By Barry Owens
There are few sidewalks in this city as broad and empty as the one along Douglas Avenue just across from East High School.
It does bristle, but only briefly, with students after the 3 O’clock bell. The music stores on the corners vibrate with customers, heard but unseen. The FedEx driver will stop and disappear inside a door or two with his dolly. Other times of day it is possible to traverse the wide walk from Grove to the Canal Route and not see another face along the way but the one reflecting back at you from an empty storefront.
“Bleak,” says one business owner along the strip.
“Come and gone, in and out,” says another of the high and low tides she’s seen along the avenue over the years.
“Kind of crappy now,” says a third, describing his own storefront.
Doors up and down the avenue are locked, even some of those that lead to thriving businesses inside. A two-by-four plank is wedged in the crumbling stairwell of the “Professional Building,” blocking the entrance. Signs in some storefronts tell customers that parking and open doors can be found around back. Others just read CLOSED, or FOR SALE. A Pit Bull, stenciled in with spray paint, growls on the face of a steel door. Elsewhere the graffiti is cryptic, but no less ominous. The messages all seem to say the same thing: “don’t come around here.”
But there is life behind the storefronts and merchants up and down the avenue who say they dream of a more inviting environment outside their front door. Some of have Douglas Design District stickers in their windows.
“It looks kind of scary on the outside, kind of intimidating, which is good because it keeps people away,” says Chris West, president of MC+W Design.
He was speaking of his own building at 2110 E. Douglas, the one with the plank in the stairwell. It is the 1950s era “Professional Building,” a two-story office building with a baby blue façade. The building has seen better days, but inside renovations are under way.
“I call it Perry Mason modern,” West said of the interior, which came equipped with heavy blond wood, period hardware and plumbing in nearly every room—a holdover from when it housed dental offices. There is also fresh paint on the walls, a few new desks inside and a conference table set up in what will be the design firm’s lobby.
West said he hopes to move in next year. In the meantime, the plank in the stairwell stays until conditions improve on the street. It seems too risky right now to refurbish the facade, he said. Graffiti taggers would have a field day.
“They even tagged my two-by-four,” he said.
“Why would they graffiti a paint store?” says Lyle Tanquary, owner of Andrew Decorating Center up the street. “I definitely have more paint than any graffiti artist.”
He said he paints over it as fast as he finds it. The storefront, meanwhile, is papered over or otherwise blanked out. Broken windows have been replaced with panels. The doors are locked. Longtime customers know to go around back. Tanquary said he would like to one day paint a mural out front, something nice, to make it look what is supposed to be: “an old time paint store.” But like West, he’s holding out on improvements to the exterior for now.
“Every time we do our windows,” he said, “they break them out.”
The neighborhood behind the strip is, in short, sketchy. New Salem is heavy on rental properties, seemingly light on pride of place, and the crime rate far outpaces the numbers east of Grove. It is possible to buy a well-kept single family home there. It is also possible to buy crack. Merchants say the neighborhood has been a burden on the strip, equal to or worse than the elimination of on-street parking there in the late 1980s.
“As the area has kind of deteriorated over the years, it has hurt our walk in customers,” says Tanquary.
To be sure, there are businesses that have survived along the row despite the decline of the neighborhood. Among them are the music stores, the paint store, a banner and sign store, upholstery shop, salon, medical supply store, photo processing place, the low-wattage television station on one corner and the well-appointed attorney’s office, with wood paneled walls and leather sofas, on another.
Few of those business rely on the walk-in customer, though. So long as the avenue remains intimidating and pedestrian unfriendly, walk-in businesses, such as a café or shoe store, would seem unlikely to thrive there.
The Douglas Design District, a merchants association, has plans to hang banners, install street furniture and greenery and otherwise spruce up the avenue from Washington to Oliver. Those improvements would be welcome, said West, who is a member of the association, but they would only do so much.
“It is really up to the property owners to take the initiative on this,” he said. “We all, as owners and tenants of those properties, need to understand that we do need to put our best face forward.”
There were hopeful signs of new life up the avenue near Grove, where late last month Blake Phillips, with Carl Chuzy real estate, was sweeping out an empty shop.
He said was he was preparing the place for a new tenant, a cleaning company. And next door, he said, representatives from a Buddhist temple were talking a real hard look at the abandoned pizza parlor.
Then he excused himself to meet the FedEx driver, who had apparently not read the note left on the door.
“Around the back,” it said.
