If You Think It Looks Bad Now, Remember 1975 : Redevelopment: City incentives for builders produced mixed results, but growth since the ‘funeral’ has been impressive.

LONG BEACH —  To those who say that downtown Long Beach is nothing but a jumble of blight-ridden blocks seething with crime, city officials have one main response: Remember the ‘70s.

“In 1975, we had a funeral in Long Beach,” Assistant City Manager John F. Shirey jokes. “We declared downtown dead.”

In that year, everything that gave the downtown area its life was either dead or dying. The Lakewood Mall, then one of the largest malls in the world, had sapped the downtown shopping district. Disneyland had made the once-grand Pike amusement park seem pathetic, and it soon shut down. Downtown had become sailors’ territory, a bawdy, often dangerous collection of tattoo parlors, bars that opened at 8 a.m., prostitutes and porn theaters.

And, as if things weren’t bad enough, the downtown area was sinking into the ocean. Overzealous offshore oil pumping was sucking away at the city’s base--a problem that cost millions to correct and made Long Beach a laughingstock as “The Sinking City.”

On its knees, downtown received one last kick when the Navy closed its base in 1974. The Navy eventually reopened the base, but the string of misfortunes prompted city leaders to create a grand plan for a redevelopment project area.

By offering developers cheap land, low-interest loans, small-business loans and rebates, the Long Beach Redevelopment Agency has been able to lure developers to the downtown.

Not all of its projects have been successful: The Jacques Cousteau museum on the Queen Mary, an expensive exhibit that still managed to look tacky, closed a few years after it opened. The park atop the city library, a maze of green lawns and trees most popular among Long Beach’s feathered inhabitants. The forbidding $30-million state office building, which received the most attention when state employees said that dangerous fumes were emanating from the beams. And perhaps the most dismal of all: the Long Beach Plaza Shopping Center, a $100-million, fortress-like building that took a hard blow in 1991 when Buffums, the grand dame of the center, closed.

But there have been numerous successes. Shoreline Village has a waiting list of people who want a space in the crowded seaside shopping center. The convention center attracted more than a million visitors in fiscal 1991 alone. The World Trade Center, although not completed, is one of the few new office buildings anywhere these days that is 89% occupied. There are also the burgeoning Pine Avenue restaurant row, the Promenade amphitheater, and the Farmers Market, which just recently was expanded to two days a week.

“I think if people could recall what things were like here in the late ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s, they would understand how far downtown has come,” said Long Beach Councilman Doug Drummond, a former police officer who used to patrol downtown. “I’m not sure it will ever be what it was in its heyday, but it has come a long way.”