Main St. to Mean St. : Retailing: When a neighborhood deteriorates, small-business owners face a whole new set of challenges.

For about a year, Herbert Sally, manager of Turner’s Poultry & Fish Market on South Central Avenue in Watts, lived in a trailer behind the store in an attempt to deter thieves.

“They’ve stolen 15 scales and tore out whole sections of the walls in back,” said Sally, who has worked at Turner’s for 38 years.

“We spent $200 on barbed wire, but it didn’t help,” he said. “We’ve lost thousands of dollars worth of stuff.”

Thieves, believed to be local crack addicts, not only steal meat and other groceries from Turner’s, but also swipe the live chickens kept in pens outside the front door.

When the nighttime thefts didn’t stop, Sally’s wife finally persuaded him that it was too dangerous to live behind the market and they moved out.

Longtime businesses that stay open in rough neighborhoods survive through a combination of grit, courage, ingenuity and tenacity. The challenges that they face have frightened off most other small-business owners in the area. In fact, many of these hardy companies are the only businesses on the block, often surrounded by boarded-up buildings or weedy vacant lots.

These small-business owners regularly contend with smashed windows, burglaries, purse snatchers, shoplifters, winos, crack dealers, prostitutes and a constant blitz of gang-related graffiti. They pay exorbitant insurance rates and battle with their insurers to collect on claims.

So why do they stay in these areas?

The owners say they do so because, although the quality of life in their neighborhoods has deteriorated, their loyal customers are willing to make the effort to patronize their businesses. They stay because they have been there for decades, rents are affordable and business is just good enough to hang on.

To cope with life in a rough neighborhood, they have devised ingenious ways to keep the riffraff out and the customers safely in. Gus’ Hardware in Watts built a chain-link fence around the store and strung barbed wire outside to protect itself from the neighborhood.

“We are OK during the day, but nighttime is very rough around here,” said Walt Lambert, who has worked at the store for 28 years.

Near Los Angeles’ MacArthur Park, two landmark restaurants have dug in for the long run. Langer’s Delicatessen and Edward’s Steak House both opened in the 1940s when the area around the park was pleasant.

“We had a lot of confidence in the neighborhood,” said Ken Rausch, whose parents, Edward and Lynette, opened the steak house in 1946. “We saw the neighborhood changing, but we never dreamed it would get as bad as it has.” As a boy, Rausch said he loved taking sailboat rides around the MacArthur Park lake. Today, the 32-acre park and surrounding streets are teeming with derelicts, drunks, drug dealers and transients.

In 1979, tired of dealing with the harassment of its customers by panhandlers and others, the Rausches closed off the front door of the restaurant on Alvarado Street. Patrons now enter from the well-lit parking lot around the back. About five years ago, Rausch said, they began allowing employees to park in the lot at night for safety reasons.

Al Langer, who built his deli business “on clean bathrooms and hot bread,” finally locked up his restrooms a few months ago. Langer’s Delicatessen is at 7th and Alvarado, across from MacArthur Park. “The hardest thing is the influx of undesirable and weirdo characters,” said Langer, who wistfully remembers when his wife, Jean, would walk over to MacArthur Park to take a catnap. “People around here feel attacked.”

About six months ago, Langer installed locks on the bathrooms to keep transients from using the facilities. In recent months, the family-run business has replaced about 30 broken windows, including six smashed in one day by a mentally disturbed woman. Norm Langer, Al’s son, said their insurance rates have more than doubled in the past five years.

Langer’s survives on a busy take-out business from downtown office workers and patrons heading downtown to the Music Center.

Many customers, craving a hand-cut pastrami sandwich, drive in from the Westside or the San Fernando Valley, Al Langer said.

Langer said his deli used to have a large Jewish walk-in clientele from the neighborhood, but those old customers moved on and the neighborhood has since become predominantly Latino.

“We do a certain amount of business with the neighbors, but not much,” Al Langer said.

In recent years, as the number of street people around the park has multiplied, the Langers have moved up the restaurant’s closing time from 3 a.m. to 11 p.m.

Los Angeles Police Officer Phil Michaelson, who is responsible for the MacArthur Park area, works closely with business owners who are “fighting like crazy to keep their doors open.”

Last year, Michaelson said police arrested about 3,000 people in and around the park for a variety of crimes ranging from gambling to drug dealing. “I don’t know how many more people we can book,” he said.

Michaelson said the park dwellers are outsiders, many of whom switched to MacArthur Park after their downtown haunts were eliminated by redevelopment.

Michaelson said when police officers crack down on people living in the park, the people frequently fan out into the surrounding neighborhoods, causing more trouble for business owners.

“We didn’t have the transient problem when I started working around this park 18 years ago,” said Michaelson. “Now we have 100 or so people burning trash as bonfires and setting up housekeeping every night.”

Not far from the park, Ted Gibson, a legendary picture framer with a 10,000-square-foot shop on West 7th Street, finally locked his front door and installed a buzzer to admit customers. Gibson said he was tired of winos wandering in and smashing or stealing things.

Most of the stores and offices around his graffiti-decorated building are vacant. But one morning last week, loyal customers from Pasadena and Newport Beach braved the neighborhood to bring their business to Gibson.

“Most of my customers have moved out of the area,” said Gibson, who opened his store in the 1940s to serve the artists at the art schools situated around MacArthur Park. “There is no money here any more.”

Gibson, who used to stretch Georgia O’Keefe’s linen canvases when she was a young artist living in New York City, said some customers have had their car windows smashed while parking on the street. But even that does not stop them from bringing their artwork to be framed.

“He has framed everything in my house,” said a Pasadena matron as she sat down to discuss a project with Gibson.

“He’s the best there is--he’s got an eye for color that is unbelievable,” said Jimmy Arsenault, a former competitor who now works as a framer for Gibson.

Gibson’s son, Richard, remembers when the neighborhood was filled with older people and was a very pleasant place to live.

“This area has gone way down,” he said. “There is really no foot traffic.”

The area around MacArthur Park is not the only one considered a bit hostile to business owners.

“For the first time in 15 years, we hired a private security patrol service,” said Barry Baszile, who founded Baszile Metals in 1975 on East 25th Street in Vernon. The security service that he hired, operated by moonlighting Vernon police officers, keeps an eye on neighborhood businesses at night and on weekends.

Since 1975, when Baszile opened his Baszile Metals Service on East 25th Street, the neighborhood has changed from predominantly black to Latino. Baszile said that during that time the rate of crime seems to have stayed about the same, although there appears to be increasing gang activity lately among the neighborhood youth.

Baszile said he decided to hire the security guards after the police officers showed him neighborhood crime statistics. He was also concerned because a neighbor reported that a few transients were in his metals yard looking for scraps.

With the price of recycled aluminum rising to about 70 cents a pound, Baszile said he was afraid that more people would try to steal from his metal distribution company.

Rudy Cervantes, founder of Cervantes Neckwear on South Main Street near USC, said his greatest challenge is keeping the graffiti off his building.

“If you have graffiti on your building, customers are afraid to come and see you,” said Cervantes.

He personally wields a can of spray paint to cover up graffiti. “As soon as they put it up, I get it off.”