Scott Hettrick
This year has started out with news of the loss of several significant pieces of Arcadia:
the Arcadia Welfare & Thrift Store on First Avenue closed after more than 82 years of operation
the The Jewish Federation of the Greater San Gabriel and Pomona Valleys headquarters on Second Avenue got pushed out of Arcadia to a new base in Monrovia to make room for more housing on Second Avenue
Former site of Jewish Federation HQ
the City bought and closed the 101-to-1 cocktails bar on Huntington Drive; and then came the biggest blow: the low-profile but large headquarters for Vons is being moved to consolidate in the Albertson’s headquarters in Fullerton.
The Vons building off Michilinda Avenue, formerly the May Company store building (it still has the escalator inside), is home to more than 230 employees who will no longer be coming to Arcadia every day, and no longer buying coffee, lunch, and sometimes shopping and buying dinner here.
There is no common thread tying the exodus of these four places all at once, nor the closing late last year of three longtime Downtown Arcadia restaurants, Viva Zapata on First Avenue, Domenico’s on Santa Anita Avenue, or The Patio on Huntington Drive. Each situation was dealing with its own unique set of circumstances. For instance, in the case of Vons, parent company Safeway was purchased by Albertson’s and the deal was formerly approved by the government last month.
In almost all cases, there will be something new to replace the old, and meanwhile there are plenty of important new projects being built.
Some of the people involved with Zapata Vive opened the much nicer new Mexican restaurant Villa Catrina on Santa Anita Avenue. Meanwhile, the property owners of Villa Catrina are finalizing an exiciting new major renovation of the building and a modern new restaurant called
Rajin Cajun is making plans to open there later this year. As for The Patio, it was taken over by La Luna Negra, the popular Spanish restaurant that had been based in Pasadena on Green Street for 18 years.
A doctor’s office will take the place of Arcadia Welfare & Thrift. The 100-to-1 property will either be integrated into the two big new modern Mariott Hotel brand hotels — Fairfield Inn and Residence Inn — proposed to be built on the adjacent property now occupied by Santa Anita Inn, or the city will make it into a pocket park. And a big new medical office campus is well underway across the street from the 100-to-1 building and Santa Anita Inn, just down the road from where another new multi-story medical center was opened last year across the street from Methodist Hospital.
Vons headquarters
Many developers are already bidding tens of millions of dollars on the prime nine-acre Vons property just north of Huntington Drive behind the El Rancho Santa Anita retail center anchored by Ralph’s and immediately behind (south of) the Vista Cove senior living center, the latter of which is leasing nearly an acre of that property. Most likely additional housing will replace the venerable Vons building.
And of course Rusnak Arcadia’s Mercedes-Benz dealership is expanding with a huge new $30 million state-of-the-art two-story showroom on Santa Anita Avenue.
And this is all in addition to the ongoing quarter-billion dollars of improvements and additions at every schoool building in town. Never has the expression “out with the old, in with the new” been more appropriate for what is happening in Arcadia these days.
— By Scott Hettrick