LOS ANGELES - The mightiest retailer in the world, Wal-Mart, looked like the last best hope for the vacant and long-troubled anchor spot at Crenshaw Plaza - if only it would fit.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and other big-box discounters favor the open spaces of suburban shopping centers, using at least 18 acres for a store and parking lot. The empty department store at Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza in central Los Angeles, by comparison, crams the equivalent of 2 acres onto five floors.
But next month, Wal-Mart plans to open a multilevel store at Crenshaw Plaza - and it is possible because of a 50-year-old machine that can best be described as an escalator for shopping carts.
The device, common in Europe but relatively new in the United States, enables Wal-Mart, Target Corp. and other retailers to bring multistory versions of their giant discount stores to urban areas that have struggled to provide the kind of shopping options the suburbs long have enjoyed.
"There's no other way to build a Wal-Mart store in a neighborhood like Crenshaw," said company spokesman Robert McAdam. "There's just not enough land to make it work. You have to take something over, and the only way to make that work is by using a cart escalator."
It wouldn't be the first time technology helped change the urban landscape. Elevators made the high-rise possible, sending cities into the sky. Freeways paved the way for suburban development, which in turn left swaths of inner-city areas empty and blighted.
The cart conveyor systems, according to some advocates and urban planning experts, will help fuel a new phase of development, taking commerce back to the urban core.
"Will this little machine change everything? No. Does it get over a major obstacle for city development? Absolutely," says Richmond McCoy, president of UrbanAmerica, an inner-city real estate development company.
David Pelczmann, a former conveyor salesman, believed in the machines' potential and bought the German company that makes them.
"This is not a sexy product - it's nuts, bolts, steel and doesn't talk," says Pelczmann, owner of Darrott Inc. "But it is fundamental to the redevelopment of the urban areas. It is the only way you are going to get rid of the desolation left by the migration to the suburbs."
Most big discount retailers got their start outside of cities. As the competition and costs in the suburbs grew, however, the retailers recognized that urban areas - with their dense concentration of consumers - represent a golden, untapped market.
Still, entering urban environments posed significant challenges: The stores would have to be multilevel because of limited space, and yet shoppers would have to be able to travel easily between floors with bulky carts.
Discount retailers depend on people to buy basketfuls of goods to make up for slim profits on individual items. Without carts, customers won't buy as much.
When Target opened a store in Pasadena, Calif., in 1994, it used king-sized elevators that accommodated carts. But company executives soon realized that elevators have limited capacity and subject shoppers to annoying waits.
The cart conveyor systems, by comparison, speed shoppers and their carts between floors along parallel tracks. Resembling side-by-side escalators, the escalator and cart conveyor combination also allows shoppers to maintain a view of the store - allowing them to proceed quickly after disembarking.
Some civic planners say big-box stores are no panacea for urban ills because they drive smaller merchants out and primarily offer low-paying work. But developers and others say the giant discounters bring sales tax revenue, low-cost goods and jobs to areas that need them.
Gary Newhouse, an architect and design project manager with Target, was all but sold on the idea of Vermaports, a European invention, after he spent an afternoon at the Sweden-based furniture store IKEA, watching customers' easy acceptance of the system.
He became a believer during a trip to Europe, and he consulted Pelczmann, then the U.S. agent for Transport Technik (now Darrott), which makes the Vermaport.
Pelczmann had sent pictures and a description of the Vermaport to nearly every major supermarket chain. But his phone hadn't rung before Target came calling.
Newhouse, armed with photos, cost comparisons and design plans, had little trouble persuading Target's senior management in Minneapolis to take a chance on a one-store test in La Mesa, near San Diego. But there were hitches.
First, the company couldn't find an inspector to approve the Vermaport because neither the elevator inspector nor the local building engineer could decide how to classify it. Changes also had to be made to meet U.S. safety standards.
Target added two swinging plastic panels to keep children from wandering onto the belt and placed signs directing parents not to leave their children in the cart while it was on the conveyor.
On the store's opening day in 1995, the question was whether shoppers would accept the odd-looking machines - and what Target would do if they didn't.
Target stationed clerks at the top and bottom of each escalator to demonstrate and to keep children and strollers off the machines. For most people, Newhouse says, the Vermaport was a fun new display. Many shoppers stopped just to watch the carts go up and down.
After the experiment, Target quickly opened two San Francisco area stores with cart escalators. From there, the company introduced the system around the country. Target now has 22 stores equipped with what it calls "cartveyors."
Other retailers followed suit.
Wal-Mart opened its first multilevel store in 1998 in California. Panorama City's nearly 50-year-old Panorama Mall was the site of the company's first in-store cart conveyor system.
The company next year will roll out its multilevel model, installing cart conveyors at the new Wal-Mart at Crenshaw Plaza and at four other sites.
By 2000, Darrott had doubled the number of Vermaports sold in the United States, with orders for 48, Pelczmann says. That also was the year a Wisconsin company, Pflow Industries Inc., introduced its own cart conveyor system.
Although sales are slow for the systems, which can cost several hundred thousand dollars each, urban planners and others are encouraged that the shift is happening at all.
"Retailers weren't going to come; they wrote the cities off," says Larry Kosmont, president of Kosmont Cos., a real estate advisory and development services company that focuses on urban areas.
"Now they have the technology to make those stores work for their customers. It opens up the possibilities."
Abigail Goldman is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, a Tribune Publishing newspaper.