Monterey Park Choking on Fame as Lure for Tourists

The tour bus, fresh off the freeway after two days in Las Vegas and one week after setting forth from San Francisco, lumbered out of the Monterey Park traffic and came to a halt along Atlantic Boulevard.

One by one, 46 tourists from Taiwan and Indonesia stepped from the bus and made their way into the Shanghai House restaurant.

Newspaper racks with locally published Chinese-language newspapers caught their attention. But the sightseers, whose last Chinese meal had been in San Francisco’s Chinatown, had no desire to read. They were ready for some home cooking, Chinese-style.

Last Wednesday’s scene on Atlantic Boulevard is repeated daily. Monterey Park, transformed in the last decade by an influx of Asian immigrants, has become a required tour stop for Asians who visit the West Coast.

But, city officials say, the tour buses contribute to increased traffic in the primarily residential city, which already has crowded streets. Ticketing some buses failed to solve the problem and city officials hope to meet with tour operators in an effort to find a solution.

The tourists, who come by the thousands each week, like to shop in the herb and variety stores and eat at the restaurants, nationally and internationally known for a wide variety of Asian menus. Even when tourists visit Southern California for no more than two or three days, Monterey Park--where the dialects of Asia can easily be heard on the street--is on the short list of places to stop, along with Disneyland, Chinatown and Universal Studios.

“They want to come see what we call the new Chinatown, the second Chinatown,” said Helen Koo, general manager of American Asia Travel Center with offices in Los Angeles’ Chinatown, Honolulu and Monterey Park.

In addition, Monterey Park has become a pickup and drop-off point for travel agencies that operate Chinese-language tours of the West. City officials say many of these travel agencies use Monterey Park as a departure point because the community is a well-known location among those of Chinese ancestry who live in Southern California.

“Whoever thought that Monterey Park was going to be a big tourist place, both as springboard to other places and as a destination itself,” said City Planner M. Margo Wheeler. “I just don’t think we’re equipped for the enormous amount of traffic we’re seeing.”

This congestion, the officials say, is more than the community of 62,000 residents can bear.

The tour buses, Wheeler said, are causing havoc, in the absence of safe, convenient parking and loading and unloading spots. The buses crowd into parking lots of supermarkets that feature Asian foods and into public parking lots, service stations, schools and churches. And the vehicles park along curbs at intersections.

Last July 4, Wheeler recalled, “an ocean of buses” were jammed all along the streets near one of the city’s main intersections, Garvey and Garfield avenues. Passengers were getting on and off, carrying luggage and children, and jaywalking. “It was like a nightmare,” Wheeler said of the noise and smoke pollution from the buses.

Said Assistant City Solicitor Stephanie Scher, “The city sidewalks and streets are being treated as if they were a bus depot.”

The buses disrupt businesses and disturb residents, Wheeler said. In an attempt to stop the problem, earlier this year Wheeler’s office began issuing zoning violation citations. As many as a dozen violations were handed out, she said, but the citations have angered tour operators who complain of harassment.

“The officials of the city of Monterey Park either just escaped from a hospital for the criminally insane or they’re engaged in (racial) discrimination. You take your pick,” said Los Angeles attorney Robert M. Snader, who represents one company that has been cited twice, Ritz Travel of Alhambra.

Action Called ‘Ludicrous’

“The application of zoning laws to control buses in a public street is ludicrous,” said Snader.

The case against Ritz’s manager, Paul Chin Fa Chen, died in Alhambra Municipal Court, Snader said, after his client, who is of Chinese ancestry, received a favorable ruling. “Caucasians are trying to drive (Chinese) people out,” said Snader, who is white.

Scher and City Councilwoman Judy Chu, the only Asian-American member of the council, denied that racial motives are at work. Pure and simple, they said, the problem concerns how to best resolve the traffic congestion issue.

Scher said she faced a similar problem as assistant city attorney for Beverly Hills in the early 1980s. Big tour buses, seeking out the residences of movie stars, negotiated narrow, hilly streets in residential areas and had difficulty parking and loading and unloading passengers at restaurants and shops in the densely packed commercial district of the city.

The problems were solved, she said, by designating bus parking spaces and limiting the routes and the times of the buses’ journeys.

Tour operators say they are finding their own solutions by taking some of their business elsewhere.

Recently, a busload of Japanese tourists was scheduled to eat dinner at a Monterey Park restaurant, and, even though the group was looking forward to the visit, American Asia Travel Center President Stephen Seng said he changed the meal to a restaurant in Hollywood.

Still, said Helen Koo, when the travel agents bring buses to Monterey Park, “we have to act like a thief in the night.”