Down the Road Apiece

I stopped by Edward’s Steak House the other day to say goodby.

I hadn’t been there for years, but it looked pretty much the same. Sawdust on the floor, glowing Tiffany lamps, a wooden Indian by the door, family pictures on the wall.

George Escobar was behind the bar as always, pouring one hell of a drink, and Jeannie Jackson was bustling about, waiting on tables.

I talked to Ken Rausch, whose father opened the place 44 years ago and whose announcement to sell the building has left a lot of old-timers in a state of shock.

When a deal is made, the restaurant closes.

Drug dealers, gang members, addicts, whores, pimps and pan-handlers in nearby MacArthur Park have driven them out of business, the Rausches say.

They can’t risk the lives of their customers and their employees by remaining open in an area, as one former customer put it, that has become a human sewer.

Everyone is telling the Rausches to hang on, that things are going to get better somewhere down the road, but Ken Rausch says the decision to sell is irrevocable.

There were tears at the announcement. Ed Rausch’s hand shook and his voice trembled. City Councilwoman Gloria Molina almost wailed in official regret. Cameras rolled. Strobes flashed.

Even Jane Pauley, America’s electronic sweetheart, is doing a segment on the end of the Edward’s Era. How big can a closing get?

I met with Ken not to add to the lachrymose nature of the Great Passing, but to take a look at what happens when crime clashes with commerce.

There’s personal nostalgia involved here too. I used to eat at Edward’s once in awhile with my old pal John St. John, the LAPD’s “Jigsaw John,” when I was writing a book and a television movie about him.

We’d go there and to Little Joe’s on upper Broadway and the Red Dog Saloon on 2nd Street. John and the other homicide cops stopped going to Edward’s, Ken says, when the neighborhood started going downhill.

Just because they’re homicide cops doesn’t mean they want to eat and drink at a place surrounded by potential killers and, as John used to say, killees. The restaurant sits in the middle of a neighborhood that has the worse crime rate in the city.

A police captain tells me that they’ve been putting heavy pressure on drug trafficking in MacArthur Park. Five years down the road, he says, the place will be what it was 15 years ago.

There’s that phrase again. Down the road. We’ll get to heaven bye and bye.

That’s not good enough, Ken Rausch says.

When cops shut down the park at 10:30 every night, dealers, addicts, gang bangers, hookers and homeless people hang out in the alley and the parking lot behind his restaurant, where the main entrance is.

“In the past three years,” he says, “the place has gotten dangerous. My sister comes here in the morning and is afraid to get out of her car. I leave at night and see prostitutes doing their business in the alley.”

The kinds of homeless who haunt those back streets aren’t gentle, either. Not like the old guy who digs lettuce leaves out of the trash bins every day to feed the ducks.

We’re talking about the guys who pounded on a terrified waitress’ car and urinated against its doors a couple of Sundays ago when she was driving out of the parking lot.

“How long will it be,” Rausch asks, “before someone gets killed?”

I hadn’t realized how bad MacArthur Park had gotten until I went out there to look around. The south side section especially has gone to hell. It even smells rotten.

Forget there are portable toilets everywhere. A lot of guys prefer the bushes or the lawn or sometimes the lake. Hell, it doesn’t matter who’s looking.

Crudity prevails in dark kingdoms.

Drunks, junkies and crazies sprawl across pathways and park benches like garbage in a flower bed. It’s hard to tell sometimes whether they’re asleep, comatose or dead, but at least when they’re out they aren’t hassling anyone.

A few of the families who used to come here are still trying to make the park what a park ought to be, a place to play and rest and picnic, but I can’t see a heaven on Earth in the near future, not down the road I’m looking.

So Edward’s is closing. Say your sad goodbys. Crime met commerce along Alvarado Street, and crime won.

But it’ll be different when Metro Rail comes, they say. It’ll be different when the skyscrapers and the condos march west down Wilshire like towers of a tomorrow.

Ken Rausch shakes his head. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but we just can’t wait for that.”

Down the road is just too far, and the road is getting tougher all the time.