The Neighbors a Slumlord Left Behind : Some Say Building Is Better but Families Still Share Quarters With Mice, Cockroaches, Decay

Dolores Oroza leaned wearily against the bathroom wall, its tiles the coolest surface in the hot, slum tenement, address: 1660 N. Western Ave. Dr. Milton Avol’s place, and for 30 days, his prison. Avol is the man with the run-together moniker: “neurosurgeon-slumlord.” In July, a Los Angeles Municipal Court judge sentenced him to a month in his own rodent-infested tenement. He and Oroza have been neighbors.

Her eyes were dark and dull in a somber face as she spoke. Water seeps under the floor tiles from the leaking bathroom sink, she said. “And the windows are no good.” She pointed to the cracked and rotting wood frame and sill. When it rains outside, it rains in her bathroom, too, the Salvadoran refugee complained through an interpreter.

And the bathtub, its corroded, blackened state was not fit to touch her baby’s skin, the woman said. She painted it. But, she shrugged and smiled faintly, “it didn’t work.” Now she uses a foam cushion to protect her baby’s bare bottom from the tub’s rough surface.

Torn Screens, Scent of Gas

Oroza left the stuffy bathroom for the kitchen with its torn window screens and scent of leaking gas.

“Nothing has changed” inside her apartment since Avol, cited for numerous safety and housing code violations in the building, was essentially put under house arrest, fitted with an electronic ankle cuff to monitor his movements and ordered to make repairs. Avol’s sentence ended Wednesday.

Some Improvements

Several tenants in the sprawling, 91-unit building said there have been some improvements, however, mainly in the common areas of the building. The hallways have been cleared of trash and human debris.

“The difference in cleanliness is tremendous,” said “Maria Vargas,” a long-time resident who asked that her real name not be used. “Before it was very, very dirty. Very bad.”

Vargas attributes the improved conditions to a new manager, coincidentally Avol’s bodyguard, who took up the manager post when Avol began serving his sentence. To Vargas, the essential difference has been that “he’s here all the time in the office, whenever we need him.”

But Vargas said she doesn’t know what will happen after Avol is gone. For now, however, she and her children no longer have to fear the prostitutes, winos, drug peddlers and addicts who used to line the corridors. “So things are better now that they are gone.”

Antonio Rivera, a new tenant, pointed to the new carpet in his apartment, “Everything is fine for now. How long it will last, I don’t know. But fine, for the moment.”

Avol has said through his lawyer and spokesman, Donald Steier, that he partly blames the condition of the building on the tenants and vandals in the area. (Steier did not return several phone calls from The Times.) But the city says the building is not up to code, and that is Avol’s fault.

Putting “new carpet over rotting wood floors is typical Avol, said deputy city attorney Stephanie Sautner, supervisor of the city’s Interagency Housing Task Force, which expedites repairs of substandard housing.

Avol “is basically working on empty units in hope of selling the property,” said Sautner, who prosecuted the case against Avol. “He’s doing a whitewashing job.”

The Beverly Hills doctor was told he had to repair broken windows in the building. He did. By covering them “with a plastic glazing that would give off toxic fumes” in a fire, Sautner said. He was ordered to replace it with glass. Sautner said that’s typical of “the kind of work he’s been doing in his buildings for 10 years.” (Over the years, Avol has been cited for numerous housing code violations in various tenements, most of which he has sold. The Western Avenue property is for sale.) “He won’t use good materials and won’t hire a licensed contractor. He hires unskilled labor,” Sautner said.

He will get another 30 to 45 days after his sentence ends to bring the building up to the city’s health and safety codes, Sautner said. If he doesn’t, “I will file another case against him.”

Right now, she said, there is a “dangerous fuse box” with an exposed wire in the common hallway on the first floor. If a child touched it, “they’d be subject to electrocution.”

Further, when she went with inspectors from the city’s housing task force to check the building two weeks ago, it was still “infested with cockroaches and rodents.”

Vargas, the long-time resident, sat with her husband and children in their living room. She pointed to the trail of white, poisonous powder that bordered the apartment floor. Rats and roaches “that is the state all the time.” The children sleep in the bedroom with their parents because the rodents consider the living room their territory, she said.

Welts on the Legs

Even so, “I can’t sleep at night sometime because I feel the itches and things,” her 7-year-old daughter said. “I don’t like the way the animals do.”

Her father pointed to the small, red welts on his children’s legs and on his own arms. “My children now have an infection on their feet. We don’t know what kind of animal got to them. It itches a lot.”

Oroza, not her real name, feared reprisals from the landlord if her identity was revealed. She admitted she had not asked the new manager to make repairs in her one-bedroom apartment “because of all the people I have.” There are nine in the one-bedroom apartment.

Oroza, 35, has had eight children. Two died at birth. Two remain in El Salvador. Four live with her.

At night, she and her husband sleep in the living room with three of their children. One, a 17-year-old, sleeps on a cot in a doorless closet, clothes hanging over his head. A daughter, 15, has a sleep-in job as a domestic. She is home only a few nights a week.

Three other people, also from El Salvador, share a bedroom. They are looking for their own apartment. And a man, who said he is going back to Texas in a few days to get his green card, sleeps on a bed in the hallway.

Oroza rubbed her hand across her lumpy mattress. The rodents think they have bed privileges, too, she said. Unknowingly, she sat down on the bed one day and killed a mouse. “I crushed it to death,” she said, laughing hard.

But she worries all the time that a rodent will “bite my baby. I am always cleaning, cleaning, cleaning,” she said with a shudder.

Her baby, her last born, Oroza said, “is incapacitated.” The child was brain damaged at birth. “She is not going to die. She is going to grow, but she will be mentally sick.”

Oroza, who entered the United States illegally in 1983, said “I always have this nervous tension.” She wishes she could take medicine for it. But she can’t afford to go to a doctor or to buy the drugs.

“I have boring eyes,” she offered suddenly.

Perhaps her meaning was lost in the translation.

“I have boring eyes,” she repeated.

Then she agreed she meant sad eyes, eyes dulled by pain and worry.

It was late evening at 1660 N. Western Ave. Oroza and her husband, Miguel, had agreed to let us stay the night.

She sat at the kitchen table eating. She always ends up eating last, she said--after the baby is breast fed, given medicine and exercised as the doctor has prescribed. The night air coming through the kitchen window was cool. She ate alone and enjoyed the breeze.

Her son, Pablo, stood at the sink shelling cooked mussels. “It will be served with rice,” he said. He does not cook often, usually when his mother is not home. But tonight, he was helping her. His mother seemed particularly tired. They looked at each other and smiled.

Night School in Fall

The son, 17, works as a painter. He and his father support the entire family.

Though he had to drop out of school in the 11th grade to work, he hopes to go to night school in the the fall, he said. “I would like to be an architect.”

At night, he dreams of the house he will design for himself.

“Two-story,” he said, deftly opening the shellfish with a knife, “and with many rooms.” It would have a “big garden. Many trees. A swimming pool around it. A small park where the children can play. Animals, as on a farm. I would like to have the family life.”

Emphatically, he said he wants children “but no more than four.” His mother laughed.

He is homesick for El Salvador, he said, “its beaches, its rivers.”

There are beaches here, he knows, but “not like down there.”

But down there, “guerrillas” tried to kill him. They caught him in a field one day. “I couldn’t run because they would kill me right there. They grabbed me from my hair and they asked me questions . . . They told me they were going to let me go, but I had to kill somebody.”

He was told to kill the owner of the land on which he worked.

“And since I told them ‘yes,’ when they looked the other way, I began to run. That’s it.”

He said he was only held for hours. But his mother feared for his life. She decided they had to leave the country.

Pablo said he is not as happy here as he was in El Salvador. But he is happy. “Because I have my mother . . . “

Oroza’s husband brought guests when he came home. It was close to 9 p.m. She excused herself from the kitchen to see who they were. Embarrassed, she said, “we don’t have a sofa for them to sit on,” only straight chairs.

The visitors, a man and a woman, sat stiffly in the living room for a short while, then left.

The television had been on all evening. First, tuned to the English-language network news, then Channel 52, the Spanish-language station.

“We like to keep informed,” said the friend from Texas, the one who will get his green card soon. He came to L.A. because there is more work here than in Texas. “When one is too busy to read the paper during the day, you must watch the television to keep informed,” he said in fluent English. The news of the day was President Reagan’s Central American peace plan.

“Did you hear that?” the friend from Texas asked. A scurrying, scratching sound came from a corner near the window. “It’s the rodents.”

It’s time for them to come out, everyone said, laughing. “They usually appear around 8 p.m.,” the friend said. That night, they were late.

Oroza’s husband, who sometimes sleeps on the floor, said the mice are what he hates most. But as bad as things are for the family now, it is better than El Salvador.

Works in Factory

“I was lucky, the week after I arrived I got a job. So it’s been work, work, work . . . “ He works in a factory “to save a few cents, and to get enough to buy a house, that’s the idea. We have to support ourselves in this country because in our country, there is war. We see on television that perhaps we can get an amnesty to stay here while (El Salvador) fixes itself. We are waiting to see.”

But he’s not sure the family will remain at the Western Avenue apartment. The problem “is hygiene,” he said. The new manager “goes around like a maintenance man. I see him throwing away broken glass. But I never see anybody come to fumigate here, nothing. As far as I am concerned there is no maintenance here. When I go by where the trash cans are, there is a bad smell. It smells like urine. You can feel the foul odor.”

About 10:30 p.m., Oroza got in bed, her youngest son nestled beside her, her baby nearby. Her oldest was on the cot in the closet.

It was close to midnight before everyone decided to go to bed. The friend from Texas insisted that the visitors take his bed. He would sleep on the floor. “Please,” he said, “if you get up in the night, just step over me.” The space he chose, at the foot of his bed, was near a known entry and exit point for mice.

It was a noisy night. But it is always noisy at night, we were told. This strip of Western Avenue at Hollywood Boulevard, never sleeps. Nor did this writer.

Even in this household, where every attempt at good hygiene is made, the air was foul. The walls, inside and out, seemed to have been washed by a flush from a toilet bowl.

There are always shadows when light and night meet. But these were unfamiliar shadows. The sharply-angled, geometric forms cast by street lights through a paned window. Shadow boxes of dark and light suddenly cut by the headlights of a zooming car.

Sleep was pointless. But the tableau of street life on the block below was mesmerizing.

Between 3 and 4 a.m. the sidewalk was alive with prostitutes, pimps and quick drug deals. Everything from Beach Boy types in late model Mustangs to taxi drivers without fares popped into the 24-hour video sex parlor across the street. In front of the parlor, strangers made friends quickly: a handshake, an exchange. In an alleyway a few doors down, a barefoot hooker in red, a boisterous woman in white, a confused-looking male prostitute with a knapsack, and a half dozen pimps consorted with others. Only Geraldo Rivera was missing.

Long before dawn, Oroza was up. She had to fix lunch for her husband and son.

Why?

“Because they are lazy.” She would not go back to sleep, she said. Her day had begun.

“Are we in your way?” her visitor asked, clearing the table.

The woman with the “boring eyes,” looked at us anxiously. Her face muscles tensed, but her eyes maintained their dull glaze. “How much longer do you plan to stay?” she asked nervously.

“As long as you will allow.”

She conferred with her husband, who seemed willing for us to stay. But she said it would be safer for us to leave when her husband did. The manager will not be there then. She risked eviction if he saw us.

On the street below, we said goodby to her husband. One last time, we checked the alleyway beside the tenement where the garbage was kept and the drug peddlers and prostitutes used to hang out. No one was loitering. The lids rested loosely on the full and foul-smelling cans.

As we left the alleyway, two men across the street, in front of the 24-hour sex parlor, stopped and stared. Their hostile curiosity was palpable. They seemed ready to approach. We looked the other way. In sneakered feet, we walked swiftly toward the boulevard.