Western Avenue : East Meets West Where Thoroughfare Slices Through Koreatown

When the winter rains washed down Western Avenue 60 years back, puddling up around 9th Street--where the rutted road dipped--the local boys would make a nice piece of change bringing their horses to drag the Model A’s and their sheepish drivers out of the muddy rainwater.

The California Korea Bank now presides over that stretch of Western where Silas Lawler, now 82, once borrowed his father’s horses to rescue trapped motorists. Western at Olympic Boulevard--where Lawler and his roller-skating buddies would catch hold of a delivery wagon from the local dairy farm and be towed along on their skates--is chockablock with Korean businesses.

At Pico, where the wagon driver would finally tire of the game and flick the roller-skating boys off with a touch of his whip, a gas station’s pumps gleam under roofs like blue tile pagodas.

Not far from Beverly and Western--where Van de Kamp’s bakery set up the first of its little prefab Dutch windmills on the northeast corner, and women in Dutch costumes sold bread and pastry--there is, within the space of two blocks, two hemispheres’ worth of ethnic diversity: an Israeli group center, an Armenian hair salon, a Latino Pentecostal church, a Russian shop, a store whose sign still advertises Glassman’s delicatessen but where the fare is empanadas, not bagels.

“If you were to drive down Western Avenue,” said Otis Will--who has done it often in his job as project manager of the city’s Chesterfield Square home renovation program, farther down Western--”you would be driving through a cross section of Los Angeles itself.”

From the Hollywood Freeway to the Santa Monica Freeway, Western Avenue is a perfect specimen of the ethnic changes that have made Los Angeles an Ellis Island of the West.

The little shops that have shouldered up onto Western since the commerce boom of the 1920s are still there, but their products and proprietors have changed. From Argentine-Italian fare at Regina’s to the Korean store selling Italian high-tech furniture, Western above the Santa Monica Freeway is a business corridor reading like the U.N. Charter--Vietnamese, black, Ecuadorean, Armenian, Guatemalan, Korean, Cambodian, Salvadoran. The American Czech Assn. has its office on Western; so do the Korean Chamber of Commerce, the Afghan Community Center’s refugee coalition and a Hungarian newspaper.

Down a street of cycle shops, cleaners, shoe stores, grocers, aging hotels and food served in an olio of languages, the faces behind the shop counters of Western are changing. An optometrist’s window at Beverly and Western displays the standard eye chart: in English, Korean and Hebrew. Korean entrepreneurs are snapping up storefronts north and south of the Olympic Boulevard zone that had defined Koreatown just a few years ago.

Just up the street from a one-time supermarket, now the Oriental Mission Church, Phil Mason had run his bookstore for more than 20 years. The only thing that had changed--besides his prices--was the name: from the original Brooklyn Bookshop, to the Rosewood Bookshop, Yesterday’s Books, Omar Khayyam and finally, Main Sequence--named for an astronomy phenomenon that Mason had learned of in his enthusiasm for space. He had seen Halley’s Comet in 1910 and he had hoped to see it again in 1986.

But Mason died of a stroke last year, and his daughters settled the affairs of their colorful father, a technician and veteran stunt man for what he still called “the picture business,” a man who spent a few of his young years in the new Soviet Union of the 1920s and came back an ardent capitalist.

Mason remembered Western’s first prosperity, when, in the hectic flush of Los Angeles in the 1920s, even the kitsch along Western seemed stylish--the diner shaped like a Pullman car, near where a Bank of America now stands, an ice cream place shaped like a coffee cup and called, naturally, The Cup.

Over the years fewer and fewer customers strolled in from the neighborhood. Language differences, for one thing, Mason had said, became a problem. Within six months of his death, his beloved bookstore became an Oriental antique gallery.

At 3rd Street and Western, a Korean businessman has bought a dignified relic of that era, an extraordinary building that is entitled to be called glamorous, designed about 1930 by Arthur Harvey in the black-and-gold art deco style known as the Richfield type, of which few examples survive.

The building failed in its first role as a men’s clothing store, then did better as a bank for several decades--most recently as a Crocker Bank--but now stands vacant.

Whatever goes on inside, or doesn’t, the building commands the corner, queening it over an otherwise drab intersection. The fate of the glittering but now-vacant bank has come to symbolize the historical awareness of Los Angeles as it enters its third century.

Although its owners want to raze the edifice to modernize the corner with a new building--many of the Western Avenue storefronts above it already have been torn down--community members want the building designated a historic-cultural monument.

The designation, already endorsed by City Councilman John Ferraro, would permit changes on the building’s interior--as long as the fabulous facade from another age remains intact, much like the revisions done to the Pelissier Building, which houses the Wiltern Theater, farther down Western. The matter will be taken up by a council committee later this summer.

Although 3rd Street is one of the north-south boundaries of the heart of Koreatown--the other is Pico Boulevard--Korean businesses have established themselves as far north on Western as Melrose and as far south as Venice.

Much of the business property around there is moving into Korean hands, said Glenn Sanada, the housing and economic development coordinator of the Pacific Asian Consortium in Employment. One Anglo businessman said he is frequently approached by Korean realtors walking door to door soliciting property sales.

Sanada, who recently helped draft a Koreatown commercial area revitalization plan, said Western Avenue is the western boundary of an expanding Koreatown commerce that nonetheless remains insular, catering chiefly to Koreans.

Immigration and business zeal have helped to push up storefront, he said. They also are pushing the old Koreatown boundaries north toward 3rd Street and south beyond Olympic.

Korean merchants, their business names painted in Korean characters on store windows, sell their wares on nearly every block--out of vintage storefronts crowned with Spanish tile or renovated shops bright under fluorescent lamps, mixed among Latin panaderias, X-rated movie theaters and franchise fast-food stops.

“It’s kind of a cultural thing,” Sanada said. “The original group here wanted to establish themselves, establish an identity and make themselves a home in this area. Business is a good thing to get into.”

Opening a business in Koreatown is easy: “Most of your clients will be Korean,” Sanada said. “It’s (also) easier for them to communicate (with non-Koreans) in dollars and cents; you don’t need language skills,” and therefore, Sanada said, many Koreans don’t bother to learn them.

The owner of a Korean mirror and glass shop on Western, mindful of his varied neighbors, took pains to put a sign in the window, “Se Habla Espanol.” And Councilman David Cunningham has asked that an advisory committee of Korean and non-Korean residents in the area consider asking Koreans to put up signs in English as well, to make that stretch of town less bewilderingly alien to Angelenos who have lived there for years.

Sanada said a telephone survey he conducted found that 40% of Korean shopkeepers had no one on the premises who spoke English.

About 15 years ago, when Koreans began moving in, it was “one of the older Asian neighborhoods,” where land prices were cheap and, with an enclave of Japanese, not completely alien to Korean newcomers, Sanada said. “There was a lot of familiarity with food and culture.”

Now the area is high priced in spots and getting higher, Sanada said. Along Koreatown streets, shops and restaurants that are there one month are sometimes gone the next, he said.

Turnover is not a new problem for Western. From the boom-and-bust 1920s, an anonymous “old promoter,” in his book “Sunshine and Grief in Southern California,” sounded the tocsin of warning on Western Avenue, where duplexes and little bungalows were hauled away overnight and businesses put up in their place to satisfy eager speculators. With the ruthless winnowing of business, it couldn’t last long; hundreds went broke. By 1931, he wrote, “this once-famous avenue of trade remains in the minds of many a remembrance only of better days.”

For the non-Korean businessmen who have been long entrenched on Western Avenue, the competition and the slow changeover to Korean landowners pose different problems.

One Hollywood man, who wanted neither his name nor business used, spent seven years in a shop just off Western, prospering with the changing clientele of Latinos, blacks and elderly, and “glad when my snooty Anglo customers”--the ones who snubbed their new ethnic neighbors--”moved out.”

But then, he said, new Korean residents moved in and began treating non-Korean businessmen--including himself, a nearby hairdresser and an elderly antique store owner--”arrogantly. . . . They’d pound on the counter to get my attention. . . .” Finally, a few months after several Korean businessman bought his leased shop and he faced higher rents, he gave up his business.

One element that the new advisory committee may discuss is friction between established and newer businesses and residents, acknowledged its temporary chairman, businessman Ki Su Park

Tense feelings toward Koreans in the black community--a black-owned newspaper in Los Angeles recently advised blacks to “wake up” and stop patronizing neighborhood stores owned by Koreans--is based on fears that the already impoverished communities are being further drained by Korean businessmen taking the profits out of the black areas where they earn them.

The advisory committee, which will make its recommendations to city planners, hopes to explore “the problems and issues of the general area, not exclusively for Korean-Americans but for all the people who live and work there,” Ki said.

In the loft apartments above those Korean storefronts are still long-timers who cherish “the neighborhoody feeling” of Western, both then and now, said screenwriter John Lafia, who himself “could afford to move but I don’t want to.” Some of them, like his upstairs neighbor, with his own rooftop Jacuzzi and private palm tree, have been around more than 15 years. They meet to gab over morning coffee at the venerable all-day breakfast place up the street, or at night at the Bob-Bin Inn farther down Western, “a whole world of people.”

Frank Fried has his own ways of blending the new world of Western with his old one.

Since World War I, Western Avenue around Beverly, 3rd and even Melrose has been “Furniture Row, and at one time it was the best furniture street in the city,” said Fried, owner of Paul’s West Furniture.

He moved there more than 15 years ago from Alhambra, to a shop across the street from the furniture store his uncle had owned since before the Depression.

Now, Fried said, the nature of the competition is changing. The quality of merchandise along the street is as varied as the shops, and some of the goods in the dozens of new, struggling shops are, he said, “poor-quality merchandise that looks the same (as good furniture) but turns out not to be.” When it proves inferior, he added “the (buyer’s) attitude is that ‘the whole area is that way, and I don’t want to shop there.’ ”

His solution is to retrench, stocking more sophisticated furniture and cutting back on his floor space to “merchandise in a way we can compete with them.”

The raze-and-rebuild urge has been strong on Western Avenue, but there are a few survivors. Near 1st Street, Fire Station 29, at 72 years old the oldest working fire station in the city, a little gem of a building designated “historically significant” still stands--but for how long, no one knows.

North of Wilshire, the venerable building housing the Elks’ Lodge 99, and the longtime Mama Lion restaurant-club nearby, are across the street from three lunch spots that sit elbow to elbow: a sushi luncheon spot, a Mexican food restaurant and a pizza joint.

Dan Hoye, the program coordinator for the Southern California Historical Society, has lived not far off Western for several years, and lately, he said, with the merry-go-round of businesses moving in and out, he no longer finds much to draw him there to dine or shop. Nothing along Western feels inviting, much less enduring or neighborly, he said.

“It’s a channel now. I go through it on my way to work,” he said. “Lately, it just has a negative, nebulous feeling.”

Even the local characters have tended to drift away, Hoye said. The “trinket lady” who wafted around the intersection, “a human Christmas tree” in spangles and beads, has moved to Hollywood Boulevard; the fat, grimy man wrapped in a blanket who stalked Western with his bags of trashy treasures, occasionally taking up residence on a bus bench and, said Hoye, confessing aloud to inventing the U-2 spy plane, has moved on. The stately gentleman who stood at Melrose and Western every day for years and solemnly pitched nine innings with an imaginary baseball, rain or shine, died long ago.

Some things have not changed. Fifty years ago, National Geographic proclaimed the “Golden Circle”--the corner of Wilshire and Western--as “the busiest corner of Los Angeles.”

When they wrote that, there was a General Electric appliance store where a drugstore now stands, and across the street, at the seafoam-green Pelissier Building--once the site of a prosperous dairy farm--the art deco Wiltern Theater was showing “Man Wanted,” starring Kay Francis, and an Andy Devine co-feature. Admission was two bits.

It is still a frantically busy corner. Buses ply it constantly, shifting human cargo in all four directions. Metro Rail planners envision a Wilshire-Western station just west of the old Golden Circle, where, they say, people would get on or off the subway 25,109 times each day. The Wiltern, meticulously restored after being ravaged by transients and city grime, has reopened.

The theater is one of the street’s pillars; so is El Cholo restaurant, where restaurant iconography holds that the food is good enough to have brought in Betty Crocker and the margaritas strong enough to have lured to Los Angeles an ex-con still eluding the law.

The former head chef, Joe Reina, who died in May, remembered all that in a conversation with a Times reporter. He sold newspapers on Western as a boy, making his best money on championship fights. In 1929, he started working in El Cholo’s kitchen, stopping in after school to grind corn for a dime so he could go see the Tom Mix movies up the street.

In 1932, Reina had joined up full time, proudly driving his first car, a Model T Ford, down Western, which was watered regularly to keep the dust down, and parking it beyond the hitching posts out front.

In those years, he recalled, the businesses were pretty much family affairs--something El Cholo still is. The kitchen of the popular restaurant is named after Reina and his late wife, who worked alongside him for 20 years.

Until World War II, El Cholo’s neighbors were mostly Japanese, who were forced to sell their property during the relocation.

Now, the neighbors, from south of Olympic to the Santa Monica Freeway, are different. The 1980 census, which by now under-represents Latino and Asians, shows the Western corridor there with a 43% black population, 40% Latino and 11% Asian.

Nowadays, El Cholo’s patrons come from far away; years ago, the clientele used to be local, Reina remembered.

They strolled up or drove over from the spacious homes around Pico and Western, elegant leftovers from the turn of the century, when the city’s first country club and finest military academy were thereabouts.

Berkeley Square, the enclave of 20 mansions called “an island of gracious living” in turn-of-the-century Los Angeles, once stood on the west side of Western, straddling what is now the Santa Monica Freeway. It was torn down when that interstate barrelled through. The grandest of those homes, the 65-room Phillips Mansion, was in the 1960s the home of a black religious group; later, a group of black doctors bought the property for a medical building.

But between Pico and a parallel street that is still called Country Club, several fellows back around 1895 bought up enough land at $250 an acre for an 18-hole golf course, and, with an initiation fee of $10, the Los Angeles Country Club was open for business. A German named Saul Schultz set up a beer garden nearby, and a black express-wagon driver named Bruce was hired to haul golfers from the end of Pico to the clubhouse.

At the first Southern California Golf Assn. tourney, on Washington’s Birthday in 1900, 29 golfers teed off. A few years later, the club packed up and moved west.

But the Harvard Military Academy at Venice and Western stayed around for at least two decades more.

The academy used to be a stop on Silas Lawler’s paper route, and he would stop sometimes to watch the wealthy young men playing football in the shadow of the great houses, which, now fading and sagging in spots, stand reticently apart from the busy street, abuzz with transactions at places like Ricky’s Burgers, with paletas for sale, and at the gas station with the blue tile pagodas.