Vice Thrives Along Decaying Imperial Highway : Crime: The run-down street is home to drug dealers and prostitutes. Construction of the Century Freeway has exacerbated the problem.

Take a drive down Imperial Highway between Hawthorne and Crenshaw boulevards and you’ll see one of the South Bay’s biggest eyesores.

Long a haven of drug dealing and prostitution, the blighted street is lined by hotels that rent by the hour. Along its side streets illicit liaisons often are consummated in parked cars, say people who live and work nearby.

In a few years, the Century Freeway will wind through the area, bringing a different kind of commerce to Imperial Highway. But today, the freeway exists mostly on blueprints. In its place are scarred empty lots and chunks of concrete alongside old tree roots and boarded-up shacks covered with graffiti.

Although streetwalkers have done business with customers of the nearby race track and the Great Western Forum for years, the freeway blight has attracted more prostitutes and drug dealers, police say.

“It’s the most popular place for people seeking prostitutes or for a prostitute to work,” said Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Sgt. Robin Sawyer. “In the South Bay, that’s the big spot for it.”

Hawthorne police and the county Sheriff’s Department both have targeted Imperial and its side streets for extensive undercover operations. Two weeks ago, Hawthorne police and female decoy officers arrested 45 men for soliciting prostitution during a nine-hour sting operation. It was their third anti-prostitution operation since January, and more are planned.

But many people say the crackdowns only provide temporary relief, and within a week the drug dealers and the prostitutes return. Many of the prostitutes are drug addicts, so-called strawberries, who trade sex for drugs or the cash to buy drugs.

Jack Prince, owner of Prince Pontiac on Imperial Highway, said the recent police campaign has not saved his business from being destroyed by crime.

“It’s put me out of business practically,” Prince said. “There’s no security there. If you have five or six prostitutes walking up and down the street, I don’t think you’d want to bring your family in here to buy a car. People won’t even bring their cars in here for service.”

Auto sales have plunged from 95 to 20 per month in the two years since construction began on a freeway overpass across the street from the dealership, said Prince, who began moving the dealership to a new location in Hawthorne last week.

Property values near Imperial Highway were depressed even before the California Department of Transportation began acquiring property in the late 1970s to make room for the cross-town freeway, Hawthorne City Manager Kenneth Jue said. Being in the flight path of Los Angeles International Airport also kept prices low, but the proposed freeway exacerbated the area’s troubles, he said.

As construction plans languished, many of the abandoned houses in Caltrans’ possession became no-rent hideaways for prostitutes and drug dealers, police and others say. Although persistent complaints persuaded Caltrans to target many of the neglected shacks for demolition, some remain standing.

“Over the years, we have tried to eradicate (the problems) with the cooperation of local law-enforcement agencies by removing the structures where some of the activities took place,” Caltrans spokesman Thomas Knox said. “You can do that, but sometimes the (prostitutes) return or find other locations.”

But the freeway isn’t solely to blame.

Police and others say the area’s reputation as a hot spot for illegal activity dates back at least 15 years.

The Forum and Hollywood Park guarantee a certain amount of business for prostitutes, said Lt. Dennis Slocumb of the sheriff’s vice unit.

“Travelers and people going to the race track have money in their pockets” and prostitutes know it, Slocumb said.

Although most of the affected area is now in Hawthorne, it is bordered by Inglewood, the city of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County. The convergence of so many jurisdictions makes the area difficult to patrol, law-enforcement officials say.

“You want officers to stay in their own town,” Sawyer said. “But all these ladies have to do is walk a couple of blocks and they’re out of the officers’ area.”

Hawthorne police say they could better control illegal activity in their jurisdiction if they had more officers to do the job. A measure on the June ballot proposes to raise property taxes to allow the Hawthorne Police Department to hire 35 more officers. Owners of houses and condominiums would pay about $55 more a year; landlords would pay $70 more per unit.

The measure requires the approval of two-thirds of the voters. The first payments would be levied in December, Jue said.

A similar tax in Inglewood that raised money for additional officers brought results, police said. In 1988, voters approved a tax that allowed the city to put 14 more officers on the streets. Since then, prostitution is down dramatically, said Inglewood Police Sgt. T. Johnson.

Additional police patrols may move the problem temporarily out of the area, but many people say law-enforcement crackdowns do little to stop these women--who often have endured incest and other abuse--from using drugs to escape their misery and using their bodies to make a quick buck.

“No one is doing anything to help these women,” lamented James Morrow, director of the Women’s Drop-In Center in Wilmington, a project of the private, nonprofit Behavioral Health Services.

“The tragedy is people keep putting them in jail, but once they come out, they keep going back to that life style,” Morrow said. “There’s nothing even remotely resembling an alcohol-drug recovery program (in that area) for these women to get involved in. If you had something like that, some women would make a choice to change their lives.”

But with no such help on the horizon and prostitution and drug use rampant, the frustrations of residents and business people continue to rise.

Some efforts are being made to target the drug business. The Hawthorne City Council in February passed an ordinance to restrict pay telephones to one-way calling along Imperial Highway and other parts of the city. A total of 52 pay telephones along three major thoroughfares have been identified as phones used in drug deals, and city officials will soon ask owners of businesses where the phones are located to change them to calling-out only, Hawthorne Chief of Special Services Harry Reeves said.

In voting to restrict public pay telephones, Hawthorne joined the ranks of most cities throughout the county, Pacific Bell spokeswoman Kathleen Flynn said. The phone company has been complying with such requests, but she said: “This cannot be in and of itself the solution.

“This is not going to solve the drug problems,” Flynn added. “We don’t want to restrict all the pay phones on Imperial Highway or Hawthorne Boulevard because we have to recognize the needs of our customers who do need to take incoming calls. But we will cooperate and have cooperated in the past to take this one step to try to combat the problem.”

Although restricted pay phones may not be a total solution, many property owners say they will not be satisfied until the city removes all outdoor pay phones in the area.

Fred Hand, a Hawthorne apartment owner, recently presented the City Council with a petition calling for the removal of pay telephones outside a liquor store and a pool hall on Imperial Highway.

“There is a significant amount of activity and we feel the telephones . . . are contributory,” Hand told council members. “It’s quite an open thing.”

Hawthorne City Atty. Michael Adamson said he is looking into the request, but he added that “it may be more complicated” to force property owners to remove the phones than to restrict them from receiving calls.

Still, residents, city officials and police agree the long-term solution is in redeveloping the area. But with the freeway not expected to be completed until 1993, and redevelopment in surrounding areas still needing to be approved, that improvement is several years away.

Although Imperial Highway itself was targeted for redevelopment in 1984, Hawthorne has had problems attracting a developer to the area because the lots are so narrow, said Bud Cormier, Hawthorne’s assistant director of redevelopment.

To deepen the lots, Hawthorne annexed several blocks north of Imperial Highway in November, 1987, and has been working ever since to declare it a redevelopment zone. The proposal is being studied by community groups, and a public hearing is scheduled for late summer.

But Hawthorne officials are so confident that the area will be approved for redevelopment that in June, 1989, they granted two developers the exclusive right to negotiate with the city for the property. Both developers, Tandam International Center and Imperial International Partners, want to build mixed-use projects that would include some condominiums, and office space and light industrial areas on more than 100 acres that flank Imperial Highway, Cormier said.

“The agreement we have with them is entirely conditional on the (redevelopment) plan going into effect,” Cormier said. “We prefer to keep it at an arm’s length until those boundaries are defined.”

Although acknowledging that their local redevelopment project won’t stamp out prostitution or drug use, Hawthorne city officials and others are hoping improvements to the Imperial corridor will drive illegal activity from the neighborhood.

“When you have a first-class development, it tends to scare the prostitutes away,” Jue said. “There’s sort of a self-cleansing action with new, good development.”