City Cracks Down on Garment District : Safety: Inspectors slap more than a thousand citations on owners and tenants of buildings that are potential firetraps.

Los Angeles safety inspectors are cracking down on aging high-rise structures in the city’s garment district to correct years of inadequate inspections and slapdash modifications that allowed the buildings to become potential firetraps.

At least 35 high-rise structures in a 20-square-block area in downtown Los Angeles have been hit with 1,243 citations since February, prompting protests from building owners and clothing manufacturers alike who say they will have to pay for millions of dollars in repairs.

Landlords and business owners also complain that city fire and building safety officials knew for years about many of the code violations in the shabby buildings, which have been subdivided into hundreds of small job shops employing legions of low-paid seamstresses and cloth cutters.

“If obvious violations have been overlooked in the past--that’s inexcusable,” replied City Fire Marshal Davis Parsons. “But this area has traditionally been a problem for us and we are not putting up with it anymore.”

The campaign by a garment industry task force of inspectors from the Fire Department and the city’s Department of Building and Safety was spurred by a fierce Dec. 5 blaze that gutted the 76-year-old RK Building in the 700 block of South Los Angeles Street, injuring 40 people.

Some of the injured garment workers were hampered in their escape by an extremely narrow stairway, partitions that blocked exits and covered fire escapes, and holes cut in walls to serve as entrances and exits, Parsons said.

A subsequent inspection of the RK building found that it was “absolutely the worst garment district building we had,” Parsons said.

Authorities have complained for years about the poor working conditions and low wages that the garment district’s largely Asian and Latino workers have endured since they began flocking to the area after clothing manufacturers moved into the city’s former hub of finance in the 1930s.

Now, city officials say they fear that clothing shop operators and building owners may be endangering their workers as well.

“These are often undocumented people who are afraid to complain and are therefore exploited by unscrupulous people who employ them,” said City Councilman Richard Alatorre, chairman of the council’s Public Safety Committee. “If there are serious violations taking place, they have to be corrected for the health and welfare of one of the largest exploited classes of workers.”

Alarmed by the discovery of so many serious violations in the RK Building--as well as by the large number of fire-related injuries--safety inspectors decided to methodically and aggressively inspect every high-rise in the garment district and bring them up to code. The task force had been set up last October, two months before the fire, but the blaze moved the campaign into high gear, authorities said.

Among hundreds of serious violations found by safety officials were bolts of flammable cloth blocking exit corridors, electrical cords wrapped around fire sprinkler pipes, illegal security gates, and steel doors installed over fire escapes and stairwells.

“If a locked door is blocking a legally required exit, that door has to come down,” Parsons said.

Dozens of shop owners have been ordered to remove combustible partitions and office walls erected without approval or permits from building authorities. Others are being forced to tear down their bolted security gates and steel doors.

In what they called a “typical case,” fire inspectors Daryl Arbuthnott and Joseph Jackson discovered that half a dozen flammable walls had been built in East West Fashions, a shop they had visited in April to advise against unauthorized modifications.

“I never guessed they were dangerous,” said Hung Sung Kim, co-owner of the shop, who added that she spent more than $1,000 for the walls and on a new steel door over the fire escape. “Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it,” she said.

The response to the crackdown has been less than cooperative among building owners and tenants who typically operate on narrow profit margins and manage low-rent units crammed with sewing machines and assembly lines.

Compounding problems, the crackdown comes on the heels of ordinances adopted by the City Council in July, 1988--two months after the destructive high-rise fire at the downtown First Interstate Bank building--requiring sprinklers and fire alarms in all buildings over 75 feet tall.

John Cho, general manager of the Korean Garment Assn., blamed “language barriers” among the area’s predominantly Korean shop owners and “certain discrepancies between fire rules in Korea and the United States” for widespread safety problems in the garment district.

“A lot of our contractor members do not speak English well enough to speak with authorities--just well enough to speak with customers, clients and manufacturers,” said Cho, whose association includes 470 contractors employing more than 20,000 workers.

Beyond that, Cho said, “In Korea, once you get a lease, you are allowed to do just about anything you want.”

Parsons was unsympathetic.

“What occurs in other parts of the world doesn’t have any impact here,” he said, “except in that we often look at disasters in other parts of the world and use them to substantiate the need for more effective code enforcement.”

Stunned by almost daily visits from teams of fire, electrical, plumbing and building inspectors, some building owners angrily contend that they are receiving citations for violations that were ignored for years.

“Inspectors used to be more lenient when push came to tug--all that’s changed,” said Elena Irving, who owns a 12-story brick building housing dozens of clothing assembly shops near the corner of Main and 8th streets.

“We’re desperate to comply and yet keep the economic integrity of our businesses,” Irving said. “But the costs are horrific and the deadlines they are giving us are killers.”

A block away from Irving’s building, Richard Gerry pondered the costs and logistical nightmare of complying with a Fire Department order to remove several dozen security gates from his buildings. Gerry said that his tenants have bolted them over stairwell entrances and fire escapes to prevent burglaries.

Fire officials say the gates, which lock from the inside with keys usually guarded by shop owners, are illegal and a serious threat to occupants.

“The Fire Department said they are coming back next Friday and if the gates are not gone they’re going to take me to court,” said Gerry, who manages 10 buildings in the garment district.

“The thing is,” said Gerry, who plans to remove the barriers, “the gates have always been illegal, but before, inspectors looked the other way as long as they weren’t locked during business hours.”

Tenant Wan Ma, 32, was distressed when Gerry visited his women’s apparel assembly shop, N&J; Fashions, to tell him that his security gates had to come down.

“We have to operate without gates?” asked Ma, who employs 70 mostly Latino workers in a cluttered and dusty sixth-floor unit buzzing with sewing machines. “That will be good for thieves--not for us!”