Empty Houses, Dreams : Lynwood: Downhill on the Freeway

Environmental change--from polluted streams to congested freeways and overdeveloped land--is affecting the quality of life across the nation. But such change is gradual and often goes unnoticed while it happens.

To measure how changes in the environment have affected various areas over decades, The Times dispatched reporters to the places they grew up. This occasional series of articles examines how our hometowns have changed--for better or worse--because of environmental factors.

In 1961, I was a freshman at Lynwood High, the National Civic League named my hometown an All-American City and the Century Freeway was only a dotted line drawn over some state highway engineer’s blueprint.

Twenty years later, the dotted line would cleave the city in half, cutting property values to the quick and hastening Lynwood’s ruin as a classic Southern California suburb. In the course of constructing the freeway, Caltrans would uncover one of the most notorious toxic waste dumps in the state’s history and spend $27 million to clean it up.

Gangs, drugs, racism and poverty would descend on my hometown like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

But, in 1961, Lynwood was still the postwar manifestation of the American Dream for about 10,000 World War II veterans and their young families. It was a time of tract houses, boosterism, Boy Scouts and high hopes. With its own artesian well system, tree-lined residential avenues and independent public school system, Lynwood was “The Best Place to Live Best,” according to the Chamber of Commerce.

“It can be the best place to live best again,” Mayor Evelyn Wells said recently. “It’s just going to take a little while, that’s all.”

Today, the city is home to 16 gangs, by Wells’ count; 40, according to City Councilman Louis Heine. City Manager Charles Gomez puts the true number somewhere between those two figures. The city pays $200,000 a year to clean graffiti off public buildings.

Twenty-eight people died at the hands of Lynwood gangs last year, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Twenty-eight more died the year before.

“I just looked up one day and it was crowded,” said Thelma Williams, a 17-year resident and member of the Lynwood school board. “It started out as a nice bedroom community, where the children could play out front. And then I looked up one day and we all seemed to be up on top of each other.”

The city has an official population of 54,000. But Councilman Heine, who has lived here more than 45 years, says the true population is closer to 60,000. The 71-year-old retired educator reminded me that 30 years ago, the population was half that when he was my seventh-grade science teacher back at Hosler Junior High.

“It has gone downhill, but we’re headed back up,” he said optimistically.

Nowadays, dozens of families live in garages. Dozens more illegally overcrowd one- and two-bedroom apartments. City officials say it’s such a widespread, low-priority problem that the city doesn’t police it. In the northwest quarter of town, four times as many people live in apartments as city ordinance allows, according to Gomez.

The aging schools, surrounded by iron bars and chain-link fence, resemble armed camps. An infantry of security guards and a mobile patrol constantly watch for drugs and weapons.

Racial tensions frequently run high, with an aging retired white minority often at odds with a younger middle-class black and Latino majority. In April, the two white septuagenarians on the City Council grudgingly joined the three black council members, who are all under 50, in a ceremony renaming Century Boulevard for fallen civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. The next day, Councilman Robert Henning, who is black, found a five-gallon water bottle in his driveway. It was filled with gasoline and stopped up with a rag, as though it were a huge Molotov cocktail.

Newspaper Quits

Businesses have moved out of the city in droves over the last two decades. The weekly Lynwood Press, which published for more than 40 years, suspended publication in March.

Lynwood still has some manufacturing. It is headquarters for Helen Grace candies and Jorgenson Steel. St. Francis Medical Center, which is currently undergoing a $180-million remodeling, has made the city something of a mecca for surgeons and cardiovascular specialists.

But the retail district is generally decimated. Except for an isolated 18-month-old redevelopment project on Long Beach Boulevard, the main thoroughfares--Atlantic, Century, Long Beach and Imperial boulevards--are rife with abandoned storefronts. Mayor Wells and Councilman Heine both joke that the city’s largest concentration of semi-successful retail business until recently seem to have been doughnut shops, video-rental stores and nail boutiques.

All the chains and major department stores--Sears, Zody’s, Giant, Sav-on Drugs--pulled out years ago. The last survivor, Montgomery Ward, now leases its abandoned building on Imperial Highway to the Sheriff’s Department, which has converted the building into a Crime Prevention Center. It contains a boxing ring and other athletic equipment. The idea, according to Councilman Heine, is to give young would-be gang members and drug users a place to “blow off steam.”

Still ‘All-American’

Lynwood still thinks of itself as an All-American City, Heine maintained. On nearly every sign in and out of the 4.1 square miles that the city fathers incorporated as a bona fide California city in 1921, it reads: “Lynwood, All-American City.”

But something happened along the way that tarnished the title, making it more ironic than honorific.

And it began with the Century Freeway.

When I was a junior at Lynwood High, the year was 1963 and things had already begun to change.

The California Department of Transportation was quietly buying up the first few houses along the freeway right-of-way that bisects the city.

If the Chamber of Commerce was aware that the city was about to be cut in half and that roughly 1,100 homes were going to be razed to make way for the eight-lane highway, it chose not to publicize it. The chamber’s promotional literature painted a pastoral picture of Andy Hardy’s America. The only mention of freeways was the nearby Long Beach and Harbor freeways, which gave prospective businesses “speedy, safe, over-the-road transport in all directions,” according to one chamber brochure from that period.

The Century Freeway should have been no surprise. It had been part of the Caltrans master plan since the 1950s. The natural corridor along the route of the all-but-abandoned Pacific Electric rail route through the center of town had always seemed the most likely location. When I was old enough to cross those tracks, the legendary Red Cars had already stopped running. Everyone drove. Nobody had time to wait for a trolley.

Seen as a Solution

In 1963, freeways were still seen by most Lynwood residents as progress--a solution rather than a problem. An environmental fight in federal court against the freeway, led by the Westwood-based Center for Law in the Public Interest, was still a decade away. Eventually, that battle would halt construction on the freeway for most of the 1970s. The Century Freeway right-of-way would become a virtual wasteland, lancing through the center of my hometown like the pathway of a tornado.

The 17.3-mile freeway would eventually stretch from Norwalk to Los Angeles International Airport and become the most expensive thoroughfare in California history. By the time the freeway was actually being constructed in the 1980s, it would cost $2 billion.

The court fight would not end until 1980, after Caltrans completed a series of environmental impact studies that would satisfy the federal court that the state was doing all that it could to mitigate the trauma of yet another Southern California freeway.

But in 1963, there was no freeway trauma. The city was still pristine, calm, innocent, All-American--something between “Babbitt” and “Leave It to Beaver.” Lynwood’s entire assessed property value in 1963 hovered around $100 million--not even enough to buy one mile of the Century Freeway in 1989.

A Domino Effect

The way city officials now interpret events, Lynwood’s freeway troubles were the result of a domino effect. It may not have been stoppable, but could have been eased at any point along the way by a more visionary city government or a more compassionate state highway department.

“Your city has to keep moving all the time or it will die,” Mayor Wells said. “In the ‘70s, the City Council was all old and kind of laid-back. Lynwood just stopped moving. And it almost died.”

The city government apparently did not foresee, nor could not prevent, the irreparable harm to the tax base that the removal of 1,100 homes would have. (That represented about 10% of the single-family homes in Lynwood before the freeway.)

As each home was bought, another source of city revenue dried up. Money for schools and city services tightened. The Police Department was disbanded and the city began contracting with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department as a cost-saving measure. Businesses began moving out, eroding the tax base even further.

Homes near the freeway route began selling as well. Property values plummeted. Although an enlightened Caltrans is now planning to spend about $500,000 per mile along the Century Freeway route for anti-noise barriers, the highway agency can’t wall out auto pollution.

“Nobody wants to live next to a freeway if they can afford it. Those who could sold and left,” Gomez said.

Some Fought Successfully

More affluent and politically powerful cities fought freeways. Some, such as Beverly Hills and South Pasadena, achieved something of a permanent stalemate. The glut of Westside and Pasadena street traffic in those two areas during rush hour these days may make permanent freeway postponement seem like a hollow victory, but property values have been preserved.

“Caltrans just waits for its enemies to die,” Gomez said. “As soon as the last La Canada councilman (who opposed the La Canada-Flintridge) freeway died a few years ago, they started building that one. Time is always on Caltrans’ side.”

While environmentalists who did not live in Lynwood battled in federal court to stop the Century Freeway, Lynwood’s trauma only intensified. Dozens of homes that had been bought and vacated along the freeway route became home to transients and rats. At one point in 1980, packs of wild dogs lived in the abandoned structures. For nearly a decade, a swath of four city blocks through the heart of the city had become a ghost town.

But the Century Freeway was not the only future shock that began imposing itself on Lynwood in 1965. The city was also about to change color.

Two months after I graduated from Lynwood High in 1965, neighboring Watts erupted in race riots. The rancor spilled over into “Lily White Lynwood,” as my hometown was then known. If Lynwood had been relatively untouched to that point by the raucous decade that will forever be used to define the Baby Boom generation, there was no doubt that the ‘60s had arrived in full force by the long, hot August of 1965.

“Years ago when I was growing up in South-Central Los Angeles, Lynwood was, I guess, 90% Caucasian if not more,” recalled Veta Banks, a ninth-grade history teacher at Lynwood High.

She moved here from Inglewood with her husband and family 12 years ago. In 1965, when Lynwood’s “ultraconservative” racial prejudice made it intimidating to even drive through town, she never dreamed she would one day live here.

“With the influx of minorities, it’s forced some attitude changes, and that can only be good,” Banks said. “Of course, it can be hard on the older residents who see minorities, blacks and Latinos coming in and want to run. Anyone who believes their life style is threatened is going to be afraid.”

Complexion Changes

By the time I left Lynwood to join the Navy in 1967, its blue-collar, lily-white complexion had begun to turn Latin brown and middle-class black. According to the most recent city census statistics, Lynwood’s population shifted from nearly 100% Caucasian 25 years ago to a current breakdown of 38% black, 40% Latino, 20% white and 2% other.

The Century Freeway may not have caused Lynwood’s integration, but it was certainly a catalyst, according to city officials. When word got out that the freeway would be built, property values dropped and many people fled the area. As minorities began to buy homes in Lynwood, so-called “white flight” accelerated.

“Obviously the racial balance has changed and the city went down some when the freeway cut through,” said city Recreation Director Harold Matoon. “Now, it’s recovering.”

Matoon, who is white, was born in Lynwood 52 years ago. He attended Lynwood schools and has always worked for the city. He and his wife and three children moved out in 1971 when Caltrans bought their home for the freeway. Matoon does not plan to move back.

Councilman Paul Richards, who is black, moved into Lynwood in 1980. He is assistant city manager of neighboring Compton, married and father of two preschoolers. Like Matoon, he sees the city as something of a phoenix, about to emerge from a quarter-century of freeway-induced agony. When Richards was elected to the council four years ago, it was still dominated by a white majority.

‘Voicing Their Opinions’

“A significant portion of the white population has lived here for a number of years and will stay until they go on to their final reward,” Richards said. “We’ve had a lot of new residents just moving in and learning their rights since the freeway (began construction). Now, they’re finally voicing their opinions and concerns.”

Lynwood Unified Schools Trustee Thelma Williams is also a parent and a Compton elementary school principal. She is more blunt about Lynwood’s continuing racial readjustment.

“Over 60% of the teachers in Lynwood are white. Until the last few years, the majority on the City Council was white. The school board is still run by a white majority. Now, what does that tell you?” she asked.

What it tells Williams is that Lynwood has only recently begun to throw off the chains of municipal apartheid. Thirty years ago in her native Alabama, Southern California was idealized as an enlightened example of progressive, integrated living. When she finally arrived here, she had a rude awakening.

“I’m not from California, but my husband is. He grew up in South-Central Los Angeles,” she said. “He remembers before the Watts riots, when you didn’t dare come into Lynwood. He talks about how he was afraid. It was ‘Lily White Lynwood’ then. I don’t believe the freeway had anything to do with changing that.”

Alfred Kiots doesn’t blame Lynwood’s trauma on the freeway or race relations.

“It’s all the dope that’s come in that’s caused all the violence,” he said bitterly.

Kiots turns 80 this year. In his baseball cap and turquoise bolo tie, he looks like a character in a TV commercial for Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers. A retired machinist, Kiots moved from Compton to Lynwood 23 years ago.

Despite his age, he isn’t overly intimidated by the threat of gangs and drug-related crime. He is a longtime member of the National Rifle Assn. and has a few firearms around the house to prove it, he said.

Lorraine Davis, an 83-year-old widow who raised a son and daughter in Lynwood, is not so confident.

‘All-Nations City’

“We used to be the All-American city,” she said. “We are no more. Not since we got a bunch of colored and Mexicans coming in. It’s more like the All-Nations City. Of course, I get along with all of them. You have to.”

Neither of her children live in Lynwood. She would like to move, but feels she can’t. Like Kiots, she owns her own home, but she doesn’t think she could get much for it if she put it up for sale.

Several unscrupulous real estate agents--both black and white--engaged in the practice of “block busting” during most of the 1970s, according to Gomez. By playing equally on fear of the freeway and racial prejudice, they solicited older Anglo residents, urged them to sell below fair market value and move.

But “white flight” and freeway phobia both seem to have run their course.

“We have Caucasian families who are now moving back into the community because they found that Orange County is too far out and they want to be closer to Los Angeles where they work,” Banks said.

Term Redefined

“All-American” has also been redefined in the last quarter century.

“It’s a good city. Culturally, it’s become more diverse,” Banks said. “In a way, it’s more All-American than it ever was. We’ve become a global society . . . an international society. Why not start out on a small scale, right here in Lynwood? It’s good for the children. It’s good for all of us.”

That doesn’t mean she does not empathize with white senior citizens who have spent most of their lives in Lynwood.

“I feel for older people who believe they’ve basically gotten stuck because their kids have grown up and moved away and they feel like they can’t move,” she said. “But you can’t live in the past.”

Youth Advisory Council

Banks’ daughter, Cornecia, is 17 and a junior at Lynwood High. She is one of 21 young people the City Council recently appointed to its Youth Advisory Council--exemplary young adults who will offer suggestions to the city on education, recreation and anti-gang programs.

“The schools are overcrowded and the classrooms are too small,” she said. “We need a new high school.”

Basically, though, Lynwood has been a good place to grow up. Cornecia shrugs when asked about the freeway. She has no opinions one way or the other about it being good or bad. It’s just something that has always been there.

As far back as she can remember.

Lynwood’s early boosters--the men and women whose names still appear on bronze plaques around town--are mostly gone now. J. Jack Willard, who was mayor when City Hall was built in the early ‘50s, died years ago. He wrote a history of the city, detailing its charms as a laboratory for the small-town American dream.

But Willard is remembered for something else these days. His Wilco Dump at what is now the juncture of the Long Beach and Century freeways turned out to be a 14-acre environmental nightmare where industrial waste had been buried for years. Long before there was an Environmental Protection Agency, Willard accepted almost anything at his massive landfill on Wright Road, on the banks of the Los Angeles River. For a few dollars per load, anyone could drive in with old car batteries, paint sludge, chemical waste, all sorts of scrap metal . . . and dump it.

Nobody paid much attention to the fact that several of Lynwood’s precious artesian well sites were little more than a mile from the dump. Years of seepage into the water table would pass before Caltrans rediscovered the Wilco dump during its excavation for the Century Freeway.

Premature Deaths

By then, some of my high school chums would have died prematurely from cancer, and talk of a poisoned Lynwood water supply would be whispered at class reunions. Two years ago, it cost the state $27 million to dig up 100,000 cubic yards of hazardous waste and truck it 200 miles north to a toxic dump west of Bakersfield before Caltrans could proceed with the Century Freeway.

For a time, there was a fear that the artesian well system might have been fouled. Some current residents, such as Thelma Williams, still maintain that the tap water tastes “funny.” But Gomez said that tests supervised by the California Regional Water Quality Control Board show Lynwood water to be uncontaminated, before and after the cleanup of J. Jack Willard’s dump.

Long before there was any suspicion that toxic waste might have polluted the city’s artesian wells, Willard’s contemporaries had moved on to Orange County or Palm Springs or Long Beach.

As a fellow member of the Class of ’65 remarked to me at our 20-year class reunion, “Nobody lives in Lynwood any more.”

Well, somebody does. It just isn’t likely to be anyone we might know.

Hopeful Again

Crime and poverty and drugs were always there in some lesser degree, but not in the ugly, debilitating doses that afflict the city nowadays. The long-delayed freeway that seemed to aggravate Lynwood’s misery is seen by the younger residents as a cure: once it is built, commerce will return to Lynwood.

And maybe they’re right. Long Beach Boulevard is being widened, landscaped and repaved. There are plans for several new restaurants and retail businesses at the intersection of the boulevard and the freeway.

But, as city officials acknowledge, Lynwood has a long way to go.

At the intersection of Bullis Road and Martin Luther King Jr. (formerly Century) Boulevard is the burned-out shell of Thrifty Drug Store. Once, in seventh grade, I bought a vanilla Coke there for Audrey Porter after I walked her home from nearby Hosler Junior High. Thrifty Drug had a terrific soda fountain with countertop jukeboxes and sour waitresses and fat, cheap hamburgers.

The old Thrifty Drug is in ruins. But there is a new Thrifty Drug.

Point With Pride

It just opened last year, next to the Viva supermarket center, adjacent to the Long Beach Boulevard off-ramp of the Century Freeway. Councilman Heine and Mayor Wells and City Manager Gomez all point to the new Thrifty Drug with pride. They were on hand for its dedication, just as they were for the renaming of Century Boulevard. The high school ROTC color guard brought on the flag and the Lynwood High band played a song or two. There were speeches and handshakes and optimistic smiles.

As part of Lynwood’s long-awaited redevelopment, Thrifty Drug is symbolic of the city’s brightening future. City officials are already talking about Phase 2 and Phase 3 redevelopment. The council recently solicited bids for a new public relations campaign, accenting Lynwood’s 28-year-old status as an All-American City.

“Over here, they’re putting in a new McDonald’s restaurant,” Councilman Heine told me recently when he took me on a short tour of the city’s redevelopment projects. He pointed to a half-constructed building at the juncture of Long Beach Boulevard and Imperial Highway, just down the street from the new Thrifty Drug.

“The owner is spending $35,000 on landscaping alone. It’s going to be one of the most beautiful McDonald’s there is anywhere in the country,” Heine said proudly.

And it’s a good thing, because the new Thrifty Drug doesn’t have a soda fountain. It isn’t within walking distance of Hosler Junior High. It has no sour waitresses, nor a single jukebox.

And it doesn’t serve vanilla Cokes.