Dry cleaner struggles to survive in empty downtown L.A. skyscraper. Welcome to the zombie economy

A little before 8 one summer morning, the canyons of downtown Los Angeles still hold the cool of night.

Santiago Lopez walks down 6th Street into the deep and familiar shade of a high-rise lofting above him between Hope and Grand. If any homeless resident bedded down beneath the building’s generous overhang, security has cleared them out.

Lopez unlocks the door to Cleaners Depot. He’s pushing 10 years at a dry cleaner that’s just like any other dry cleaner in any other town, except this is downtown Los Angeles and it’s one of the few here. He wonders how much longer he’ll last.

Since the pandemic, the service sector has been struggling. Sidewalks are quieter. Elevators are less packed, offices are experiencing record vacancies, and few buildings are emptier than his, 611 Place, still known as AT&T Center.

A 42-story high-rise, 611 Place, is empty but for three small businesses on the street level. s.

Referred to in real estate parlance as a zombie building, this 42-story giant, a modernist masterpiece from the late 1960s designed by William Pereira, is a hollow shell devoid of tenants but for three small businesses on the ground floor.

Sheets of plywood, painted and repainted in shades of brown, have replaced the floor-to-ceiling windows that front the sidewalk. A skeleton crew watches over the marble-and-granite lobby, where elevators once whisked tenants and guests to offices and appointments high above the street. If there are any zombies, they’ve all turned to ghosts.

Settling into his routine, Lopez preps a few pressed shirts on hangers, first covering them with paper garment covers, then plastic bags. The air conditioning has been out for years. He’s turned on a small fan.

A resident of Boyle Heights, Lopez, 36, has worked downtown long enough to recognize the ebb and flow: how businesses boomed in the early 2000s, tanked after 2008, recovered in the late teens. But today — the aftermath of COVID — feels different. Downtown seems perched as if on a teeter-totter, between recovery and failure.

Don Kohan helps employee Santiago Lopez sort through garments.

Don Kohan, the owner of Cleaners Depot, has seen little bounce-back in the last four years. Among his three cleaners — two downtown and one in Century City — business is off about 60% since peaking in 2019, he said.

“I’m just breaking even with the stores downtown,� he said, “but I can’t close them or I’ll have three families without income.� He feels an obligation to Lopez, who lives with his parents and has a fiancée, as well as to another employee, Abel Nunez, and to the manager of his other downtown store.

Kohan opened Cleaners Depot on 6th Street in 2003 when the ground floor was bustling with a florist, a stationery store, a restaurant and a bank. One by one they fell. The building’s last major tenant — the Social Security Administration — moved out during the pandemic.

The mystery of the abandonment is compounded by the privacy of its owner.

Garments hang on a conveyor belt at Cleaners Depot, which has been struggling since the COVID-19 pandemic.

When a reporter called the building management company, Metcom, the person who answered declined to confirm the name of his employer (“maybe,� he said) and referred to Google for any information about the property before abruptly hanging up.

611 Place’s owner is listed as Joseph Chetrit, a media-shy New York-based real estate developer whose holdings in Los Angeles include the Clark Hotel on Hill Street and the Trinity Hotel on Grand Avenue, both empty and boarded up, zombies as well.

If Chetrit is hoping that property values will increase as the neighborhood improves, he might be waiting awhile. Since the pandemic, the high-rise market in downtown Los Angeles has cratered. Working remotely delivered the first blow, while rising crime and persistent homelessness have kept new tenants away.

Cleaners Depot is on the ground floor of a 42-story high- rise, 611 Place, which is nearly empty.

Cleaners Depot is joined by two other tenants on the ground floor: an optometrist and Dental Arts Dentistry (“Dentistry You’ll Never Regret�), which has been here almost as long as the cleaner. Its offices are conspicuously well-lighted and welcoming, despite a locked front door.

After the George Floyd protests in 2020 left many panes broken, plywood went up. Dr. Han Tak successfully argued with the building management to have it removed from her windows. She didn’t like the boarded-up look. Today, she and her husband, who also practices here, are considering a move to Pasadena when their lease is up next year.

A nostalgia, if not sadness, inhabits spaces like the lobby of 611 Place where once was hope, promise, prosperity — and even now, a reminder of what downtown was and aspired to be.

But bank mergers and antitrust regulations have changed the course of this empire. Built on the site of the Savoy Hotel, 611 Place was the corporate headquarters for Crocker-Citizens National Bank until a Japanese real estate company purchased the building in 1982, and AT&T became the anchor tenant. Chetrit purchased the building years later and for a time planned to turn it into condominiums.

Cleaners Depot employee Abel Nunez carts a rack of clean garments to a downtown customer.

At 10 a.m., Lopez is joined by Nunez, who arrives with clothes he picked up from the Omni Hotel. The two men separate fluff-and-fold from dry cleaning and stuff orders into black bags that Nunez carries to a van. He’s headed to a cleaning plant near USC.

Alone again, Lopez lets the late morning’s languid pace take hold. Buses roar down 6th Street. Voices drift in from the sidewalk. Skateboarders clatter by.

“Hello, welcome� says the automatic greeting when a customer trips the front-door sensor. The walk-ins drift in throughout the day.

One’s the owner of a security business who needs two suits cleaned. Another’s an office manager for a law firm needing table cloths cleaned. With earbuds in, most are talking on the phone, conducting business with Lopez through pantomime.

Steady clients include USC’s Keck School of Medicine and the Federal Reserve. Others are downtown residents or employees of law firms or financial institutions that have not relocated, as so many have, to Century City, Westwood or Beverly Hills.

Cleaners Depot employee Santiago Lopez, left, pulls garments out of a van driven by owner Don Kohan, right.

Some people walk in just to talk to someone, and sometimes their intentions are less innocent.

Last month, a man grabbed unclaimed clothes off a for-sale rack near the front door and took off down the sidewalk. Lopez ran him down and took them back. He hangs customer clothes deeper inside the shop.

Downtown has become sketchier, said Lopez, who is on guard for any unwanted intrusions. He keeps a pocket knife in his left pants pocket.

“I’ve never had to use it,� he said, “but you’ve got to be ready.�

One day, he came to work to find the shop had been robbed, uniforms from the Federal Reserve stolen.

Another time, a man broke into the store at 3 a.m. A surveillance camera caught him watching pornography on the store’s computer.

Once, someone came in and tried to make off with a computer monitor by the front door.

“Every day is an adventure,� Lopez said.

Santiago Lopez sorts garments at Cleaners Depot. If everything plays out, he’ll have a different job in a year, operating medical imaging machines.

Sunlight, now higher overhead, dapples the sidewalk with shadows from tall ficus trees. Through the front door, Lopez watches the comings and goings at the Subway sandwich shop across the street. He is taking classes at Pasadena City College and hopes to become a radiologist. If everything plays out, he’ll have a different job in a year, operating medical imaging machines.

By noon, he has listened to a podcast hosted by entrepreneur Patrick Bet-David and is streaming “Peaky Blinders� when the owner arrives.

Kohan, 65, is wearing a white short-sleeved shirt stitched with his first name and company logo — the city skyline — above the breast pockets. A black kippah covers his gray hair. His cellphone is holstered on his belt.

Lopez meets him at the curb to help bring in new orders.

Kohan, he said, is like an uncle to him. He is loyal to the point of being protective, sensitive that the business might be targeted because of Kohan’s Jewish faith.

Born in Iran, Kohan came to the United States in the late 1970s and studied business management at Woodbury University downtown. When he graduated in 1980, his parents told him not to come back home. The 1979 Islamic Revolution had changed their lives.

He and a friend opened a liquor store in Burbank, but that didn’t suit him, so he turned to dry cleaning. After success in Century City, he opened the shop downtown, eyeing an opportunity to serve business suit-wearing attorneys and stockbrokers in the financial district.

Morning turns to afternoon, and the sidewalk shadows begin lengthening again. Kohan leaves, and Lopez is left with the slowest hour, 1 to 2 p.m. Nunez returns with more clothes to be sorted.

At 2 p.m., Kohan texts Lopez and tells him to close in an hour for building maintenance. Lopez is happy to head out early; he knows Kohan will pay him for the 10-hour shift.

For the last call of the day, Lopez gathers up five bags of table linens for delivery to a law firm at City National Plaza, two blocks away.

Cleaners Depot employee Santiago Lopez works inside on the ground floor of a 42-story high-rise. “Every day is an adventure,� he says.

Hardly a zombie — this property is nearly fully leased — the sparkling lobby is alive with comings and goings. Two smartly uniformed security staffers register visitors at a long, white marble desk anchored by an arrangement of lilies and gladiolas.

Lopez takes an escalator down a floor, walks past the barber shop and shoeshine stand and opens the door to the freight elevator. Its operator logs him in and takes him to the 27th floor. Ears pop.

A little before 3 p.m., Lopez is back at the cleaners. He loads up his daypack, turns off the flashing OPEN sign, steps outside and locks the door before disappearing into the streets.