[img]1|left|||no_popup[/img]If it has been awhile since you last decamped in downtown Los Angeles, you doubtless will be as delightfully shocked as I was yesterday when I went to inspect what I thought would be the smoldering ashes from last Sunday night’s hooligan riot over the Lakers championship.
Gentility.
Suavity.
Cleanliness.
These three desperately needed elements have come to downtown.
Amazingly, gentility, suavity and cleanliness have transformed the southwest corner of Flower Street and Pico Boulevard into a civic showcase where you will find an unusual family-owned business.
The curiously titled Holy Grail Shoe Store — you never expected those four words to be strung together — is at the eye of this sparkling gentrification.
Sale Hours
Smacked down Sunday night by mindless thugs, Holy Grail , with the help of the activist/professor Earl Ofari Hutchinson and other neighbors, is staging a Bounce Back From the Riot or Buy-In promotion tomorrow.
It starts at 12 noon and will last until 7 in an effort to telegraph to the hooligans that a little rioting amounts to no more than a baby hiccup.
If you believe in helping others, if you have the remotest need to pick up a pair of the hippest sneakers on your street, or if you want to bag any Laker star or Laker memorabilia, Holy Grail may be your destination.
Broad strokes of gentility, dear reader, have come to specific neighborhoods of downtown that have not been this polished since Teddy Roosevelt’s horse was born.
Test it.
Walk around by yourself.
Unprotected and unaccosted.
Exult.
It is breathing a magnificent air that makes you want to elevate your voice and let others know.
Since growing up, a few decades ago, I hardly ever remember anyone saying on, say, a Sunday afternoon, “Let’s go downtown and have a great time.”
Different Side of Los Angeles
I mean, there is a reason Playa Vista was not planted in the burly, smoky bosom of downtown.
Los Angeles often is described as America’s most laidback city, and in the same breath, the coldest.
Not anymore at the intersection of Pico and Flower where Richard Torres Sr., a modest, reserved and quite soft-spoken conservative businessman, and his 29-year-old son Richard Jr. have spent the last year and a half trying to turn Holy Grail , a thousand square feet, into a self-propelling business.
Yes, you can distinguish them apart. Each represents his generation, the father immaculately in a conservative business suit, white shirt, perfectly knotted necktie, his pony-tailed son in a commercial tee-shirt and jeans.
When it came to articulating their circumstance, move over Barack Obama.
With Father’s Day hours away, Mr. Torres and his son are the classiest father and son team I have encountered.
I was stopped short by the powerful impression father and son made at yesterday’s media conference — organized, I believe, by Mr. Hutchinson.
How to Gain Attention
I counted 6 or 7 television cameras, representatives from LAPD Chief Bill Bratton, Mayor Villaraigosa (no, not his new television reporter gal-pal), City Councilwoman Jan Perry and a bank of civil rights type personalities that I have not seen for awhile in one place.
The iron fist of inspiration and high-grade organization that Mr. Hutchinson lent to the occasion was eye-catching. As they say, Mr. Hutchinson knows how to throw a media party and trumpet his stentorian message of brotherhood to the farthest and unlikeliest corners of Our Town.
I was arrested, if you will forgive the exquisite hyperbole, by the obvious self effacement and the muscular moral character of the Torres gentlemen.
If you don’t make a purchase tomorrow, it still would be worthwhile to visit the store, congratulate them, wish them strength.
With a splendid example of neighbor helping forming a backdrop, I spoke separately with father and son yesterday.
A Closer Look
The modest — dare I say humble? — manner with which they conducted themselves amidst the flurry of unsought media attention was a textbook reminder of how to behave when shock treatment is thrust upon you.
I have only met one or two persons in my life who have run away from an uninvited avalanche of instant publicity.
And now the Torres men can be added.
All of television-watching Los Angeles knows what Holy Grail is going to do tomorrow.
Would that it could be said of any of us — he is shy and self-effacing.
If you have a reasonable arm, you can stand in front of the Holy Grail Shoe Store and nearly throw a baseball to the Staples Center in one direction, the Convention Center in the other.
A handsome — gentrified — apartment building is immediately to the west of Holy Grail.
The dimwitted thugs struck Holy Grail apparently because everything else was sealed off.
“We have always wanted to put in a rolldown gate,” the younger Mr. Torres said. But the $15,000 price tag made that impossible. “We had put a lot of money into the business, and we really couldn’t afford it. We went 6 months, a year, no problems. We weren’t worried. Now this.
“Last Saturday, the day before the Laker game, I had room on my credit card, and for some bizarre reason, I called for an estimate on a rolldown gate. They came here last Monday, we made a deposit, and now they are going to install it.”
The elder Mr. Torres — who has turned a “grungy hole in the wall,” his words, into a smart, hip center of commerce in a year and a half — said neither he nor his son anticipated a breakdown of civil behavior.
Laker aficionados patronize their store seven days a week. This was a rock out of the sky.
“I never have felt unsafe here,” the younger Mr. Torres said. “I moved here. That is how much I love this neighborhood. I thought (rioting) was a thing of the past.”
Holy Grail is not a standard retail outlet. It turns out to be a destination for the segment of our population known as Sneakerheads. Its inventory is created by customers who bring in sneakers they have collected, and Holy Grail acts as the middle man in transactions with another segment of the public, on an 80 percent to 20 percent split.
The catchy Holy Grail name derives from the fact that Holy Grail sells hard-to-get sneakers to passionate customers who nearly pant for them,
