Street Scene Organizer: ‘We’ve Tried So Hard’

Her voice sagged with fatigue and the crumbling effects of energy letdown. The night before, Sylvia Cunliffe had finished producing another Street Scene, a logistical nightmare. Now she was being told that this one would probably be the last.

Mayor Tom Bradley, reacting to a weekend of violence, on Monday announced his desire to cancel the massive festival. For Cunliffe--who had insisted for years that sporadic fights and other confrontations at the Street Scene were being overplayed by the news media--it was the bitterest of pills.

“We’ve tried ever so hard to create a wholesome program that would be trouble-free,” she said. “I guess I just don’t know how to do that.”

Such admissions of defeat have been rare in Cunliffe’s climb through the City Hall bureaucracy. She has taken on the responsibility of Street Scene each year since 1979 on top of her job as general manager of the city’s General Services Department, a position that makes her responsible for 2,000 employees and a $200-million annual budget for purchasing, maintaining equipment and dispatching it to almost all other city departments.

City Council members who wish to redecorate their offices or need office equipment must deal with Cunliffe’s department--and sometimes with Cunliffe herself, leading some city officials to grouse privately about the 5-foot, 53-year-old woman.

Cunliffe’s distinctive dress also makes her a City Hall standout. With her trademark beehive hair style and her penchant for wearing large brooches and jewelry pins, she is an unmistakable figure. But her power is not illusory.

“You don’t cross Sylvia Cunliffe,” said one council member, who asked not to be identified.

To stand in such regard represents a spectacular rise for someone who began her career as a junior administrative assistant in the Bureau of Engineering after graduating from UCLA, and who in the ensuing 22 years received, by her own count, 10 promotions, becoming only the third woman general manager in the city’s history.

Of all of this, Street Scene, burgeoning each year, was Cunliffe’s gem, a tribute to the power of music and art to meld disparate chunks of humanity together on a common ground.

Which is why it was all the more galling to have the cancellation come after this year’s festival.

This, after all, was the year that Cunliffe, trained as a violinist, had created a separate stage for classical music and an international youth music festival to dim the criticism that Street Scene had become little more than a symposium for unsavory rock bands. This was the year that more police would be on hand, the year that bottles would be checked at the gates.

Instead, this was the year of some of the worst violence in Street Scene’s nine-year history, the year when someone watching a group called World Class Wrecking Crew on the International Stage at Aliso and Spring streets pulled a gun and shot a spectator, who later died.

“I was there when the shooting took place,” Cunliffe said Monday. “I was on the stage, looking at the crowd and saying to myself, ‘These are really wholesome-looking kids.’

“The audience was so dense--the greatest number of people I have ever seen--but to get to the stage I’d walked through that crowd and said ‘Excuse me, please,’ and everybody parted without saying anything. I got on the stage and saw all the people and my only concern was whether somebody was going to get squashed.

“The next thing you know some fool started shooting.”

No, she said, disputing Police Chief Daryl F. Gates’ characterization, “we did not book any heavy ‘punk’ acts. I don’t know if people really understand. For example, ‘heavy metal’ sometimes gets criticized but there’s different heavy metal: heavy-heavy metal and then the kind where kids dress up to look like heavy metal followers, but they aren’t. Most of our programming was very soft. We had oldies, rock ‘n’ roll, jazz, a lot of dance. . . .

“It’s such a pity to stop the music because it’s through music and art that we’ve been able to cross lines that politicians can’t cross.”