The assignment is to find Main Street. We're not talking Thomas Bros. here, but a journalistic concept--a sense of place, mood, texture. Maybe even substance. There are a million main streets in the naked county . . . dozens, anyway.
And Melrose Avenue seems an obvious place to start.
"Yeah," sneers Billy Shire, a Melrose original. "A little too obvious, don't you think?"
Well, thank you, Billy, but maybe that's the point. Now that Fox TV is spooning out the hip hard bodies of "Melrose Place" to a gullible nation, now that Johnny Rockets can be found serving burgers and malts in London and Tokyo, now that your cousin from Kansas has posed for a snapshot outside Retail Slut, isn't it about time to let the rest of the world in on a dirty little L.A. secret?
The bloom is off Melrose.
This neon-lit avenue of the hip, quasi-hip, \o7 faux \f7 hip and too hip--once so happening, so ahead-of-the-curve--is past its prime, a facsimile of its former self, a place that has become . . .\o7 too obvious.\f7
Shire is in a position to know. The 41-year-old Berkeley-type (actually, he's an Echo Park native, but nonetheless a Berkeley-type) presides over a little empire of stores--the Soap Plant, Wacko, Zulu, La Luz de Jesus. Little did anyone know that when Shire created the Wacko sign it would become a celebrated icon for weird L.A.
Shire is not exactly sure when the decline of Melrose began. He mentions the "jobbers," peddling factory seconds at Melrose prices. He mentions the opening of that mall store--the Gap--and that was five years ago.
Shire isn't alone in his distress.\o7 Too obvious \f7 is what Klaus Wille of Neo 80, a fashion boutique, thinks when he walks past new shops peddling factory seconds at Melrose prices. \o7 Too obvious\f7 is fashion designer Lisa Elliot's critique of the hamburger-chomps-City-Hall architecture of The Burger That Ate L.A. And \o7 too obvious \f7 may serve as the epitaph for Ecru, a posh men's store established with such bravado that they built the name right into the design--a monstrously impressionistic E-C-R-U, each letter about 13 feet tall. Now it's vacant, a glaring, gaping failure.
"Who's going to rent something that's got somebody's name on it?" Shire mutters.
Shire, Wille and Elliot all qualify as Melrose originals; they were there at the creation, when low rents of the late 1970s and early '80s attracted the \o7 artiste\f7 crowd. There remain relatively few trendsetters who helped transform Melrose Avenue from a tired street lined with tailors, artisans and antique shops into a phenomenon of L.A. style.
