From the Mailbag : New Postal Complex in South-Central L.A. Will Give Economic Boost to Area

Koiu Chang Lee can remember when the view from the doorway of his grocery in South-Central Los Angeles was not a pretty sight.

Directly across the street from the neighborhood store on South Central Avenue near Gage Avenue was the hulking shell of a long-vacant tire plant surrounded by weeds that grew as tall as a man. On rainy days, the unpaved walk around the plant oozed brown mud into the street. On dry days, the weeds became a trash receptacle for passers-by. Lee’s customers were mostly neighborhood people because passing motorists didn’t often stop along a business strip where most of the storefronts were boarded up. He was making an adequate income for himself and his family, he said, but just barely.

Last week, Lee stood in the front of his store and looked out at a different scene.

Where the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. plant once stood is a newly constructed Main Post Office and General Mail Facility for Los Angeles, a sprawling complex of modern, low-slung gray and green buildings with landscaped grounds that after next Saturday will be the center of postal operations for the city.

Work Force of 5,500

The complex, which will have a work force of 5,500, is expected to boost the economy in the neighborhood five miles south of downtown, not by bringing new jobs to people in the neighborhood, but by bringing in people who have jobs.

Nearly all of the positions at the complex will be filled by workers who now work downtown at the outdated Terminal Annex mail processing operation near Union Station. Other jobs will be filled through the Postal Service’s regular Civil Service procedure.

The post office will remain open at Terminal Annex, but the buildings where mail is processed will be sold or leased once the city Community Redevelopment Agency comes up with a master plan for the area around Union Station, postal officials said.

Those expected to benefit most from the huge transfer of personnel from downtown to South-Central are people like Lee, owners of small businesses who hope postal workers will cash their checks, eat meals and buy merchandise near where they work.

Already, in mere anticipation of the opening of the postal complex, a restaurant has opened across the street, two others are planned and established businesses are expanding.

Lee is having a portion of his store remodeled into Main Post Office Check Cashing, a walk-up check-cashing stand.

“Besides the environmental effect, I don’t know what benefit (the postal complex) will bring to me,” he said, “but I’m going to be prepared.”

Buster Williams, 30, one of the owners of the Lil Rascals Cafe directly across from the postal complex’s employee parking lot, said he and his brother, Merk, had the postal workers in mind last year when they bought three badly deteriorated storefronts for $60,000 and had them combined. Their restaurant opened in December.

Hope for New Clientele

“I’m not depending totally on the post office people,” Buster Williams said, “but I am hoping they will be a large part of our clientele.”

The Williams brothers, both truck drivers, grew up not far from the old tire plant and still live there. They have not been in business before and probably wouldn’t be now, said Buster Williams, if it were not for the new postal complex.

The neighborhood around the complex is a mixture of residences and industrial sites. Between it and downtown are trucking firms and fresh fruit and flower distribution markets. The neighborhood is generally poor and parts of it are run-down.

Residents of some of the tiny bungalows just east of the complex said they welcome any new businesses near their homes.

“Since Goodyear closed the whole strip has been dead,” said Vernell Holloway, a young mother who lives on 68th Street. “You had to walk a pretty good ways to find a restaurant.”

Other Projects

Now the strip is reviving. Besides Lee’s addition to his store and the opening of Lil Rascals, these enterprises were under way within two blocks of Holloway’s home:

- Louis Hale is planning to expand his check-cashing operation for what he expects to be a 300% increase in business. Hale said he bought the property for $44,000 four years ago, and recently was offered $200,000 for it.

- Owners of the Fat & Fat Market are renovating a storefront that will become the Fat & Fat Chinese Restaurant.

- The owner of the building that once housed the United Rubber Workers union is having the structure demolished to make way for a mini-mall that is already 80% leased. A single unleased unit, said the man’s real estate broker, is being sought by a major hamburger chain.

Charles W. King, general manager and postmaster for the Los Angeles division of the U.S. Postal Service, said no one is happier than he about the optimism among the merchants.

King called the postal complex “the most major development in South-Central since the Watts riot.”

The $151.6-million complex is on 74 acres of land bounded by South Central Avenue on the east, railway lines and an industrial park on McKinley Avenue on the west, Florence Avenue on the south and Gage Avenue on the north. It is dedicated to the late Leslie Nelson Shaw Sr., who was postmaster for Los Angeles from 1963 to 1969 and the first black to head the post office of a major American city.

New Complex

The six buildings constructed since 1985 include a neighborhood post office, a three-story administrative building, a warehouse, a garage, a maintenance support building, and a state-of-the-art mail processing plant the size of 10 football fields.

The processing plant will handle 6.7 million pieces of mail daily and is equipped to accommodate increases in the city’s mail flow for the next 20 years, postal officials said.

South-Central residents will receive no preferential treatment for the jobs at the complex, but they won’t have to travel as far to apply for work. The personnel office that hires for all of the Postal Service’s operations in Los Angeles has been moved to the South-Central complex.

King, who along with other administrators moved his office from downtown to the new complex months ago, said he has heard nothing “adverse” from people who live nearby.

“They recognize that there will be new investment” in the neighborhood, he said. “The reaction to that has been very favorable.”