Bakewell Plans to Remake Hawthorne Mall : Economy: The activist and a partner will seek greater focus on discount retailers. A face lift is also on the agenda.

The deal, as one observer put it privately, is one where angels might fear to tread. But if ever a project needed an angel, Hawthorne Plaza does.

Tenants have taken flight in droves over the past several years, leaving half the stores empty. Like the debt-ridden city of Hawthorne itself, those shuttered businesses are casualties of the aerospace industry’s economic free-fall.

Remaining tenants and some economic observers say it is a virtual certainty that the mall will also lose the Broadway, one of its three anchor stores, now that the chain is being sold. And the nearly 1-million-square-foot shopping plaza has been in receivership since February, 1994.

Those conditions amount to a mountain of “negatives,” as so-called smart money people are wont to say.

But where others see a mall that is half empty, Brotherhood Crusade President Danny Bakewell sees one that is half full. He sees an opportunity to recast the mall at El Segundo and Hawthorne boulevards to better serve the changing demographics of its shoppers.

Bakewell and his partner, Lonnie Bunkley, have formed a joint venture with a San Diego firm, Oliver McMillan Inc., to buy the mall for $25 million in a deal expected to be completed this week. Bakewell’s and Bunkley’s 50% share will make them the only African Americans in Southern California with that large a stake in a major mall, retail experts say.

The new owners expect to focus more heavily on discount retailers. Commercial real estate specialist Dick Carter, vice president of Blatteis Realty in Century City, said that strategy and a relatively low purchase price gives the mall an excellent chance to prosper. The price tag “allows them to change it and bring in tenants who don’t traditionally pay that much rent,” he said.

A successful mall, generating additional city sales tax revenue, would be a welcome turn of events for Hawthorne, which is reeling with a $10.5-million deficit blamed on the regional economic downturn and fiscal mismanagement.

Turning the mall around will be a formidable task, and Bakewell plans to start with the way it looks.

“This mall looks like a sanitarium, like a jail,” he said. “You don’t know it’s there. You have to knock walls out; open this thing up.”

Despite its dull facade--one real estate broker calls it a bunker--the mall has been impeccably maintained, Bakewell said.

He talks enthusiastically of getting tenants to stay and attracting new ones, especially discount retailers who know how to do business in minority communities. That task has been made easier since the mall restructured its debt, slashing tenants’ monthly payments by as much as a third, city officials said. Bakewell said he hopes to attract a Kmart or a Target and other so-called “off-price” retailers.

Bakewell’s vision for a make-over has won enthusiastic support from Hawthorne city officials.

“I’m real excited by what I’ve seen of their plans,” said Acting City Manager Bud Cormier, who agrees with Bakewell that motorists can drive by the mall now without realizing it is there. “These guys are rethinking the whole thing,” Cormier said. “I think you’re going to see something there that is completely untraditional. They are challenging a whole bunch of old assumptions.”

Hawthorne Mayor Larry Guidi said the mall “needed someone to come in who knew the community and the people in it.”

Real estate expert Carter said Bakewell’s plans are similar to the make-over of the Fallbrook Mall in the western San Fernando Valley, which allowed it to prosper in the face of stiff competition from Topanga Plaza and the Promenade in Woodland Hills.

At Fallbrook, he said, a Sears store was replaced by Kmart, Ralphs grocery and a Burlington coat factory. “What used to be a traditional mall was changed to a promotional [discount] center,” Carter said. “I think that is what will happen in Hawthorne. Malls are changing, and [Hawthorne] just needs a refocus.”

Times have been so bad for Hawthorne that city fathers considered selling City Hall and dismantling the Fire Department. The gas company cut off service at one fire station when the city did not pay its bills, and one upscale neighborhood briefly flirted with seceding in an effort to be annexed by neighboring El Segundo.

“This is no longer white-collar Hawthorne,” Bakewell said. The mall’s operators “have just been totally void of being sensitive to the community in which they operate.”

The 1990 census showed that nearly 60% of Hawthorne’s 72,000 population was black and Latino. Observers believe that that percentage has increased since the census. For the past several years, the mall’s managers have estimated that its customers are about 70% African American.

Bakewell said he has made black community development his niche. The fact that he is a developer might come as a revelation to many who are more accustomed to seeing him shutting down construction sites where no African Americans are working, or threatening to disrupt the Rose Parade because no blacks were on the organization’s board.

For all of his militant activism, Bakewell was also once president and chief operating officer of Cranston Securities Co. and won a $4.4-million settlement from the company’s chairman as his share of a buyout.

He has developed two shopping centers in Compton, another at Crenshaw Boulevard and Slauson Avenue and is negotiating to develop the first major supermarket shopping center in predominantly minority northwest Pasadena.

Pasadena redevelopment officials had expected Bakewell’s Pasadena Commercial Development Co. to begin construction in July on the 69,000-square-foot shopping center, but old buildings at the site have yet to be demolished.

Some city officials have grown impatient with the pace of the project, but a Vons spokeswoman said her company and Bakewell “are close to executing a lease. We expect to open mid-1996.”

Bakewell said his approach to inner-city development is to point out to major corporations that populations of 100,000 or more often have no major department or food store.

“You’ve got a captive market,” he said he tells corporate executives. They often ask how much of the residents’ income is discretionary, and he answers: “All of it is discretionary. One hundred percent. They’ve got to spend it.”

So many of the problems with retail businesses in black and Latino communities, Bakewell said, result from merchants simply not knowing how to successfully do business in those communities.

He makes no apologies for any financial success that flows from his projects, coupling his community activism and business activity in an aphorism that has become his philosophy: “You can do good and do well at the same time.”

Community correspondent Richard Winton contributed to this story.