Melrose Seniors Get Eyeful Watching Trendy Set Go By
From his lawn chair vantage point on Melrose Avenue, Arturo Spada has come upon a generational problem of epic proportions. Fewer people seem to know the meaning of a wolf whistle.
There are still enough young women who turn around and giggle when they realize that an 84-year-old man under the terry-cloth porkpie hat just whistled at them. And there are plenty more who recognize the irritating double strain well enough to fix Spada with glares that could freeze the few hairs left on his head.
But more often these days, the women who parade past Spada’s lawn chair in front of the Golden Age Retirement Hotel just walk on by. “Maybe I’m not as loud as I used to be,” he reasoned glumly.
Spada makes these sociological discoveries because he is a resident of a retirement home that tries to be a quiet haven for 75 elderly residents in the middle of one of the trendiest, most youth-oriented streets in Los Angeles.
The gray concrete building with orange tile pillars has been a fixture on Melrose Avenue for more than 13 years, built when the street was still a desolate strip populated with gas stations and auto repair lots. Now, the Golden Age is surrounded by clothing stores with winking neon signs and underwear in the display windows. Nearby are stores named Wacko, Mad Man and Retail Slut, and newer stores with sophisticated European names like Grau and Skul, trying to outdo each other with wild new uses for punctuation, placing umlauts where accents have never gone before.
Nothing is on sale at the Golden Age, but there is always a crowd of window-gazers out front. Perhaps it is the drawing power of an audience of regulars like Spada, who sit for hours outside the front entrance of the home, and just watch. Sometimes, when Spada tries another wolf whistle, it is difficult to tell who is the real audience, the watchers or the watched.
“Nice place to retire,” said Kip Owen, 24, a would-be actor who wheeled around after he heard one of Spada’s whistles. Owen, wearing a black sleeveless T-shirt, black jeans and black boots, grinned at Spada and gave the old man a thumbs-up sign.
Spada peered out from under his porkpie, disappointed at this latest response to his whistle. “Yeah, it’s good,” he muttered. “And we got a room for you.”
It is less certain whether there would be places for some of Melrose’s fashion pioneers, such as the man dressed vaguely like a modern pirate who sauntered by with a dark cape flapping in the breeze. Lee Mager, 83, a Brooklyn woman who moved into the Golden Age a month ago, stared long enough to take in the rest of the man’s costume, which included tight pants with a pattern of lightning bolts, several indistinguishable layers of shirts and a long iron cross earring.
‘What’s to Like?’
“My daughter asked me, ‘So how do you like the avenue?’ ” Mager said after the pirate had disappeared from view. “I said, ‘Muriel, what’s to like? I don’t see any difference from any other street.’ She said: ‘You know, all those strange people.’ And I said: ‘It’s like any other street. You have nice people and you have meshugges .’ ”
She cocked her head slightly to see if the pirate was out of earshot. “That was a meshugge,” she explained, using the Yiddish term for crazy.
A resident who said her name was Goldie ticked off some of her recent sightings. “Well, let’s see,” she said, furrowing her brow, “there was the fella whose hair looked like the Statue of Liberty. There were some girls who looked like they used chalk for makeup. One older man came down the street dressed half his age. With a ponytail yet.”
As she continued her list, a young boy sailed by on a skateboard. He held another skateboard aloft, showing it to the elderly chair sitters. “Five dollars, five dollars,” he chanted. None of the Golden Age residents took him up on the offer.
Bemused Silence
Most of the time, the chair sitters take in these momentary encounters in bemused silence. They are quick to point out that they are not fazed by these events. “It must be the air here,” Spada insisted.
Moses Feiner, the curly bearded owner of the Golden Age, said the residents of the home have adjusted, if a bit uneasily, to the pace of the avenue. “We are good neighbors to everyone,” he said. “Nobody is against us. What could they possibly have against old people?” Feiner’s only concession to caution has been to put chains around the legs of the lawn chairs to deter thieves.
Feiner encourages the retirees to amble around the neighborhood. Most of them stay on the sidewalk, but a few wander into the clothing stores. At Slique, which sells denim jump suits and stylish sweat shirts with vaguely hip words on them, Shoshi Oz, the manager, has befriended one elderly man who comes in once a week to buy a few postage stamps.
Next door, at Skul, a store that sells kneepads for skateboarders, surfing trunks and T-shirts festooned with cartoons of Tammy Bakker, Kayla Chase was slightly more ambivalent about the mingling of old and young.
“It’s bizarre . . . no, it’s cute,” she said. “They’ll come into the store and look around for awhile. They look kind of nervous. Some of them will come up to the cash register and they’ll give me this kind of scared look and say, ‘What do you sell here?’ Then they say, ‘Maybe I’ll buy a T-shirt.’ But they never do.”
Spada gets around to some of the stores, but he prefers to stay safely within walking distance of the Golden Age’s front door. From his perch on a lawn chair, he gets all the daily entertainment he needs, free of charge.
