When I met Ryan Smolar 11 years ago, he seemed an unlikely candidate for the Long Beach connector extraordinaire he was to become, this 22-year-old computer nerd living in a studio apartment that might charitably be described as charmingly slovenly. But Smolar’s irrepressible good nature, goofy humor, and active mind were evident even within that messy cocoon, traits that were magnified exponentially by a motor that wouldn’t quit. And because he was always more interested in elevating his community than himself, if you knew him, you were likely to benefit from more than just his companionship. Blair Cohn, Justin Hectus, Evan Patrick Kelly, Brian Ulaszewski, Logan Crow, and the late Shaun Lumachi are just a few names from the long list of community contributors who were boosted by Smolar (and I count myself among them). But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Eventually frustrated with institutional resistance, Smolar left Long Beach in 2011, for the next three years living in over a dozen different cities spread out across the U.S., before settling in Santa Ana, where he currently serves as lead consultant for downtown Santa Ana’s Business Improvement District (BID).
But the link between Ryan Smolar and Long Beach runs deep, and so when 9th District Councilmember Rex Richardson came calling to see whether Smolar would join the team to help steer North Long Beach on its “Road to the Renaissance,” it was an offer he couldn’t refuse.
It’s a story Smolar tells in his characteristically informal fashion. “I was in the jacuzzi when Rex called,” he laughs. “[…] He asked to join the team to assist director of the Uptown BID—so, the Blair [Cohn, executive director of the Bixby Knolls Business Improvement Association]—to get things popping up here—you know, activate the retail, connect with the community, the region, and the rest of Long Beach. […] He’s kind of moving the big ships, and he needed more help with the intermediary steps to revitalizing the district, and to make sure this was an equitable, inclusive, and creative process that connects to the community here broader Long Beach.”
Smolar pivot’s in a positive direction when asked about North Long Beach’s challenges: “I don’t really tend to think in terms of the ‘challenges,’ because that’s [something] hard, and that has the effect of constructing a reality for this community, of putting it in a box that it will have trouble getting out of. I look more at what opportunities we have. I think one of the first things we need is a place for creatives and the community to come together and start to build something.”
To contextualize Smolar’s sense and vision of community, cast your mind back to 2002, when really young Ryan moved from his childhood home in the San Fernando Valley, where Smolar says he may never have attended a single community event, to Long Beach, where he had the good fortune to meet a Downtown Gazette reporter who took him to a plethora of events she was covering. “I’d never seen anything like it,” Smolar recalls. “It was intoxicating.”
He fell in with an intellectually engaged Long Beach subculture that included Daniel Brezenoff, who would later serve as Councilmember Robert Garcia’s legislative director and has followed Garcia to the mayor’s office. By the time Smolar moved to the East Village Arts District, he himself was writing for the Gazette and gaining ever deeper insight into how the city worked—and didn’t work.
“The DLBA [Downtown Long Beach Associates] was putting together big events that weren’t really connected to the people who were coming in and who I saw as my community, these creative, awesome, young people who had so much talent,” he says. “We didn’t really want to be a part of the things that were going on downtown. So we were trying to figure out how to break into that. […] We felt like we really knew the community, and that what was happening wasn’t working.”
Ironically, it was the DLBA, by hosting a lecture by urban studies theorist Richard Florida, that indirectly galvanized Smolar to see whether he could do better. Smolar read Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class, which contrasts the redevelopments of Pittsburgh and Austin. As Smolar explains, the formula for Austin’s redevelopment was capitalizing on its organic music scene, which impelled 20-somethings to stay rooted to the city, which resulted in their interacting with each other over the longer term and creating businesses, which in turn attracted big investors who wanted young, educated talent, a phenomenon Austin city officials responded to by continuing to help the music scene proliferate. By contrast, Pittsburgh bulldozed historic buildings in favor of erecting large institutions that required extensive upkeep, without any functional basis for doing so—a model that proved unsustainable.
“That was the message that Richard Florida had,” Smolar recalls, “and we were bringing him here to talk to us, which was super exciting to me, because I really resonated with that Austin model. […] Downtown Long Beach was asking questions like, ‘How do we connect with the university? How do we build this functional economy? How do we invest in the arts in a sustainable way?’ I was asking the same questions, and I was seeing we were reading the book that tells us what to do. I was like, ‘Yes! Yes!'”
But to Smolar’s disappointment, he didn’t see the city heeding these lessons. So in 2007 he (with the help of partner Rachel Potucek, former legislative aide to Councilmember Suja Lowenthal) decided to take matters into his own hands by creating University by the Sea. Described as “an upscale arts and education festival that demonstrates how satisfying it can be to live in Long Beach’s downtown urban playground” by offering attendees the opportunity to “‘go back to school’ for fun enrichment classes such as wine tasting, personal finance, dance, urban architecture, interior design and more”—as well as featuring a slew of outdoor musical performances, an student film festival, and a silent-film showcase held in the Jergins Tunnel—Smolar saw U-Sea as addressing two particular downtown shortcomings: making downtown businesses active participants in an event, and facilitating a downtown presence for Cal State Long Beach. In addition to U-Sea’s major partnership with Cal State Long Beach, business partnerships for the one-day event included the Aquarium of the Pacific, the LGBTQ Center of Long Beach, the Arts Council for Long Beach, and several Pine Ave. restaurants.
“People were delighted that we were coming and talking to them,” Smolar recalls. “They saw a lot of opportunity downtown; they just hadn’t made that connection. […] This is how you activate a community. You bring these disparate parts together, and you showcase its talent.”
Among that talent Smolar tapped to teach classes were then-Mayor Bob Foster, Straight Talk TV host Art Levine, CSULB President F. King Alexander, and then-LBPD Chief Anthony Batts.
Despite selling out the 1,500 tickets to enter the Jergins Tunnel (open for the day for the first time in 40 years) and exceeding capacity at most every one of the 60+ classes offered, the progressing worldwide financial meltdown translated into diminished institutional support for U-Sea’s 2008 incarnation, particularly on the part of the City and the DLBA, and so Smolar decided against putting on U-Sea in 2009. He turned to other Long Beach projects, including developing the Long Beach Post‘s Website and working for the Small Business Development Center. More recently he’s been working with LB Fresh to help the foment a local, sustainable food scene by connecting “eaters, feeders, and seeders” and creating system-wide change with limited resources—resources he’s greatly augmented by securing grant money from the California Endowment over the 18 months.
He’s also curated and published two compilations of Long Beach authors, Book by Authors and Book by Authors: North Long Beach. And what he saw in the submissions for the latter stuck with him.
“What I read in those pages is hope, a want to be included in the good things happening in this city, of people finding community here and loving the diversity, feeling sometimes that this area is getting the short end of the stick and wanting to change that,” he says. “I think that’s all really great energy to channel into productive output that will transform and activate this area.”
Which brings us back to now. Councilmember Richardson says that, while over the last 18 months the Uptown BID has focused on operations (cleaning, maintenance, security), with those programs up and running, some of that focus can be shifted to “vision” issues: placemaking, programming, long-term initiatives, grant-writing. And Smolar is just the man to help with that job.
“Ryan’s got a unique set of experiences and talents,” Richardson says. “[…] We have a reputation now in North Long Beach. We try big things. […] Not everyone can keep up. But I think Ryan can contribute to the special things that are happening up here.”
That jibes with the effect many feel Smolar has had on the Long Beach community at large. For example, Blair Cohn, universally recognized for invigorating Bixby Knolls, says all his success stems from his experience working with Smolar on University by the Sea.
“I have to say that Ryan’s creativity was the spark that opened up the floodgates to and of all the creativity in Bixby Knolls,” Cohn says. “I call him my muse. He inspired me to try new things for this district, experiment, and figure out how to best promote our businesses while also engaging our local community and customer base.”
Summer And Music co-producer Justin Hectus, who labels his Smolar experience curating music for U-Sea and elsewhere as “a real peanut-butter-in-my-chocolate moment,” has similar feelings.
“Ryan is one of a kind,” he says. “He’s a big thinking idea machine who can actually drill down and execute concepts that no one would have thought of much less dared to make into reality. He’s got the stuff to make magic out of a handful of beans.”
Smolar’s general diagnosis for the Uptown beanery is a deficiency in connectivity, whether in the form of “strengthened connection between bottom and top, the powerful and the powerless, the known and the unknown” or stronger connections between North Long Beach and not only the rest of the city, but also with nearby outlying areas.
“I feel North Long Beach is the victim of disenfranchisement and disinvestment because it’s not connected closely to power or institutions.” he says. “[…] If you look at a map of Long Beach, and looks like this.” (Here he extends a hand perpendicular to the ground, his thumb pointing skyward, then pointing to the thumb with his other hand.) “That’s North Long Beach. When I first met with Rex [which took place at city hall], one of the things I told him is, ‘There are two city halls between where we are right now—Lakewood and Signal Hill—and where the BID is. We’re probably more proximate to Compton, Paramount, etc., than we are to downtown Long Beach. That regional difference is a big issue.”
Smolar’s prescription is primarily two-pronged. The first concerns improving Uptown’s communication lines both internally and running outward, thus maximally capitalizing on Uptown’s diversity, an area strength that has yet to be converted from potential to actual.
“When you have diversity, there is often a lack of connectivity across [the diverse groups],” he says. “So we need North Long Beach hyperconnected to itself. And then we need to understand our context and narrative. That’s going to be the most effective way of dealing with those targets around the region that we need to be interacting with.” He says part of that job is simply “going out and knocking on doors and telling people what we’ve got here, what we’re looking for, and representing those needs and opportunities to them.”
The second prong of Smolar’s attack is refocusing North Long Beach regionally.
“What does the thumb, as epicenter, really look like?” he asks. “What’s our relationship to these communities north of us, east of us, west of us? How do we improve those relationships? One of the biggest problems in Long Beach—not just North Long Beach—is its myopia, its naval-gazing, its desire to be unto itself. When I’ve gone out regionally, they can’t connect with Long Beach, because we’re here just looking at our toes and telling ourselves that they look good. We really have to reach out more broadly. […] North Long Beach has access to different pockets [of people] who aren’t being served [culturally, artistically, etc.]. So if we can serve those customers uniquely, then this is where they’re going to come.”
Smolar isn’t the first person to recognize Long Beach’s connectivity problems, and remediating them is more easily said than done. But as Cohn opines, there’s plenty of reason to believe Smolar is just the man to help change the status quo.
“North Town is in for a huge dose of creativity to the likes it has never seen,” Cohn says. “Ryan is an innovator, a creator, a connector. He thinks so far outside of the box that he’s the David Bowie of community development. He’s always up for a challenge and will dig deep into the community to find the assets, doers, and create programs that will give the Uptown BID a boost that it seeks.”