It’s Hard to Read the Message of Olvera Street in Laker T-Shirts and Tourist Gimcracks

Were it not for a children’s book that I first read as a small boy, it would be awfully hard for this somewhat jaded adult to work up any affection for the worn alley, known as Olvera Street, that marks the birthplace of the city of Los Angeles.

There, 40-odd Mexican settlers founded a pueblo in 1781. It did not take long for Los Angeles to sprawl beyond the community that those settlers laid out, in Latin American fashion, around a plaza and a church. By the 19th Century the area was known as Sonora Town, the city’s first barrio. Olvera Street was a slum when civic leaders first restored it as a Mexican-style marketplace in the 1930s.

Many Latinos still remember when Olvera Street and the adjacent plaza were the heart of the Mexican-American community--a place where people gathered for social and civic events. But to a kid from the faraway San Fernando Valley, Olvera Street was a place visited only infrequently. And I remember being taken aback when I first saw it in the early 1950s.

Before that my only exposure to La Calle Olvera was through a small book titled “Pedro, the Angel of Olvera Street” by children’s author Leo Politi. It is a delightful story, one that I later enjoyed reading to my own daughter. It explains the Mexican Christmas pageant known as Las Posadas, which reenacts the search of Joseph and Mary for lodging in Bethlehem, through the eyes of a boy who portrays an angel in the celebration held on Olvera Street.

The picture that Politi drew of the street was simple and idyllic, far from the gritty reality of the place. And the more I know about Olvera Street as an adult, the less idyllic it seems.

It saddens me to admit that there are times when I have been ashamed to show visitors the place where my hometown was founded. It’s not that the surrounding neighborhood is a bit seedy; downtown in any major American city looks about the same. My problem is with the street itself. While merchants who run the tourist-oriented shops and restaurants have made an admirable effort to preserve its Mexican character, the street’s ambiance, by the most generous standards, is tacky.

A few stores sell genuine Mexican folk art. But too many are cluttered with Laker T-shirts, Hollywood-sign ash trays and similar junk. There is not enough parking. And the place is not cleaned as often as it should be. It’s a sign of how much Olvera Street still means to local Latinos that so many keep going there in spite of its many shortcomings.

Thankfully, most of the street’s merchants know that it needs sprucing up. And those who doubt it need only ponder the effects of urban renewal in nearby Chinatown and Little Tokyo to see what could happen to Olvera Street if they do not take some initiative.

That’s why merchants on the street began working two years ago to develop their own plans for upgrading and modernizing Olvera Street, with the cooperation of some Latino architects and several preservationist groups. Because of their self-interest and knowledge of Olvera Street’s history, the merchants say, they have the sensitivity needed to carefully oversee its restoration. But their efforts have not been without infighting.

Earlier this year a dissident group called the Business Leadership of Olvera Street broke off from the long-established Olvera Street Merchants Assn. For the last few months they have been at loggerheads, each group insisting that it should take the lead in restoration of the street. Normally one might expect these factions to compromise, but the estrangement is actually growing worse. A key reason is that, despite smaller numbers, the Business Leadership has the advantage of close ties to Eastside Councilman Richard Alatorre. The strong-willed councilman has his own ideas of how Olvera Street should change, and would prefer to work with whichever group is most amenable.

The coming year is likely to be pivotal for Olvera Street’s future, for two reasons:

--By Jan. 1 the control of the land on which it sits will pass to the city from the state of California, which has owned it as part of El Pueblo de Los Angeles State Historic Park. That move will eliminate many bureaucratic roadblocks that delayed renewal, and will speed the decision-making process.

--Next spring the city will have a mayoral election, and the Olvera Street Merchants Assn. wants to use the opportunity to pressure Mayor Tom Bradley, and his opponents like Westside Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, to take a stand on the street’s future. So far, Bradley has let Alatorre take the lead rather than intervening on an issue that many people think has citywide implications.

The Olvera Street Merchants Assn.’s strategy will not endear it to the mayor, who’d prefer to get reelected with as little controversy as possible. But it makes cold-hearted sense. It’s a sure sign that the era of naive innocence on Olvera Street is dead. Once the battle there spills over from the Eastside, whatever benign impressions about Olvera Street still exist in the rest of the city will surely die, too.

My daughter is a teen-ager now, and seems to have outgrown her childhood enjoyment of Olvera Street and its Los Posadas pageant. But I may take her one last time before Christmas. The way things are going, neither of us will be able to look at Olvera Street in quite the same way again.