inside her old-fashioned candy store.

She's now at work on an in-store fun house.

"Remember carnival fun houses, with their curtains and their warning signs not to enter?" she asked, pointing to a curtained back room with an unfinished mannequin that will become a gypsy fortune-teller.

When it comes to creating a Main Street business that will attract more customers in a tough economy, "you have to think entertainment," Moran said.

Every North County community is feeling the effects of a national economic downturn that is causing job losses, mounting foreclosures and a decline in consumer spending. Downtowns that have survived suburban shopping mall developments, past recessions and the Internet-fed era of 24/7 competition are suffering new hard times exacerbated by high gasoline prices, steeper rents and tight credit.

"Everyone is struggling in different ways," Moran said about her Main Street neighbors.

Yet, many downtown business owners such as Moran are adopting innovative strategies to keep their doors open and preserve the heart of their community, attract a wider base of customers and preserve the heart of their community.

"If you don't want to make it bleak on Main Street, you're going to have to use every tool in your arsenal," said veteran downtown Fallbrook business owner Robert Sommers, who owns the Blue Heron Gallery. Sommers says he has a built-in cushion against local economic downturns ---- he exhibits his fine arts and antiques eight to 10 times a year at locations throughout the country.

His strategy also involves keeping inventory affordable enough for his "passionate" clients to augment his high-end sales to the consumer demographic least affected by this sour economy.

"The really rich people, they're fatter than ever," Sommers said.

Arts and development

Downtown Fallbrook promotes its numerous art galleries, art center, theaters and Art in Public Places initiatives as retail, tourism and business development calling cards.

This unincorporated community of farmlands and rolling hillsides between North County's beaches to the west and inland Interstate 15 to the east boasts an intentionally quaint central business district also capitalizing on its late 19th-century roots.

What Fallbrook Chamber of Commerce Chief Executive Officer Robert Leonard calls "customized zoning" allows the downtown district to preserve historical buildings, allows a few "faux" fronts to even out the historical look and stays flexible for future development.

Fallbrook also does its homework, adopting components of other cities' Main Street strategies. A la Carmel-by-the-Sea, chains such as Denny's are asked to discreetly inset their signage to keep Fallbrook's village look, and a "community by consensus" approach ensures that incoming businesses "fit," Leonard said.

A small bridge over a creek adjacent to downtown streets "someday might look like what San Luis Obispo has," Leonard said, referring to the central coast city's downtown "creek walk" of bridges, landscaped walkways, sculptures and fountains.

Remaining unincorporated has its advantages in not forcing Fallbrook to follow the lead of other cities in need of higher sales tax revenues to court big-box stores and sprawling residential developments to support them, Leonard said.

The community of some 44,000 people doesn't rise as high as other economies, but it doesn't fall as hard, either, he said.

That doesn't make Fallbrook immune. An August report from the San Diego Workforce Partnership on unemployment rates within San Diego County shows Fallbrook as having the highest estimated unemployment rate (7.4 percent in July) among 12 North County cities on the list.

Downtown Fallbrook's outside arts initiative took a beating this year with the theft of three outdoor bronze sculptures.

Like other cities across the country where outside art recently has gone missing, Fallbrook leaders suspect the pieces were being sold as scrap metal.

The thefts in Fallbrook led community leaders this summer to remove other sculptures adorning downtown's Village Park Square and other locations to safeguard them "until better times," Leonard said.

Downtown by donation

Still, downtown revitalization, which Leonard calls "a 15-year work in progress," continues to add new features to Main Street.

Main Street businesses have been key contributors to Fallbrook's downtown-by-donation approach.

The names of businesses, business owners and community residents adorn small plaques beside trees planted along downtown walkways, on park benches and at Village Park Square. Names of contributors also are engraved on Hollywood Boulevard-style stars embedded in concrete outside a renovated downtown theater.

Leonard said an extra bonus is that business owners and residents tend to pay special attention to the care and tending of their Main Street namesakes.

This year, 40 oversize pots containing flowering plants were donated to further "green up" downtown streets.

It was into this setting that Stefeni Engebritson of Oceanside arrived this spring, scouting locations for a Victorian-style tea shop similar to one she had operated in Carlsbad for seven years.

"I wasn't thinking recession. I was looking for a place I could make a destination," said Engebritson, who in May opened Ticky-Boo Tea Shoppe in Jackson Square, a collection of small shops clustered below street level on Main Street.

Her inspiration was Canterbury Gardens & Gifts in Escondido, she said, because its appeal as a stand-alone destination for shopping and special holiday events made it worth the drive from Oceanside for Engebritson and her friends.

Now that she has opened her shop, Engebritson is readying a second location in the little plaza that will feature Victorian-era fashions and accessories. She also is working on plans to create a Dickens-style Christmas village in the downtown plaza, complete with strolling carolers in Victoria-era garb.

"Have a theme," is her advice for other downtown retailers. "In this day and age, you have to have a theme ---- a reason for people to come."

Consumers as stakeholders

Lori Cook, the third-generation owner of her family's Village Copy Center in downtown Fallbrook, said strong local support remains crucial to preserving the heart of any community.

"The issues are always the same ---- getting people to become more aware of their own town," Cook said. "There are so many people who live in Fallbrook who don't know where downtown is ---- and they live here."

Cook said a community's residents must become personal stakeholders in preserving the history and future of their own downtowns. Thus, her business strategy involves giving residents a way to literally take ownership of at least a small piece of the city's history. The walls of Cook's copying and printing business are decorated with framed photographs depicting Fallbrook's history, and she sells specially made postcards depicting Fallbrook.

She also has created a special section in her store to sell crafts such as collectible boxes made from original fruit and vegetable crates reflecting the long agricultural roots of a community that calls itself the Avocado Capital of California.

"There is a lot of history here, a rich history, and people who live here should be aware of it," Cook said.