Park the Car, Take a Hike : Even in L.A., Walking Remains in Style

On a noisy street west of the Harbor Freeway, a man called Chief walks to clear his mind.

James Enox--known by most of his neighbors only as Chief--was forced to stop driving after some hoodlums pummelled him a while back. They fractured his skull and he has had blackouts ever since. So now he walks, sometimes for miles, all the way from Vermont and Manchester avenues to 7th Street and Broadway.

“I just can’t sit and dry up. I walk to keep alive,” said Chief, an old man in a fedora, dapper in stripes and suspenders.

Chief does not walk alone. In a city known for its symbiosis with the automobile--and, more recently, for the kind of random street-side violence that befell Enox--there are still many people who travel by foot, by choice or necessity, along the sands of Santa Monica beach, through the streets of Central Los Angeles, in the canyons of the South Bay.

Some of these walkers say a stroll through Los Angeles reminds them of country summers and child’s play, of a time when their bones didn’t ache so much and they didn’t have to work so hard. Others walk to forget--that they are jobless, hungry or alone. Some walk because it gives a sense of community--they sometimes connect with those they otherwise might never meet. Or, they say it reunites them with nature, offering a sense of solitude in the midst of millions.

This being Southern California, there are legions of fitness buffs, their ranks at the vanguard of what some people maintain is a genuine, if hardly novel, trend: Walking.

“What’s happened with walking is kind of like a quiet storm,” said Jake Steinman, editor and publisher of City Sports magazine. “It’s not like running where you have a few people at the top. This is really an activity that’s worked its way into the mainstream.”

Fifty-thousand Southern Californians chose to walk to work rather than drive last year, a number that should increase as employers and transportation officials advocate alternative means of commuting, said Peter Hidalgo of the Commuter Transportation Services, which promotes and develops new commuting concepts.

Carol Luttrell, an Echo Park real estate agent, said many of her clients desire homes in neighborhoods where they can feel safe walking: “I know a couple,” she said, “who, before they do anything--before they make dinner, before they take their shoes off and put their feet up on the coffee table--they pick their children up from the baby-sitter and take them out for a walk.”

Barbara Cadow, a USC psychology professor, said the stress of city living and the need to connect with fellow travelers is driving people to the sidewalks.

“When you’re in your car, you tend to fade out,” Cadow said. “You’re very isolated. . . . When you’re walking you notice the smells, the temperature, the breeze.”

Pedestrian numbers are hard to come by. No one is in charge of counting sidewalk traffic. But trust your eyes: It’s not difficult at any hour, in any corner of the city to find serious walkers.

In South-Central Los Angeles, men stroll the streets in the late afternoon and meet for a moment of laughter and camaraderie on a bustling corner.

In the Fairfax District, the air sweet with the smell of fresh fruit and baked bread, giggling children and bustling shoppers stream up and down the street--an elderly man named L.G. among them, dispensing wisdom to a passerby as he does his morning shopping.

Across town in the Glendale Galleria, a collection of elderly men and women gather as early as 7:30 a.m. many days for brisk walks through the mall, the center’s carpeted walkways and thick walls separating them from the smog and crime some fear lurks outside.

Some evenings, just before sundown, a group of professionals can be seen hiking deep into the hills of Palos Verdes, until the McDonald’s and mini-malls below disappear. Only five miles of mountain trails remain.

“People have always walked in Los Angeles,” said Robert Greene, director of education for the Los Angeles Conservancy, which provides walking tours of downtown Los Angeles for about 20,000 people a year. “What they haven’t done in the last few decades is walk from one area to another. This is what we are trying to do, not just introduce tourists to parts of Los Angeles, but introduce ourselves.”

Of course, there are some people too afraid to walk in Los Angeles at all, even in their own neighborhood and especially at night. A Times Poll in February showed that only a slim majority--55%--of Los Angeles County residents are not afraid to walk. Broken down geographically, the poll results showed a growing fear citywide about walking after sundown--42% of the Westside respondents, 41% in the San Gabriel Valley, 57% in Central Los Angeles.

Sadly, police concede the fear is not without foundation. “Any place in this city, there’s a need to use caution and be aware of your surroundings,” said Los Angeles Police Capt. Norman Rouillier, whose Central Division patrols neighborhoods from Elysian Park to Chinatown. “Of course, there’s places that should be avoided, but any place where you’re not aware of your surroundings is dangerous.”

There are pressures beyond crime that make it difficult to be a Los Angeles pedestrian. The whole momentum of the city seems to revolve around vehicle traffic. This is a city known for an array of drive-through services, and not for kiosks. Even automatic bank tellers have become accessible by car. “Nobody walks in L.A.,” goes one song.

When Gary Herman, West Coast bureau chief for the show “Inside Edition,” moved to Los Angeles from New York in 1976, “I found myself driving two blocks to get the newspaper. Here the mentality is get in the car for everything. It’s crazy.”

Now, Herman regularly passes strolling neighbors as walks from his West Hollywood home to the supermarket or Beverly Center. And in a city where freeways sometimes do more to divide people than to connect them, Herman said he relishes this chance to meet strangers and discover his community.

Curtis Lee Ford, 60, is something of a neighborhood fixture in the South Los Angeles community where he takes his daily strolls. A former barber instructor, Ford started taking the walks after suffering a heart attack last year.

“Everybody down here knows me,” Ford said one recent morning, strolling down Vermont Avenue, a cup of cold coffee in his hand. “So I can walk the streets in peace.”

His route never varies. He hits the doughnut shop at Florence and Vermont first thing in the morning. Then he drops by Willie’s for coffee and small talk before helping out at the Salvation Army store down the street. He takes a stroll down to 79th Street around 11 a.m., walks back to the Salvation Army in the afternoon and hits the doughnut shop one more time to finish his day with a cup of tea.

But, as Ford talks, he plants the notion that another force draws him to the sidewalks. A widower no longer in contact with much of his kin, Ford seems to have built a surrogate family of the hairdressers, shopkeepers and wanderers he meets on his daily route, ducking his head through doors, yelling hello through open windows.

“Willie, come here,” Ford says one afternoon, beckoning playfully from a worn leather seat in Willie’s homey coffee shop. “I’ve got something to say to you. And when I talk to you, I want you to listen with your good ear, not your bad one.”

They talk briefly and then Ford is on his way, sauntering in his white coat and matching hat past Domino’s pizza, Sneaker World and Fred’s auto shop, where the mechanics used to see Ford with his worn-out coffee cup and think he was guzzling Ripple.

“When I walked,” Ford said, “they’d say, ‘There goes that wino with that wine--until they found out it wasn’t nothing but coffee.’ ”

Move off the sidewalks and into one of those indoor malls. Ethel Latauska, a member of the Glendale GoGetters, is walking with her fellow club members through the Glendale Galleria. The GoGetters, mostly older people, take mile-long walks through the mall almost every morning.

“You don’t get mugged and you build up bone mass,” Latauska said.

She had been too afraid to walk the streets of Los Angeles, but she used to walk all the time when she was a girl in New England. “There weren’t that many cars in those days,” she said of her childhood just outside Boston. “My father was an avid walker. He had three daughters and he’d drag us out. It was wonderful.”

Latauska, her Reeboks in constant motion across the malls’ carpeted expanses, paused to think about her family. “I’m the only one left now,” said Latauska, who gives her age as 70-something. But now “I’m walking again. It’s memories. Even when you walk alone it brings back all those memories.”

Other walkers gravitate toward the beaches or canyons.

David DiBernardo walks the beach to escape the streets and connect with nature. “When I don’t come out here, when I haven’t been out for two or three days, I feel funny. Like I’m trapped in the city,” said DiBernardo, treading the sand in white shorts and dark shades.

Bob Patrick said he sometimes experiences that imprisoned feeling too. But then he takes off on mountain hikes and nature walks with fellow hikers and the stresses of day-to-day living seem to slip away. On a recent Thursday evening, Patrick, 63, helped lead a group of doctors, engineers and other buttoned-down types down Silver Spur Road and up into the Palos Verdes Mountains.

“After you complete a hike, you’re wringing wet with sweat,” said Patrick, who has been hiking for nearly six years. “Your knees hurt and your back hurts. But you can look back and say, ‘Look what I accomplished today.’ You can go back and face the traffic, and it doesn’t bother you at all.”

For some in the city, walking is more than a pastime--it’s a lifestyle.

Dean Jackson, a 46-year-old homeless man, walks the streets of Skid Row in worn-out shoes. Every day he strolls, from a shelter on 5th Street to Pershing Square to City Hall, and back again. The walks don’t always make him feel good, he said. But they make him feel better.

“It’s to kill time, kill the monotony,” Jackson said as he searched up and down Broadway for cans to recycle. “You have nothing on your hands but time when you’re unemployed.”

The last time Jackson lived in Los Angeles, he said, was the 1960s. He was, he said, a television writer. “I rode then,” he said smiling. “I was employed, doing well.”

This time Jackson has no job. He grabs a berth at a church shelter called Gravy Joe’s and hits the pavement by dawn. He said he isn’t afraid of the sometimes dangerous streets of Skid Row. In fact, you can learn a lot about a city, said Jackson, walking and watching its people. “You’re closer to humanity. When you’re in a vehicle it’s like watching a movie.”

Sometimes, though, he gets tired of his life of endless walking. The blocks get longer past Olympic Boulevard, and sometimes instead of making him forget, they make him remember what life was like before things got so bad.