Chain Street, USA

In 2021, a spanking new plaza opened in the middle of my Southern California neighborhood’s downtown. Previously, it had been a municipal parking lot you crossed on your way to somewhere else. Now, it’s the place to be. People gather in what was previously a bare patch of asphalt to drink coffee, eat ice cream, and people-watch, while kids play in the grass on the central square.

Have a seat on the row of quirky concrete steps on a weekend afternoon and take it all in. People are joining the long line at Salt & Straw and ducking into Philz for coffee. Teens sip and flex their bright, multilayered, $22 Erewhon smoothies. At the picnic tables, families unpack bags from Shake Shack, unless someone risked crossing busy Venice Boulevard to bring In-N-Out back. Interlopers filter down from a nearby shopping center with Blue Bottle coffee cups and bowls from Sweetgreen. Though why walk all the way up there, when there’s a Tender Greens and Cava across the street?

Looming above is the headquarters of Amazon Studios, which also, incidentally, owns the movie theater anchoring the plaza’s opposite side. Maybe now is the time to explain that the central square’s grass is actually Astroturf.

Does it matter that this new public space is served by the same mix of businesses that have taken over similar plazas and main streets all over the country? My neighborhood, Culver City, sits smack in the middle of west Los Angeles. I could drive 20 minutes west for Blue Bottle and Salt & Straw and Erewhon on Abbot Kinney in Venice. I could head 15 minutes north to the Century City mall for Blue Bottle and Shake Shack. Or I could cross town to Sunset Junction in Silverlake and find… Sweetgreen and an Erewhon.

Even if I hopped on a plane to visit the best-known trendy neighborhoods in San Francisco, Brooklyn, Austin, or Chicago, I would likely run into many of the same businesses. Over the last 10 years, these chains, or their near-identical competitors, have terraformed the ambitious urbanist redevelopments, tony outdoor malls, and iconic high streets of cities across the country.

Nearly 15 years after the arrival of a Duane Reade sent shivers of gentrification down Williamsburg’s spine, many of those iconic neighborhoods are now the domain of chains. But not the chains that got big in the 1990s and early 2000s — the Starbucks, the Paneras, and Subways. The takeover has been accomplished by slick, 21st-century businesses, many of which began as small businesses in these same major cities, largely in the first decade of the 2000s, when young professionals were flooding back into cities and bringing their tastes for pour overs and high-quality food with them. In Los Angeles, Abbot Kinney, dubbed the coolest block in America in 2012, was already struggling with gentrification at the time. It was soon overrun by Intelligentsia, Blue Bottle, and Salt & Straw. A recent TikTok called this phenomenon in Los Angeles “Salt and Strawification.”

At that time, venture capital saw major opportunity in the new cultural obsession with food. Nearly all of these new-school chains are afloat on some form of venture capital, which means one good argument for enjoying the ramen, coffee, ice cream, and sushi now is that someday, the bubble might pop. Other countries have government subsidies for artisan producers. We get rapacious capitalist ice cream.

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To see a quirky, bustling shopping street — one often with old bones, which once supported a mix of independent businesses and neighborhood restaurants — turned into a copy of a similar street, maybe one located across town or in another city, makes the world feel not smaller, but flatter. Locals feel turfed out by more expensive businesses, often catering to newcomers by offering them more of what they liked somewhere else; visitors, who are steered toward these neighborhoods by travel guides, never get to see what makes a city great.

This is personal, of course. I met friends at beloved Cuban coffee shop Cafe Tropical on Sunset Boulevard in Silverlake in 2006. I fell in love with a city (and a person) around Austin’s South Congress in 2007. I can’t say for sure, but I don’t think I would have loved either of those places quite so fiercely if I’d found a Sweetgreen there instead — and there’s one now on both. When I predicted in 2015 that the future was fancy chains, I wasn’t excited. I’ve written before about my youthful grief for what seemed like a scrappy, singular food revolution flattened into yuppie comfort and all-American scale.

I am also complicit, of course. I am a white, college-educated millennial queer, a first-line gentrifier, and the first to be priced out again. My suburban childhood was full of malls, and I moved to city after city seeking to escape them.

Until I gave up, and put down roots somewhere walkable but also mall-like, in the particular California logic. It would be disingenuous to present downtown Culver City as some scrappy, independent main street before the plaza. The vibe has always been more Downtown Disney than the coolest block in America. When we moved here, we could walk to a Starbucks, a Chipotle, and a Cold Stone Creamery, and four different Mediterranean lunch bowl concepts. Minus a lunch bowl contender or two, they’re all still there. You can see the Cold Stone from the Salt & Straw, and the In-N-Out from the Shake Shack. Across the street from Erewhon is the neighborhood’s abiding Trader Joe’s.

I go to all these chains (except the Cold Stone. Sorry, Cold Stone). But the new chains undeniably feel nicer, and are often more delicious. They cost more, but not so much more (except Erewhon). I can’t say they’ve hurt the plaza, either. They may even be fueling it, by offering recognizable attractions that don’t need time to build a following, so people know from the get-go why they might want to visit.

The focus on the Salt-and-Strawing of certain iconic streets can obscure a hard truth: Most of America is already full of chains. That means new, better chains, for most places is, an improvement. Chains also don’t necessarily get in the way of civic life. In 1970, Ray Bradbury published an essay with a novel prescription for fixing Los Angeles’s social ills: a place to have fun. Specifically, Bradbury — the science fiction writer, futurist, and consummate Angeleno — called for the creation of town plazas, like those in Mexico, Italy, or even the Los Angeles of Bradbury’s youth. It’s tempting to say he was calling for something like my plaza. But, in fact, he was thrilled by the Glendale Galleria. If the point, in other words, is to bring people together, chains might not be so bad.

Still, I struggle with the dissonance between a specific, municipal, communal space and businesses designed to succeed all over the country. The restaurants and cafes that draw my neighborhood together are not owned by anyone we might run into while we are there. They spark community encounters, but they do not join the community. They also don’t funnel money back into the community the way a locally owned restaurant would.

In fact, they’re a symptom of the skyrocketing cost of living in the area. When a neighborhood shifts from Cold Stone to Salt & Straw, the housing prices have likely done something that would make a $9 waffle cone blush. Most of the young families I meet on the Astroturf green have arrived from other neighborhoods, or are renters, like us. I wrote this essay sitting between my son’s changing table and his crib in a room we refer to as the “nurfice.” You see where this is going. The chains are here because it’s such a desirable place to be. The housing prices climb higher the better the downtown gets, and only the chains can afford the rents.

Much like how Meta, Google, and Amazon seem to have won the internet, these chains seem to have won what was once the wide-open space of revitalizing urban cores. And if they take up all the space, independent restaurants won’t be the only ones to lose out. Mass failures of chains in New York City lead to a phenomenon known as high-rent blight.

The neo-chains dotting trendy urban neighborhoods and their nearby exclusive suburban malls aren’t new concepts spun off by Yum! Brands or Taco Bell Cantinas. Almost all of them started in stands, trucks, or small restaurant spaces, and generated an authentic following because their owners figured out something no amount of market-testing could: what people wanted next. If they take up all the real estate, and rents remain nose-bleedingly high, no one will follow in their wake.

None of this keeps me from patronizing the plaza myself. My partner and I take our toddler to the green and split a Mint Mojito from Philz or a bagel sandwich from the one local business, if you could call it that — a bagel shop that has four locations and counting. We rush out for ramen from a Japanese chain before bedtime, and let the baby range on the plaza until the food comes. It’s lovely, honestly. But every time I’m out there, I do wonder how long it can last.

Meghan McCarron is an award-winning freelance journalist based in Los Angeles.
Adam Mazur is an award-winning illustrator based in Montréal that enjoys drawing (and eating) all things crispy, crunchy, saucy, steamed, grilled, and delicious.
Copy edited by Cynthia Puleo