Customers are changing as well. The neighboring Miracle Mile and Fairfax areas are attracting more and more singles and affluent young families, who daily join the ethnic minorities, retirees and tourists who have frequented the market for generations. Yet, like much of older Los Angeles, Farmers Market has suffered from the dispersion of middle-class families and shopping places to the Westside, the San Fernando Valley and more distant suburbs. The number of shops at the market has dropped from 120 in 1993 to 111 today. Henry L. Hilty Jr., grandson of Earl Gilmore and president of A.F. Gilmore Co., which still owns the site, believes that the market must continue to attract young families moving into the area and increasingly sophisticated and demanding tourists if it is to grow in the next century.
Tourists account for roughly a quarter of sales.
Hilty sees the Grove development as a way to revitalize what has become a cherished but dog-eared space. But you have to remember this all started with 18 farmers selling out of their trucks. Updating a retail environment without severing its connection with its past is an ideal embodied into many successfully restored retail districts in Los Angeles. Los Feliz, Silver Lake, Santa Monica's Montana Avenue and parts of Hollywood are examples. In contrast, attempts to duplicate the suburban mall experience, as in Pasadena, Santa Monica and downtown Los Angeles, have generally disappointed shopper and investors.