Edward’s Steak House Sours on Neighborhood, Serves Last Meal : Crime: The owner of the MacArthur Park restaurant says ‘a bad element’ has forced him out of the area. He had been in business since 1946.

It happened one evening about four years ago. As usual, Don Zigrang had a craving for red meat. And as usual, he ended up at Edward’s Steak House. He liked the food at Edward’s. He liked the prices. He liked the ambience.

But after that night, he didn’t like the neighborhood. As he arrived at the landmark MacArthur Park restaurant, the valet rushed up to say a passerby had just been shot.

“Somebody was lying on the sidewalk leaking blood,” Zigrang would recall. “We got there just as the ambulance pulled up.”

Zigrang, who had dined at Edward’s for 30 years--and who didn’t let the sidewalk shooting keep him from his dinner that night--wasn’t surprised Tuesday that the restaurant was going out of business, citing the neighborhood crime rate.

“People used to line up to get into the place, but the neighborhood changed,” Zigrang said. “The dope, all the people hanging around in the park--it’s just a bad element.”

While beat cops strolled the knolls of MacArthur Park and crack dealers stood vigil around the pay phones, the regulars crowded in Tuesday for one last pilgrimage to 733 S. Alvarado St.--to the brass-and-mahogany steakhouse Edward Rausch opened in 1946.

Ed Rausch, now 73, wore a starched white shirt and tie as he greeted each customer with a warm handshake and a sad smile. At the bar, a group of businessmen in black armbands held a boozy wake. At the cash register, Ken Rausch passed out souvenir mason jars stuffed with Edward’s coasters, little jars of Edward’s all-purpose seasoning and a handful of the trademark sawdust from the restaurant floor.

Embittered by the changes that have swept his neighborhood, besieged by panhandlers, pimps and junkies, the Rausches sold their restaurant June 29 for about $2 million to a developer who plans to turn the place into a swap-meet arcade.

“We’re not doing this because we want to close our restaurant--we’re doing this because we have to,” said Ken Rausch, 37. He acknowledged that a recent police crackdown has cleaned up the neighborhood considerably, but said the police have “cleaned up” MacArthur Park almost annually for years, and the derelicts always seem to return.

Not all the business people in the neighborhood believe that the Rausches did the right thing.

“I think he’s crazy,” said Al Langer, who opened his Langer’s Delicatessen just up the street the same year Rausch opened his restaurant. “He’s letting a little difficulty get him down. I just think he wanted out and used (the crime) as an excuse.”

But Ken Rausch said business has been off by 40% in the last five years, despite a $400,000 renovation in 1985. The 27,000 meals a month Edward’s used to serve has dipped in recent times to around 11,000, he said, and the neighborhood, now crammed with botanicas and taco stands, no longer draws the city’s steak-and-potatoes crowd.

For this, Ed Rausch blames the police and the street people, and because of this, he said, he and his son will concentrate now on their Edward’s restaurant in suburban El Monte.

“I can remember when you could take your kid boat-riding in MacArthur Park,” the elder Rausch said. “In those days, a lot of the old houses around here were rooming houses. Pensioners lived there. They played checkers in the park. The grass was green, the flowers were planted--it was beautiful.

“Now,” he said, “it’s a human toilet.”

Inside Edward’s on Tuesday, judges and union workers, secretaries and physicians, sat at tables and swapped memories under the honeyed glow of the Tiffany lamps. Ted Huebner, a lawyer who has been dining at Edward’s for 15 years, presented the Rausches with a gag lawsuit on behalf of himself and others who figured there should be a law against people like Ed Rausch closing down steakhouses like Edward’s.

“It’s been very sentimental,” Ken Rausch said. For days, he said, people like Zigrang and Huebner had been dropping by to pay their respects. Zigrang, in fact, brought 26 of his neighbors by on Friday for a “last supper,” he said.

But not everyone was nostalgic for Edward’s--particularly not those newcomers who have so changed the neighborhood. Next door, for example, street vendor Rosa Garcia, hawking little girls’ dresses from a folding chair, sighed with relief when she learned that the restaurant that was closing wasn’t the Salvadoran pupuseria down the block.

And over at Cisco’s Tacos, owner Tun Lee was equally matter-of-fact.

“That place,” he said in careful English, “I think that is another world, that place. Times change. Everything change. Some people around here don’t know even if it is a restaurant in there.”