Spring Street

A New York brewing company that suspended Internet-based trading for its stock last week amid regulatory scrutiny said Monday that regulators have agreed to allow the system to resume with several minor conditions. The fate of Spring Street Brewing Co.'s innovative trading system, called Wit-Trade, has generated intense interest on Wall Street and among small businesses.

When Carlos de la Rosa opened a convenience store on Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles last year, he was hoping to get in on the ground floor of the residential development boom. His dream was to someday sell organic vegetables and fresh-cut flowers to urban loft dwellers. But in his first year, he made ends meet selling cold drinks and cigarettes, mostly to people getting on and off the dozens of buses that stopped outside his door.

Spring Street, known in grander days as the Wall Street of the West, has had a hard struggle over the past decade to regain some vestige of its former respectability. Bordered by Skid Row, divided from the new, largely Anglo, Bunker Hill commercial center by Latino Broadway, Spring Street still limps along, despite an infusion of $50 million in public money by the Community Redevelopment Agency.

Los Angeles Theatre Center got a new lease on life--through October--when the Los Angeles City Council voted 9 to 3 Tuesday to approve $750,000 for the building's operating costs and debt service. At the same time, it was clear that a report on the future of the four-theater facility at 517 S. Spring St., due by the end of September, looms ever larger as the key indicator of what will happen to LATC.

When musician Forrest Pierson and his wife, salon owner Ratana Tanasaphaisal, moved into a fifth-floor condominium on downtown Los Angeles' Spring Street five years ago, they believed that the panhandlers and drug dealers would soon be swept away, and that the old, boarded-up office buildings would fill with workers, interesting shops and cafes. But the street's only upscale eatery closed two years ago, as did a promising new nightclub.

Sure, you can get smoky ribs or hot links at Spring Street Smoke House. No problem. But unlike most barbecue joints, it will also serve you fire-roasted veggies or green salad with raspberry vinaigrette. If you don't feel like a soda, there's plenty of Pellegrino water. At one time the smoked chicken sandwich even came with tarragon sauce and the sliced brisket included a side of au jus. But this place's uniqueness isn't about it being pretentious.

When the artist otherwise known as Gronk first moved to downtown Los Angeles in the early 1980s, he found it "littered with all these little bits and pieces," the raw materials that furnish a creative mind. Drug dealers and prostitutes prowled the streets near his apartment. For years, there was no trash pickup at his building.

The 11 people who could determine the future of Los Angeles Theatre Center met for lunch in Mayor Tom Bradley's office Monday and began their summer-long deliberations. Appointed by Bradley a month ago, this group was charged with figuring out how to ensure "the permanent survival of theater" in the Spring Street building that houses LATC. The Community Redevelopment Agency has said that it can no longer afford LATC's facilities and debt.

In downtown Los Angeles, it wasn't unusual to walk down the street and see ruins and old dustbins and people milling about aimlessly. Occasionally, slicing through this emptiness, there'd be the thumping bass of a boombox. A dozen or so years later, change and gentrification have taken away much of the ruins and dust, and people mill about with more purpose. As for that unexpected noise: On Thursday, "Unsilent Night," an ambient piece by composer Phil Kline for crowd, cassette tape and boombox, debuts in downtown L.A..

Los Angeles has a bike plan, and it's a fine idea. We have quite enough cars and quite enough drivers, thank you very much, and the counter-stereotypical truth is that we also have thousands and thousands of bicyclists who would gladly leave the car in the garage (or not buy one in the first place) and take to the pedals if only we could make enough room for them on the pavement. That's the idea behind the mile-and-a-half or so of green-painted bike lane that runs along Spring Street downtown.