Journal Arts Writer
PROVIDENCE
-- In an era of "big-box" chain mega-bookstores and 16-screen movie complexes, the independently run College Hill Bookstore and Avon Cinema continue to buck the rampaging trend toward a universal sameness in the marketplace.
They're both owned and operated by real estate mogul Ken Dulgarian in the block of Thayer Street that has been in his family for a couple of generations. From his cramped second-floor office above the bookstore's main floor, Dulgarian can survey a small part of his empire through a big picture window that affords him a bird's-eye view.
At 44, Dulgarian has been called "the mayor of Thayer," even by Buddy Cianci, because of his effusive hail-fellow-well-met personality and his extensive holdings. He chuckles when asked whether someone standing in front of the College Hill Bookstore could toss a baseball in any direction and hit one of his properties. "If they've got a good arm," he replies with a smile.
Dulgarian was just 19 years old when he bought his first investment property, a two-family house on Fourth Street. Twenty-five years later, he has holdings in industrial and commercial buildings well beyond the reach of Thayer Street . . . throughout New England, in fact.
Yet despite these far-flung enterprises, despite his chairing the Providence Economic Development Corporation (which has handed out "probably $25 million" in federal-fund loans to start-up ventures in the 10 years he has been on it), despite his calling his real estate holdings "my main business; that's what I do," Dulgarian is most associated in the public's mind with the bookstore and moviehouse, because those are his most visible businesses.
For more than three decades, his family has operated the College Hill Bookstore and the Avon, a converted garage that showed its first movie in the winter of 1938 on the same projectors that are showing its movies today. His father, Earl, brought Ken into the business as a teenager "at the bottom." When Earl died about eight years ago, Ken became the boss.
Yet despite Dulgarian's perch above the bookstore, where TV monitors keep an ever-watchful eye on the cash registers and aisles, he admits it's hardly a hands-on operation.
Among other things, he credits the staying power of both the bookstore and the Avon to stability.
The store's management has been in place and in charge of day-to-day operations for a quarter-century. "The managers have complete autonomy. They have the proficiency and the autonomy because that's what they do and that's all they do," says Dulgarian, who adds that he's an avid reader of periodicals -- "we stock more than 400" -- to keep abreast of current affairs.
Likewise, for more than a quarter-century the Avon's films have been booked by Boston-based George Mansour, 68, who also fills 22 other screens in independently owned theaters from New Hampshire to Florida.
"He has full autonomy, too," Dulgarian says of his long-term relationship with Mansour. "He runs things by me, but I've never said, 'No.' He'll call me two or three times a week and say, 'I was thinking of doing this or I was thinking of doing that . . . What do you think?'
"And I say, 'Okay.'
"I am his sounding board."
'Retail wars'
Despite Dulgarian's affability and the look of things going very smoothly, it's not all as calm as it seems. Dulgarian sees himself as being in the middle of "retail wars" with his competitors. "You can be polite and put sugar on it, but that's what it is," he says.
Dulgarian says that what separates his bookstore and moviehouse from the big chains -- besides stable management teams -- is customer service, a willingness to go the extra mile . . . literally.
If a customer hears of a new book, he or she can call up the store, order it and have it delivered to the door the next day.
"The nationals don't do that, because it's labor-intensive. They don't do individual orders. But we're so departmentalized, with 40 people on our staff, that we have people who specialize in special orders. When someone is looking for an esoteric book from an obscure publisher, we can get it.
"Our staff is all college-educated. They're knowledgeable, avid readers. There are no gum-snappers. We help out individual customers. We've even gotten accounts from other bookstores because they screwed up."
Michelle Provost, general manager of the big Borders Books, Music & Cafe store at Providence Place, replies that her customers can special-order hard-to-find titles ("We can even get things from overseas sometimes") and have them shipped to their doors via UPS. "We have a terrific special order department that's part of the chain, or they can order on-line at www.borders.com." She says she also sometimes checks Borders sister stores from Cranston to Boston to Cape Cod to locate a title she may be out of.
A veteran of other bookstores and retail establishments, Provost says, "I've got the best staff ever right here. We have would-be writers, actors, classical musicians. They know so much that's esoteric. So why do they work here? So they can get the 10-percent employee discount on their books!"
Nevertheless, Dulgarian feels that the pluses of his operation are what has kept the College Hill Bookstore going against a downward spiral in the number of America's independent bookstores. From a high of about 7,000 in the 1970s, just 3,200 remain, while their market share of the $5-billion-a-year book business has declined from 32 percent to 17 percent.
"I think competition is good," says Dulgarian, who, as director of the Capital Center Commission, helped bring Providence Place to town and, indirectly, the big Borders bookstore that now sits inside it.
"It's survival of the fittest. If you do your job, you make the race . . . with a lot of luck."
Attracting big names
And also a lot of hard work. The College Hill Bookstore is open 16 hours a day, has three shifts and a warehouse full of books that sits in the basement beneath its shelves.
College Hill has has made a name for itself among readers well beyond the university environment, attracting such big name authors for book signings as vampire chronicler Anne Rice, lawyer Alan Dershowitz, basketball coach Rick Pitino, former New York City Mayor Ed Koch, boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter and House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt.
Dulgarian says he first tried to bring in Koch for a book signing through the ex-mayor's publisher and was told, "No way."
"I didn't like that answer, so I called Koch. And he said he had a very busy schedule.
"I didn't like that answer either. So I sent him two first-class airline tickets and ordered a limousine for him . . . and he came. And he drew a tremendous crowd."
Sometimes, Dulgarian says, if their schedules permit, he'll even take authors to dinner afterward, "if they're not too boring."
He brings this kind of cheerful perseverence to his other businesses and to his personal life. It has paid off on both fronts.
This is the man who once was so smitten at the sight of a pretty woman in a restaurant as he was leaving, he called the manager to find out who she was. The manager didn't know her name, only that she worked in a dress shop nearby.
So Dulgarian sent her a big floral display with the message, "Your radiance made my day." He and Gretchen Dulgarian have been married nearly a dozen years and live on the East Side with their three children.
On the real estate front, he says, "I get calls at 2, 3, 4 in the morning from some of my tenants. 'There's no heat.' So I have it taken care of. I want progress reports from my superintendent on the half-hour -- who's dispatched, where do we stand? -- until it's fixed.
"If it's been snowing and it stops, I get up at 3, 4 in the morning and go over to some of my buildings that have medical offices and make sure they've been plowed. You've got to be sure that they've put down sand to avoid liability.
"Fortunately, I'm the kind of person who can go home after a night like that, put my head on the pillow and I'm out like that," he says, snapping his fingers.
"But you've got to be on top of things. It doesn't happen by itself. Kids today think they should get immediate gratification. There's no such thing as that. There's sacrifice, no question.
"I remember when I was a kid and was getting ready to go out on a date, my father asked what was playing that night at the theater. When I told him, he said it sounded like it would be busy. So I canceled the date and worked at the theater.
"Until the last lightbulb is shut off and the last door gets locked, you've got to be attentive."
Attention to detail
It's the same attention to detail that has kept the Avon going in the face of stiff competition.
Recently, Mansour said, the theater scored a victory when the National Amusements chain, which operates the Showcase Cinemas, agreed to allow the Avon to show
In the Bedroom
on the same day as their theaters. Previously, National Amusements had demanded exclusivity in this market. (The 16-screen Hoyts complex at Providence Place still maintains exclusivity on films it plays that the Avon will also play, because the two operations are so close.)
"Our grosses equaled or sometimes exceeded the Showcase on
In the Bedroom,"
Mansour says, "but mostly we were on an even keel.
"The films we play usually don't have advertising budgets. We depend on our flyers and on reviews to bring in our audiences, even if the reviews aren't always praiseworthy."
Films that play the Avon are often independent productions. Sometimes they're in a foreign language, with subtitles. Often they're provocative. Sometimes they're even sexy and raw.
"We don't call it that," Dulgarian says with a sly smile. "We call it 'art.' "
A faithful clientele
Mansour, who claims to book theaters in which Judi Dench is a bigger star than Arnold Schwarzenegger, says the Avon depends on a faithful clientele who will come "because they feel they'll see something interesting here."
A common assumption is that because the Avon and the College Hill Bookstore sit in the middle of the Brown University campus and are a short walk from the Rhode Island School of Design, their core audience is students. Dulgarian says, however, that the real money is with "the carriage trade. That's a fancy-schmantzy word for residents."
Mansour credits the Avon's staying power with the theater's "location, that it has been maintained in a way that many small, independent theaters aren't and the bookings -- of course! That's very important. Without that, the whole thing would collapse."
The Avon still doesn't have stereo sound, and it's one of the last regularly operating theaters in America that still has a two-projector system requiring changeovers as each 20-minute reel runs out.
"If it's not broke, don't fix it," says Dulgarian, while trumpeting the Avon's new $30,000 computerized heating and air-conditioning system. "You've got to sell a lot of popcorn to pay for that.
"We don't have rosewood desks and parquet floors, but we have clean restrooms and you're not gonna find gum on the bottom of our seats . . . We check that."
Dulgarian says he occasionally sees films at the Avon, most recently during the nine-week run of the Oscar-nominated French hit
Amelie,
which he liked.
He fondly recalls a time, when he was regularly working from 7 a.m. to midnight, and his brother, Richard, who helps run the theater, lured him to the Avon late one night under false pretenses. Instead of arriving to fix a problem, Ken found himself sitting down with a box of popcorn and a soda for a personal showing of Ken's favorite movie,
Singin' in the Rain.
Yet despite what one might guess would be an emotional attachment to such a place, Dulgarian says everything has its price.
"If someone said they wanted to take over an institution like the Avon, sure," he says. "Why not?
"But the numbers have got to be right, so I can parlay it into something else."
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