Calm down. This isn’t
Manhattan. That's not Kmart

High above Downtown, standing at a window in the twin-towered Harbor Club, a sales agent plays tour guide, pointing out the myriad of street-level amenities that might appeal to one considering plunking down a half million dollars for a home. Near the end of her spiel, she gestures slightly north with her well-manicured hand. "There," she says, "is the new Ralphs."

    Yes, Ralphs. As in supermarket. As in 24-hour shopping for steak, toiletries and dog food. As in due to open this month.

    Forget the new library, Children's Park, latest Northern Italian restaurant or other project here or on the horizon. A grocery store is what has Downtown abuzz.

    Residents are already marking their calendars for the invitation-only opening ceremonies. "Everyone thinks it is just wonderful," says Beverly Wilson, g.m. of the 320-unit CityFront Terrace where units lease for between $1,300 and $2,600 and a "no vacancy" sign hangs. "They simply can’t wait for it to be opened."

    This attention has not been lost on the folks at Ralphs Grocery Co.'s Los Angeles headquarters who this year are busily opening a new location every other week. "Typically when you open a store you get a little blurb in the local paper," says Terry O'Neil, Ralphs spokesman.

    Not so in San Diego.

    "It has been quite a while since since we had a store that generated this kind of publicity," says O'Neil, who has been amassing clips. The closest the 10-year chain veteran could recall was a rebuilding project in the San Fernando Valley following the 1994 earthquake. "When the community is this excited it makes it seem like there is no way the store won’t be successful."

    Ralphs is banking on the 60,000-square-foot store drawing from more than just the 15,000 residents who live Downtown and the more than 70,000 who depend on centre city employment for a paycheck. The company is keenly aware there's no comparable market within five miles. For those who must drive, Ralphs offers 146 underground spaces and an escalator/elevator setup like the Hillcrest Ralphs, the chain's second highest grossing store.

    Responsibility for this $15 million project belongs to OliverMcMillan Inc., which also built the Hillcrest store. The company won accolades for its Horton Fourth Avenue that covered the gap-toothed grin of the Horton Plaza parking garage; breaks ground this month on a 15-screen movie theater at Fifth Avenue and G Street in the Gaslamp Quarter; and is about to announce plans to redevelop one of the historic district's shrinking number of dead spots.

    Dene Oliver, CEO of Oliver-McMillan, calls the nearly-finished Ralphs one of his best, and one that demanded an extraordinary amount of forethought.

    "To think about the concept of a regional grocery store catercorner to a Tiffany and a Cartier, and across the street from a Nordstrom, it creates a situation where you say 'I really need to sit up and pay attention,'" says Oliver.

    Among Oliver's challenges was creating something that had "downtown" character and wasn’t dwarfed by surrounding high rises. The solution was an oversized one-story mock-brick warehouse with a "muscle building" look and 9-foot-tall glass windows on three sides. To keep the the street and high-rise perspectives clean, the loading dock is fully enclosed.

    With expensive marketing studies having told him long ago that Downtown wanted a grocery store rather than a high-rise residential tower originally zoned for the site, Oliver isn’t surprised by the excitement.

    "People who are living Downtown are making some sacrifices that one has to to live in an urban environment," he says. "But there are other things that you expect to be able to do, and one of those is walk to a grocery store."

    So come Nov. 20, you know where a sizable number of Downtown residents will be partying. But don’t giggle too much. In August, Manhattan went similarly gaga. For a Kmart.