Jon Van Leuven played the role of a merchant, deftly sorting cards depicting silk, spices and gold on a folding table at the back of Aero Hobbies & Games in Mid-City. Across from him, his mother, Sarah, shuffled through her own cards and pushed a few toward the middle of the table.
When the two Van Leuvens play the card game Jaipur, they compete to be the wealthiest trader in Rajasthan's capital. In real life, Van Leuven is a special education teacher and Aero is one of the only businesses in Santa Monica he can afford to visit regularly, he said.
“It’s somewhere I can take my mom out to play cards without necessarily having to spend money,” he said. “Places like this are few and far between.”
But Aero won’t be around for long. Developer and film producer Marius Markevicius plans to build a three-story apartment building at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Yale Street, a site that includes the small building Aero has called home for 25 years.
Aero will likely close by the end of the year, said owner Keith Alexander. The 80-year-old business has changed locations twice before, but Alexander said that’s not an option this time.
“There’s nowhere affordable in Santa Monica or even the Westside anymore,” he said.
Alexander said plans made more than a decade ago to redevelop the site were shelved when the recession hit. He said he expected the capital that has flowed into Santa Monica’s housing market since then to reach his quiet corner of town eventually.
The new building at 2906-2918 Santa Monica Blvd. will contain 46 apartments — four of which will be restricted to households that earn less than $21,000 annually — and commercial space on its ground floor.
Across the street, construction on a three-story, 50-unit complex at 2822 Santa Monica Blvd. will begin soon and another apartment building up the street at 3008 Santa Monica Blvd. was completed in April.
“The land Aero is on is immensely valuable,” Alexander said. “In the eyes of developers, the community we’ve built has no value.”
Local and state lawmakers say building more housing will help solve California’s affordability crisis. It’s a simple economic calculation: enlarging the supply to meet the demand will lower prices.
But for Van Leuven, it’s hard to see the upside in a luxury apartment building replacing his favorite hobby shop. He said Aero’s impending closure feels symbolic of the economic stratification between the city’s longtime residents and businesses and more affluent recent arrivals.
“All these new buildings are going up, but a lot of the time, the retail spaces in them either are vacant or turn over very quickly because the rent is so high,” he said. “Only retail giants can survive here. The businesses that are part of the character of the city have to do really, really well to survive, or they’re gone.”
Alexander, who grew up in Santa Monica himself, first started working at Aero while attending Santa Monica High School in the 1980s.
“I worked for cash, but I never made any money,” he said. “I spent it all in the store on games.”
He graduated from Samohi in 1990 and was working as a sailor eight years later when the store’s then-owner, Gary Switzer, asked him to run the store while he recovered from surgery for cancer. Alexander bought Aero when Switzer died in 2006.
Don Rice, who started going to Aero was a fifth-grader in 1975, said he went both to get his Dungeons & Dragons fix and to talk to Switzer about all things science fiction and fantasy.
“He had read all the books I’d read, I could ask him about any game and he had a career painting miniature figurines so I could ask him for tips on painting my armies,” Rice said. “When (Alexander) took over the store, it was the same thing — he’s knowledgable about all kinds of strange stuff you can’t talk to anyone else about.”
For the past 13 years, Alexander and his wife Shanti Ellis provided a place where customers can use tabletop role-playing games to concoct epic stories, exercise creativity by painting tiny, intricate models and make friends through competitive card and board games.
Alexander plans to start hosting private role-playing game sessions when Aero closes. But that means only those with the means to hire him will have access to the games that were previously available to any customer who walked into Aero, he said.
Not all will be lost for Santa Monica’s nerds and geeks. Although Evett's Model Shop also closed earlier this year, Hi De Ho Comics, the Los Angeles region’s longest-running comic book shop, offers space to play games in its Downtown Santa Monica location.
Still, Ben Shepard, a regular at Aero for the past five years, said Aero’s closure will displace the tight-night communities that have formed around various games.
“I’ve met a lot of people and made some very close friends here,” he said. “There are other game stores around LA. But Aero is special because Keith and Shanti made it so welcoming.”
madeleine@smdp.com
