Faces With Names : On Fairfax, the Personal Side of the Neighborhood Is What Counts

For the past 40 years, there has been a scene on Fairfax. In 1968, for instance, the so-called Borscht Belt between Beverly and Clinton was also a mecca for the Love Generation. Bizarrely costumed flower children trekked up and down the avenue, passing out incense, panhandling or checking out hippie businesses such as the Psychedelic Candle Shop or I’m a Hog for You Baby, a mod clothing store that saluted the kosher markets across the street with a sign featuring an enormous pig.

Today, longtime habitues of Fairfax remember that era with a wry whimsy, as if recollecting an aberrant season that only awkwardly fits into the ongoing history of the avenue. But the street scene that continues here is still very much a public one: People treat the avenue as if it were an extension of their homes. Customers are on a first-name basis with shopkeepers; pedestrians exchange vibrant smiles. It may be the last true neighborhood in Los Angeles. What distinguishes Fairfax isn’t historical landmarks or Hollywood glamour but rather a way of life. It begins early in the morning. At 6 o’clock, regulars start dropping by Al’s Newsstand before heading across the street to Canter’s for coffee and a bagel. By 8, a steady stream of people courses up and down the avenue, eddying through the sidewalk fruit stands, cluttered kosher markets, bakeries redolent of warm, yeasty dough, and a spate of dimly lit stores selling everything from discount merchandise to religious books. The whole street takes on the guise of an open market where shopping isn’t an errand as much as a personal ritual. Little old ladies scrutinize a basket of strawberries with a wariness ordinarily reserved for used-car engines: They poke at it, hold it up to the light, squint at it, turn it over, sniff it, then pick up another basket and start anew. A purchase is a form of interrogation, and the fruit is guilty until proven innocent. Creatures of habit, Fairfax shoppers proceed from their bakery to their butcher to their kosher market--not buying for four days at a time but picking up just enough for the next 24 hours. No one here is in a hurry.

Elderly men and women, frail frames twisted in incongruous angles, shuffle up the street, aided by canes and walkers. The men are impeccably dressed in 15-year-old leisure suits, slip-on shoes and porkpie hats, and the women always manage to be perfectly made-up with the same face they’ve been wearing for the past 40 years. They don’t appear even remotely suited for life in the megalopolis; their sunglasses seem too large for their wrinkled faces. At all hours of the day, Fairfax’s elderly perambulate up the avenue with a fierce zest.

Lives are measured out in these daily peregrinations and replenished by the inexhaustible font of conversation that percolates in pockets up and down the street. You don’t come to Fairfax unless you have time to talk. At Farmers Market, at 3rd and Fairfax, old-timers cluster around the circular tables and trade vaudeville jokes, race-track stories and comments on the cheekbones of some passing “dish.” It’s a free-floating, pick-up game of a conversation, and any vacated chairs are soon filled by new recruits: The important thing is that the talk never stops. Over the counter at Schwartz’s Bakery or Sax Fish Avenue, words are exchanged like casual gifts. Inside the Tel Aviv Cafe, Israelis talk in Hebrew for hours, and the musical laughter of their country spills out the open door. Proprietors stand in front of their shops and chat up passers-by. The street resonates with the guttural hum of Eastern European accents; in the barbershop at 430 Fairfax, customers know that they can tell silver-haired Henry Goldscher--who’s run the shop for 23 years--to cut it a little shorter this time, and that he’ll understand, whether they’re speaking Polish (his native language), Russian, German, Yiddish, Hebrew or English.

Because the neighborhood is still largely Jewish, on Friday the avenue pulsates with a stronger sense of purpose. Members of the various Orthodox sects hurry to get their shopping done before sunset, when Shabbat officially begins. As twilight softens the streets, bearded, black-suited fathers and young boys in yarmulkes stroll to their synagogues with a measured gait from another era. Many of the stores on Fairfax are closed Saturdays, and a vaguely haunted hush sweeps over the street. On Jewish holidays, it’s as though the sidewalks had opened up and swallowed every last trace of street life.

Fairfax is more than just a Jewish ghetto, though; it’s a ghetto of time as well. There’s a stronger sense of continuity here than almost anywhere else in Los Angeles. This is a place where people stay. The Wittners started selling cigars on Fairfax more than three decades ago. Carmella Beckman has been running the Hataklit International record store since 1950. And up the street, John Hampton is preparing to reopen the doors of Movie--the musty theatrical shrine he first opened 44 years ago--and resume screening silent films.

Of course, the face of the avenue has changed since the 1940s, when Jews first began moving here from the old neighborhood in Boyle Heights. Back then, the site of the CBS monolith south of Beverly was a ballpark called Gilmore Field, where local fans cheered on the minor-league Hollywood Stars. The Esquire Theatre stayed alive by running return engagements of “Pepe Le Moko” until 1953, when it was transformed into Canter’s delicatessen. Notoriously racy Yiddish comedians kept nightclub audiences laughing right through the early 1960s at Billy Gray’s Band Box. Today, that site is a Crocker Bank parking lot.

Demographics have changed, too. When Fairfax High lets out, black, Mexican and Chinese students stride past the kosher markets on their way to a bus stop or some local hangout like the Me & Me falafel stand. In recent years, apartment vacancies have been getting filled by a heterogeneous crew of young singles, including writers and artists and other slightly dissolute types. Occasionally there is friction between the old and new: A young woman painter tells the story of how she used to blast rock ‘n’ roll every Friday night, knowing that her Orthodox neighbors were helpless to call the police because of Sabbath strictures.

But to some extent, nearly everyone who comes here ends up partaking in the spirit of the avenue. This is nowhere more evident than in Canter’s delicatessen at 2 in the morning. Surrounded by blocks imperturbably immured in quiet and darkness, Canter’s at this hour is a lone beacon, a haven for travelers of the night. After an evening at the Troubadour, metal heads wrapped in leather and mascara come in to finish off the evening with a close-quarters food fight. Up front by the deli counters, older men and women from the neighborhood point out Danish pastry they want bagged for breakfast. Israelis from the San Fernando Valley, dressed in European-styled suits, float smiles over the steam rising from bowls of matzo-ball soup, while couples from Fairfax High snuggle properly into booths and look around to see who else from class might show up this late. Celebrities ranging from Mel Brooks to Prince drop in from time to time.

Basically, the customers are all here for the same reason: They aren’t ready to stop talking yet, to surrender the night hours to voiceless slumber. Food is consumed simply as fuel for more talk, and the infectious conviviality is an additional stimulant. At moments, however, even the beehive whirl of public chatter takes a back seat to a more elementary social drive. As co-owner Allen Canter explains it, people like to be around people. It’s hard for anyone to feel out of place here. Older waitresses automatically address customers as “hon,” as in, “Whaddaya want, hon--you want lox or you want hash?” They’ve been seeing some of these customers every day for the past 20 years: They know who’s getting divorced, who’s moved, who’s had a stroke. They’ve watched the old couples come in over the years, growing progressively more stooped, until finally the day arrives when one of them shows up alone.

It’s an ongoing story of mercy and mortality on Fairfax. An elderly woman collapsed the other day, right across the street from Al’s Newsstand. She blacked out and fell face-down. A passer-by in a jogging outfit stopped to see if she was all right, and cautioned her to lie still till help arrived.

Twenty minutes later, the paramedics showed up. As they helped the woman to her feet, an elderly couple stopped to watch, and the man’s mouth suddenly dropped open. “That’s Ida,” he gasped. His wife drew a blank. “You remember Ida,” he began, and as they walked away down the street there was an urgency to his gestures, as though more than his wife’s memory was at stake. Indeed, when no one recognizes an Ida anymore, Fairfax will become just another North-South thoroughfare. The last true neighborhood in Los Angeles will have passed away.