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One year ago we sat down with the owners of five of downtown San Luis Obispo’s most well established businesses. Beth Law of Law’s Hobby, Tom Bello of Bello’s Sporting Goods, Bob Douglass of San Luis Luggage, Dean Moore of Forden’s, and Nina Chapman of Jorgensen Jewelers shared with us the secrets of their success and their concerns for the future.
Since that story ran, two of those stores have closed their doors, and a third is preparing for a temporary, two-month closure while they endure an elaborate seismic retrofit.
Tom Bello decided to call it quits in February, after working fulltime in the family-run business for 45 years. His parents started the business in 1945.
Bello said last year that his ability to change with the times had helped make his sporting goods store a success. The business had been waging a legal battle with Cal Poly over the use of the university’s logo since the late 1990s, but Bello cited a desire to spend more time with the family as his reason for closing the shop.
Jorgensen Jewelers, a downtown institution since 1959, has now sold its last gold chain; they closed on Christmas Eve 2005. Speaking with New Times last year, Chapman appeared confident that the jewelry business was strong and had changed very little in the past four decades. But she did express some concerns about retrofitting, explaining that her business would not be able to survive the expense of building a new vault and temporarily relocating.
Eventually it was determined that the old brick building at 850 Higuera was structurally sound and did not need a seismic retrofit. Chapman’s decision, like Bello’s, had more to do with family matters than with looming economic forces. Her husband — with whom she’d run the jewelry store since 1979 — passed away two years ago, so Chapman decided it was finally time to retire. And when neither of her sons was willing to carry the torch, the only option was to close up shop.
When New Times conducted a roundtable discussion of business owners in November 2004, the downtown was bracing for the grand opening of the Copelands’ Court Street shopping center. While certain segments of SLO worried that the new corporate cluster would detract from the city’s charm and prove damaging to the small mom-and-pop shops, no one in our circle of downtown merchants could mutter a single word against the Copelands. And indeed, it seems that many shoppers and shopkeepers alike have embraced the two-story Court Street center with open minds and open wallets.
Perhaps the greatest threat to downtown SLO’s commercial vitality was, and still is, the disruptive effect of the seismic retrofitting. Higuera is now lined with scaffolding and will probably remain so for another few years. Some businesses have already relocated, and many more are preparing to do so.
Douglass is frantically preparing to vacate his store at 1135 Chorro St. in order to begin six to eight weeks of construction. In the meantime, everything in his luggage shop is marked down 25 percent, but Douglass remains sanguine about the project and the future of downtown.
Business was strong in 2005, better than 2004, and Douglass feels more optimistic now than he did during our November 2004 discussion, when many downtown merchants were fretting over the possibility of a massive Marketplace project off Madonna Road.
The retrofit is the right thing to do, he said, and businesses are being responsible by doing it now rather than waiting until the 2010 deadline. Despite the two-month disruption of business, Douglass sees this as a very positive process that will make downtown safer and give him a chance to re-merchandise his store.
“We’ll come back bigger, better and stronger,� Douglass said.
As for retirement, nothing could be further from Douglass’ mind. “I feel lucky to be here,� he said. “I’ve been here since 1971. And I’ll be here quite a while longer.� ?
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