New Carts Hit Promenade This Fall

By Jorge Casuso

August 1 -- Come the holiday shopping season, more than two dozen new vending carts will line the Third Street Promenade offering a carefully chosen assortment of food, art and merchandise, City officials said.

The 26 carts – which include one for a concierge and three that sell art only during weekends – will replace the carts that have been operating on the popular shopping strip since it opened as the Promenade in 1989.

“It's a fresh start,” said Deborah Kravitz, whose company Provenzano Resources, Inc. (PRI) will run the new program. “The carts are being custom designed and custom built just for the Third Street Promenade.

“We want it to have its own identity,” Kravitz said. “Our hope is that we'll have some new and exciting vendors.”

Some of the existing vendors will be part of the new mix and will be invited to apply to participate in the program, which will have stricter guidelines with set hours of operation, City officials said.

The Promenade will pose a new challenge for PRI, which manages vending cart programs across the country, including those at The Grove in Los Angeles and Paseo Colorado in Pasadena, Kravitz said. As a public street, there is less control, and street performers and other distractions compete for the attention of strollers and shoppers.

“It's usually the only thing out there,” Kravitz said of the cart vendors at the other venues she has worked in. “Cart merchants are not accustomed to competing with a lot of things going on, grabbing the customer's attention.”

The new vending carts will feature built in displays, cash registers, awnings and matching chairs and offer less variety, but more depth of merchandise, Kravitz said.

City officials are confident the results will further the unique shopping experience offered by the thriving commercial strip.

“We didn't want to end up really corporate,”said Gretchen Kubacky, senior real estate analyst for the City who is in charge of overseeing the program. “We wanted to create a homemade feeling and have it be casual.

We don't want the corporate cookie cutter,” Kubacky said. Still, the new vending carts will be “neater, cleaner with set times of operation,” she added.

While the carts will offer a wide variety of merchandise, City and Downtown officials are making sure the new vendors don't compete with existing stores.

“We don't want to be in competition with the merchants,” Kubacky said. “We don't want to compete, we want to complement the inline stores.”

As with the existing program, the new carts will be in operation seven days a week, with vendors allowed to close for Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day. The minimum hours of operation will be from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday; 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Sunday.

The program will only apply to vending carts on the Promenade. City staff will continue to manage the carts outside the Promenade on an individual basis.