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Western Avenue : Thoroughfare Cuts Through Fabric of Black Life in L.A.

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Times Staff Writer

To be black in Los Angeles before the 1950s, says Bernard Johnson, was to know Western Avenue as a two-lane blacktop barricade as impassable as the Gobi Desert and sometimes as inhospitable.

For blacks, Western Avenue lacks the history of Central Avenue, where Johnson is director of the Dunbar Museum, the 1920s Art Deco hotel built exclusively for blacks turned away by white hotels. Nor does it have the commerce of Crenshaw Boulevard, the first street where major stores, mindful of black consumers, stayed put after “white flight.”

But within a generation, after the cross burnings and restrictive covenants faded from news into memory, Western has become one of the main thoroughfares in a largely black part of Los Angeles.

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a county health clinic and a free legal services operation have offices there; the Institute for Black Parenting keeps its counseling office on child abuse there, and the city has set up a housing rehabilitation center there.

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From the Santa Monica Freeway overpass, where Latinos hawk bags of peanuts or oranges from the median strip at rush hour, Western moves down to Century Boulevard--where the old Sportsman’s Park was renamed for Jesse Owens after his outstanding athletic feats in the city--through much of the fabric of black life in Los Angeles.

Edgar Johnson has known Western Avenue for almost all of his 80 years--first as a child in his grandmother’s home on 36th near Western and then, as an adult, from his office at Golden State Mutual Insurance.

The company, one of the city’s first major black businesses, sits symbolically on Western at Adams Boulevard, at the very heart of what was once Los Angeles’ “rich man’s paradise”--very wealthy and very white.

A few of the once-sumptuous houses are still there. Some of them have been lushly restored; some are ratty and ill-kempt. Several, like their late owners, have passed from the secular world into the hands of God--in this case, the nursing hospital of St. John of God.

The hospital has stood at Western and Adams, opposite the Golden State Building, for 43 years, growing in size as families with names like Fitzgerald and MacDonald left their property to the order, which now operates its 188-bed care facility behind elegant iron gates.

The hospital, funded by charity, has stayed put, said Brother Patrick Corr, president of the foundation, who came to Western Avenue when the hospital did. “The big weakness in the U.S. is there’s no tradition,” he said. “People, if they get the price, they move.”

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So Corr balked when it was suggested, years ago, that the hospital abandon the increasingly black area and move west.

“We had to stand our ground and show these people we’re not biased.” He wanted locals--black and white--to “see that we were trying to help them. . . . I’m glad we stood our ground.” The payoff, among others, is that the property has increased in value.

But it is Johnson’s old quarters, the Golden State Building, that commands the street. In the late 1940s, the business had a hand in breaking down some of the racial barriers that had kept Johnson’s family and others in “their” parts of town. The firm, in spite of threatening phone calls, made a mortgage loan to one of the first black families to move into the Hollywood Hills.

The company, Johnson recalled, also financed a medical building on Western Avenue for a group of black doctors who until then had to practice out of their houses. To this day, the auditorium in the Golden State Building is the unofficial gathering hall for community groups.

Decades earlier, in 1906, Johnson’s mother brought him here from Atlanta, to live with his grandmother on 36th near Western, at the edge of the “enclave,” he said. His mother and grandmother could work, for $6 a week, at a Western Avenue laundry--but they could not live beyond the avenue, where vineyards and orchards of apricot and peach trees stretched westward.

“For Negro people, it was very restricted. ‘You Negroes can move into the section south of Jefferson, to Western Avenue, but no further south than Exposition, no further east than Budlong,’ ” he remembered the unwritten rule. “That was the enclave.”

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Even then, the steaming-hot laundry where he played at his mother’s feet was “the only actual productive industry on Western Avenue.” So slow was it that after school he and his friends would draw a ring in the dust at the intersection of 36th and Western and shoot marbles.

“In those days.” Johnson said, “the stores remained very small. The death of an owner just put them out of business. There was a lot of turnover--in business, out of business.”

Much of that pattern remains. Down Western are a patchwork of blocks: shops that have been long shuttered, shops that have just opened hopefully for business and shops that manage by some margin to stay in business.

There is along Western, Johnson said, a lot of competition for the area’s scarce and carefully spent dollars. “Where you have low-income people,” he said, “you have low-income business.” And certainly sections of Western are just that; the mile-wide strip of Western from Exposition to Vernon, in the 1980 census, showed two-thirds of the residents with incomes of less than $15,000, and although 45% of them owned the homes they lived in, many of those households--more than 60%--were headed by the single, divorced, widowed or separated.

Shoppers who can, Johnson said, often “go elsewhere. They go out to Crenshaw or to Fox Hills Mall,” where there are “better prices, more selection in those big places.”

Cornelia Short might say a worried “amen” to that.

Shortly after the Watts riots tore apart South-Central Los Angeles nearly 20 years ago, Short opened Cornelia’s Dress Shop on Western Avenue. It has helped her raise her two children--one of them now a schoolteacher--but not much more than that.

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“Nobody is making any money, so nobody can buy. People are not going to drive from Beverly Hills to buy here. They aren’t coming out of the Valley to buy here, so it’s got to be working-class people.”

She and her customers share the same tightrope-walking feeling that can send a teetering budget plummeting, like the month her gas bill went up by a single dollar, which she just didn’t have to spare.

“You don’t know from one day to the next how long you’re going to be in business--there’s a lot of people living like that. Like I said . . . it’s a struggle,” she said.

Hard as it is, Short said, when the old people come in--and they do, asking “for 25, 30 cents, and some of them are hungry,” she will give “a dollar or two. . . . I’m just grateful to be open.”

More than a dozen years ago, as Cornelia Short was working to make a go of her dress shop, Michael Zinzun was a regular on the avenue too, often walking miles up and down it, selling the Black Panther Party newspaper to shop owners.

Now, he is director of the Coalition Against Police Abuse, whose settlement in the Los Angeles Police Department spying case has been used to set up a computer bank to record residents’ complaints about police, Zinzun said.

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The coalition’s storefront office on Western, he said, has become an “informal community center,” where residents meet to talk about such concerns as the proliferation of liquor stores, apartheid and protecting their children from violence.

Across the street from the coalition was a buy-and-sell gold operation that opened and closed within two months. Before then, Zinzun recalled, it had been an upholstery shop. Next door, he said, the current business card printing shop was converted from a hamburger joint that was in turn converted from a restaurant.

All that proves, Zinzun said optimistically, that on Western Avenue, people “still make an attempt. So that’s why you see businesses come into being and go out in a relatively short period of time. That energy is still there.”

One of his busiest neighbors is the county public health clinic, which became a bona fide part of the area it serves when it was renamed last year for Dr. Ruth Temple, the city’s first black woman doctor, whose teachings prompted the city to set up one of its first public health clinics more than 40 years ago.

There have been other changes along Western. The 1980 census showed that even four years ago, along Western, from Exposition to Vernon, the Latino population was 10% and growing.

The Latino presence along Western is apparent in such places as a Belizean restaurant, or the disco featuring “sounds of the Caribbean.” Moving into the tidy bungalows off Western, perhaps half of them rented out by owners who have since moved north or west, are more and more Latino families.

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Neighborhood patronage, whether black or Latino, is crucial to the shoestring economy along Western. To stand up to the competition--from chain stores and storefront markets--business demands diversity.

Today’s street-corner vendors may feature incense one week, fresh fruit the next and a special on brass headboards after that. On one recent day, a man sat in his pickup truck at Gage and Western, hawking sofa pillows at two for $5. A gas station at Exposition and Western offered sunglasses, baby strollers and nylon luggage.

On block after block of businesses, a few rolls of carpeting, a rack of clothes are trundled out onto the sidewalk, each merchant hoping to distinguish his shop from the blur of storefronts that pass by at 30 m.p.h.

On a sunny morning, Oddie Gauthier Vappie had dragged a chair outside and was sitting in front of her Western Avenue shop, reading the local paper--the Wave--in which she would love to be able to afford to advertise her clothing shop. As it is, she can just hang her wares enticingly out in front.

When she set up shop here a year ago, Vappie knew she had to offer something for everybody; variety “seems to help.” So in the corner building that her shop shares with ABC Beauty Supply, Vappie makes a point of keeping “a bit of everything” on hand--used clothing from 50 cents an item to new embroidered blouses for $20 (two customers tease her about her fancy things--”the Beverly Hills Shop,” they call it).

There are Peter Pan children’s slippers knitted by a friend, at $1 a pair; wood carvings from Africa and Haiti, and costume-jewelry rings at the desk, where Vappie keeps her Bible and her cash register.

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Of late, the Bible has been getting opened much more than the cash box. “It seems to fluctuate right now, but I’m a great believer, and I don’t mind saying so, that I’m looking for it to do better.”

And so it goes down the street, where the Blessed Wedding Chapel ties the nuptial knot “in the Beautiful Flower Garden in the Chapel,” and then several other shops stand shuttered until a prosperous block with a hobby store, a dry-cleaners and a hardware store. It is all cozily low-profile, one and two stories, rarely three; the tallest structures on the street are the spires of churches.

People “identify with their little neighborhoods,” said community activist Zinzun, “three or four blocks at a time.”

The people who pick up their groceries at Watson’s Market near Western and Slauson could have, 60 years before, shopped at the same corner, entering the store through an arch of curved whale ribs. The people who attend the 30th Street Christian Church would find that only the name of the corner house of worship has changed--from the Western Avenue Christian Church.

And anyone who lived around 48th and Western years ago would recognize another unchanging fixture: Mildred Fisher. The retired office manager for Los Angeles’ city schools has lived near 48th and Western for 32 years, in a house she bought in 1953 for its “huge patio and backyard full of trees” for her four children.

Fisher believes in her neighborhood and has ever since she moved her family here--the second black family in the area.

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She brought up her children in the local (and then nearly all-white) public schools. One son is an Army major; one daughter is a stewardess. “I have some high-powered kids,” Fisher says with satisfaction.

Although her white neighbors “did not do a mass exodus as they do in some neighborhoods,” many eventually retired and sold their houses, or “drifted out gradually” and rented out the homes--many to the new Hispanics coming into the area, Fisher said.

It has taken some doing, but nowadays, with the help of the city’s Chesterfield Square home program, “the neighborhood is looking so bright and sparkling . . . like it did when I moved in 31 years ago,” she said.

The home program, which offers subsidized loans of up to $27,000 to rehabilitate homes and apartment buildings, opened shop last year--significantly, on the site of a liquor store, “a terrible eyesore to the community” whose parking lot had been populated with transients hanging out in abandoned cars, said Otis Will, the project manager.

The choice of that former liquor store for its headquarters was a deliberate one, an “indication of what is happening on Western Avenue,” Will said, “to contribute to the reversal of that trend in the neighborhood.”

“Our program is geared to stabilize the neighborhoods adjacent to Western,” he said, pinpointed, like others in town, as “neighborhoods that have not completely deteriorated but are at that marginal point, (and) could go completely all the way down and be irreversible.”

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Los Angeles is so big, and Western is so long, that to make it feel like a neighborhood, residents, in their lives, chop it up into chunks of half a dozen blocks each.

And every three or four blocks, Will said, the pattern repeats itself--a church, a liquor store, a dress shop or barber or lawn mower place or little market, so that to the casual driver the street begins to look like the same half-mile pattern of shops, repeated endlessly.

Western’s depressed business property, Will said, can be boosted to prosperity if the residents behind them are committed to the neighborhoods they live in. To that end, the Chesterfield subsidized loans offer people “who say they’re not interested in moving” away a chance at low-interest home-improvement loans.

Mildred Fisher jumped at the chance and got her 60-year-old house rewired, replumbed, spruced and spiffed up.

It has meant that she can finally get homeowner’s insurance, even at a “horrendous” rate, something that had been denied her since she had several break-ins before she put in an alarm system four years ago.

“I believe it’s really because of the neck of the woods I live in,” she said. “I feel I wouldn’t have any problem getting insurance if I lived in the Valley.”

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But she is staying put. “I love my neighborhood and have no intention of moving.”

Fixing up her house was only part of her effort; Fisher helped organize a local block club, which meets at her home--most recently to fret about the liquor stores’ proliferating video games, which are “the enticement to our children.”

At a junior high school, one block off of Western near Florence, the principal hears the same worries from parents all the time.

So Marguerite LaMotte, who wants to preserve “the good things going on here” at Horace Mann Junior High, realized that there were “some very negative images in the community” and resolved to deal with them.

Over get-acquainted coffee at the school, police, block captains, Western Avenue merchants and parents met during the school year “to voice their concerns, their desire to have a safe community.”

From that meeting, a steering committee went to work. Students who complained of being intimidated at bus stops and fast-food places by menacing young men who live on the fringes of drugs or gangs, extorting money or allegiance from students, found help in LaMotte.

During the school year, she and two deans “walk Florence and Western in the afternoon . . . stand with the students at the bus stop until the RTD takes them (home),” LaMotte said. Extra patrol cars from the 77th Division, she said, have been assigned to show up about the time school gets out, as a deterrent. “We can see a difference,” she said.

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Soon, she hopes, the steering committee and the merchants will work out a plan for merchants to put a sign in their windows so students will “know it’s a person or place they could go for assistance if they feel bothered or in danger.”

Next week: Western from Gardena toward the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

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