Former Refugee Now Plays Host to Valley Homeless

Since the Baldwin Hills dam burst in the winter of 1963, flooding or destroying hundreds of homes, motel owner Leslie Goldhammer has responded to the Red Cross and other organizations when they have asked him to provide shelter for homeless families.

“Before, it was only a few rooms here and there, never this many,” said Goldhammer, the congenial owner of the Fiesta Motel in North Hollywood, which will open 25 of its rooms to the San Fernando Valley’s homeless beginning March 1.

Under a $50,000 federally funded program approved last month by the Board of Supervisors, homeless families and individuals will be provided vouchers good for a temporary stay at the motel at 7843 Lankershim Blvd.

Worked With Churches

For more than a year, Goldhammer, a short, balding, 69-year-old Agoura Hills resident who was born in Budapest, has worked with church and social service organizations that pay him to set aside rooms for homeless people.

“At first, different churches were paying for a night’s lodging here and there for a family,” Goldhammer said. “But the numbers swelled in such a hurry. We need to eliminate this.”

In fact, Goldhammer said, if there were enough federal funds for the homeless, he would like to turn the entire 77-room motel into a permanent shelter.

Financially, filling all the rooms with about 200 persons under the $15-per-person voucher program would allow him just to break even, making about as much money as he does with a low occupancy rate at conventional prices, Goldhammer said.

“I don’t need this motel to make my living,” he said. “I could easily sell it. But I want to give something back to this country and its people.”

Goldhammer said if he could use all the rooms for the homeless, he would “fill in the pool and convert the area into a playground for the children. I’ve had to close off the pool most of the time because some of the children run around unsupervised.”

Recent Hard Times

The motel, located next to a restaurant in an industrial area, has several apartments and rooms with cooking facilities. The rooms are spacious. Many have king-size beds and color television sets. Most of the homeless people sent there under the voucher program are couples or single men and women with families. Their average stay at the motel is about a week, he said.

Goldhammer has another motel in Van Nuys and formerly owned two others, one in the vicinity of Baldwin Hills at the time the dam burst in 1963. He took in his share of the homeless at that time, he said. In more recent times, he said he first noticed that there were more homeless people in the Valley a year and a half ago, when his business began to fall off.

“This whole block used to be surrounded by 18-wheelers every night,” he said. “But gradually the truckers stopped coming. Many of them lost their jobs. Others didn’t stop for the night anymore.

“One night, I found a former customer sleeping in a cardboard box in back of the motel. He told me he had first lost his job, then his home. Other former customers of mine were in tent city,” temporarily constructed over the Christmas holidays in downtown Los Angeles for the homeless.

Knows What It’s Like

“I know what it is to be homeless,” Goldhammer said. “I know the feeling of desperation you have when your children are hungry.”

Many of his relatives died in German concentration camps during World War II, he said. He, his mother, wife and two children evaded the Nazis, thanks to Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who kept 5,000 Hungarian Jews out of German hands by issuing them Swedish passports and other documents, Goldhammer said. Although he was not issued a Swedish passport, Goldhammer said, he was given papers that allowed him to live “under the protection” of Swedish people in his native Hungary.

“For a long time, there were 12 of us who slept in one small room,” he said. “Always, we were afraid. There was never enough to eat.”

After the war, Goldhammer said he escaped from Russian labor camps in Hungary three times before he was able to assemble his family, obtain the necessary papers and migrate to the United States. A brother who refused to leave one of the camps with him froze to death, he said.

Homeless in Boston

Goldhammer said he arrived in Boston with his family in 1949, jobless, penniless and homeless. At the time, the couple had two children, ages 5 and 6. A third child was born in this country.

Under the auspices of a Jewish refugee resettlement organization, the Goldhammer family took a train to Los Angeles from Boston and was provided shelter and food until he was able to provide for his family.

Within three weeks, Goldhammer said, he had a job at an aircraft company that paid $2.25 an hour and soon after had rented a house for his family in East Los Angeles.

“I remember once when I was looking for work, I got lost in downtown Los Angeles,” Goldhammer said. “I was a little frustrated. I looked up and saw I was at a street called ‘Hope,’ and I knew then everything would be all right.”

‘A Great Country’

Since then, Goldhammer has, among other things, been a silversmith, foreman at an electronics company and owned two furniture stores and two homes for the elderly.

“The United States is a great country. It has been good to me,” he said.

Goldhammer said if the homeless are not provided for now, many will turn to a life of drugs or crime and “will go to prison. It costs $40 a day to keep a person in prison but only $15 a day for a voucher for a room.”

He said workers at his motel treat people with county vouchers the same as they would regular motel customers.

“They are not freeloaders in my eyes, just people down on their luck like I once was,” Goldhammer said.”They want to go home, but they have nowhere to go. They don’t know where home is anymore.

“I would like to turn one room into a playroom for the kids, too,” he said. “I want to donate one of the apartments as a counseling facility. What we will try to do is put people back to work. Most of them wish to work. We don’t want to be like a revolving door. We want to put the people back in society so that they can be taxpayers again.”