All the World’s a Stage for Carwash

Feeding on what some journalists describe as an insatiable appetite for stories about crackpot culture in sunbaked California, news organizations around the world have devoured a story about neighborhood efforts to have a Studio City carwash declared an architectural landmark.

In the past two months, people from Peekskill, N. Y., to Paris have learned about one community’s cry against a corner mini-mall. It has been a protest cloaked in a preservation campaign, and it has reinforced a well-accepted stereotype about the wacky West Coast.

“The whole thing was a natural,” said Arthur Higbee, editor of the American Topics column in the International Herald Tribune in Paris. “It was really one of our better items. I think it was one of the more amusing ones.

‘Seems Perfectly Normal’

“Here’s this city sort of designed for the automobile age,” he said, “this city that’s got, or once had, more drive-ins per capita than any other, probably more carwashes and gas stations than anywhere else. So it seems perfectly normal that someone would suggest turning a carwash into a monument. It wouldn’t seem normal anywhere else, but it does in Los Angeles.”

At the heart of the story is a community effort to thwart construction of a $15-million shopping center at Laurel Canyon and Ventura boulevards. The existing buildings, the carwash with its adjoining gas station and restaurant, would be destroyed to make way for the two-story mini-mall.

But the showdown between homeowners and developers, though noted in stories about the carwash, was generally buried or overshadowed by theatrics.

Editors and reporters said they pursued the story because it was entertaining--fun to write, broadcast, read and watch. And, they conceded, it played well to the zany notions that the public holds about the movie capital of the world.

“I don’t think it was a fruits-and-nuts piece,” CNN Managing Editor Cissy Baker said. “We would have covered it if it were somewhere else. But I wasn’t surprised it was in L.A.”

The Los Angeles Times ran 14 stories about the carwash since the cultural campaign began in May, most of them in the San Fernando Valley edition. Two ran Thursday, the day after the city’s Cultural Heritage Commission’s decided that the 28-year-old complex did not qualify as a city treasure.

Stories have also appeared in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Portland Oregonian. The magazine Business Week ran a short item in its current issue under the headline, “Only in California: A Landmark Carwash?”

ABC, CBS and CNN carried the story. So did the “USA Today” television show, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., an FM radio station in Sydney, Australia, and a television station in West Germany.

Carwash owner Pat Galati--whose relatives in the Hudson River town of Peekskill read of his struggle in the New York press--thinks that the story plays to public outrage about overdevelopment.

“I was overwhelmed until I stopped to analyze it,” Galati said. “Then I saw that people all over feel just as people in the state of California. They want to retain something of their heritage. They don’t want all the changes.”

Right Buttons to Push

It was the silly side of the story--not the development issue--that captured the attention of the press. And Jack McGrath, a savvy political strategist who headed the “Save Our Corner” campaign, knew all the right buttons to push.

“This thing’s better than the Statue of Liberty,” he repeatedly told reporters, pointing to the boomerang-shaped beams that tower above the carwash. “The Gateway to Studio City,” he called them. “If we had an Empire State Building in Los Angeles, we would make it a landmark. But our landmark is 55 feet in the air and made out of steel.”

In an attempt to save it, community activists appeared on the CBS Evening News in T-shirts bearing the “Save Our Corner” slogan. “Is there nothing sacred any more?” they sang. “Is our community going out the door?”

David Browning, the CBS correspondent who reported the story, said for years that he has “put up with editors in New York who think all there is in L.A. is wackos and palm trees.”

Suggested Story

But it was Browning, not his editors, who suggested the story. “Every city has its stereotypes,” he said. “And everyone feeds on them once in a while.”

Seth Mydans characterized his treatment of the story in the New York Times as a playful attempt to tell his readers about the love affair that Los Angeles residents have with their cars.

“It has fun with cliches about Los Angeles,” Mydans said. “The car culture. A little bit of outlandishness or garishness, as still perceived from outside. . . . I don’t think there is any harm done by having fun with aspects of a culture. And one hopes that even in the heart of the fun, you’re saying something that’s true. I don’t think the story is misrepresenting or skewing the realities of L.A. I think it’s legitimate.”

Los Angeles is a new city, still evolving, searching for a sense of history, the journalists agreed. It lacks the grand architecture of European cities and even of some cities on the East Coast.

Bruce Buursma of the Chicago Tribune, like Mydans, pursued that angle but not exclusively.

“The notion that anyone in Philadelphia would ask an agency to declare as a historic monument something 20 years old is, on the face of it, ludicrous,” Buursma said.

“I tried not to treat the story as strictly a goofy California episode. It also spoke to something about neighborhood integrity, and a sense of community and the fact that you can rouse a bit of civic indignation in Southern California, when another one of the misconceptions is that people sit around and contemplate their navels and don’t care about their neighborhood.”

Coverage Deeper

While the story appealed to correspondents and their editors because it depicted the zany side of Southern California, they said their coverage of the area runs much deeper.

“If the entire body of my work consisted of nothing but carwash stories and quirky cultural artifacts of so-called California life style, I would be embarrassed,” Buursma said.

Many newspapers and television stations have no correspondents in California and learned of the carwash controversy from wire service reports.

United Press International ran the story even though its Los Angeles-based Pacific region editor, Jacques Clafin, holds a dim view of such pieces.

“I find it personally distasteful to file stories that confirm a lot of notions that Easterners have about Californians being flaky,” Clafin said. “I think California should be looked at as a bellwether state. . . .

“These stories come up all the time. I had the same sense about the freeway shootings. There was no way not to run it. Yet I knew in running it, it would create in people’s minds the impression that California is a lawless state. But we’re not into censoring ourselves. As a Californian, as a Western person, you kind of hold your nose and file it.”