In 1994, when Alice and Horace Bowers talked about selling their Central Avenue dry cleaners and retiring, their daughter, Vivian, jumped in to take over.  

She left behind a steady job as an account representative with a major medical insurance company. The cleaners sat in a South Los Angeles neighborhood still struggling to recover from civil unrest two years before and plagued with drugs, gang violence and rundown buildings.  

“I didn’t want to see yet another African American business closing on Central Avenue,” Vivian Bowers explained. “And if no one bought my parents’ business, we would have another blighted building. Enough is enough!”

Today, after 15 years of her management, plus a recent façade improvement grant of $172,500 from the Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles (CRA/LA), Bowers and Sons Cleaners and six adjoining businesses are spruced up and bustling. The CRA/LA help is the first of 17 such business improvement projects under construction or in the works within the Council District 9 Corridors Redevelopment Project Area.

“A lot of the community, the businesses and nonprofits, and the local police are working in collaboration on a shared vision for the street,” said CRA/LA project manager Jenny Scanlin. “We all have a lot of the same desires: Central Avenue as a bustling commercial corridor with healthy residential communities and community assets and services coming together.”

Bowers grew up working in Bowers and Sons Cleaners. Her mother’s parents previously owned a Chicago cleaners and started Smith’s Cleaners in Echo Park when they moved west. Her father, Horace, bought that business when he married his wife, Alice, and renamed it Bowers and Sons, expanding to Central Avenue with on-location dry cleaning equipment. All family members pitched in, including Vivian and her two brothers.

But at age 15, Vivian stopped working at the cleaners, vowing to earn more than her dad paid her. Over the years, her brothers also left the cleaners to pursue entertainment industry careers, and Vivian returned to the business, determined to improve it.

She incorporated the giraffe logo as a symbol of the business’s direction, “Heads Above the Rest.” She won a dry cleaner industry competition for a lobby makeover, increased the number of employees and grew the volume of business by 300%. When she heard about CRA/LA’s program to provide free money for a façade makeover, she was immediately interested.

The program has two parts: Awning, Signs and Paint and the Commercial Property and Improvement Program (CPIP). The first provides up to $25, 000 in grant money to improve business frontages, while the second is a matching program in which CRA/LA provides $2 for every $1 business owners put in. Additional money is available for historical buildings or for business clustered together that apply.

Because the Bowers’ property extends down the street and included other businesses, more extensive funding was provided. The building now more closely resembles its 1920s/1930s

origins with columns, exterior lighting and a parapet that gives the structure additional height.

"While I brought the CRA information to my parents and acted as the project manager, the bigger picture is the CRA's CPIP; my parents, Horace and Alice Bowers; and their Bowers Retail Complex," Vivian Bowers said.

"The larger facade improvement project happened because my parents owned the retail complex and Jenny Scanlin suggested they include their entire block of store fronts,” she added. “It allowed them to take advantage of the larger amount of grant funds available for this fantastic work on Central Avenue."