15 Seconds That Changed Whittier : 3 Years After Quake, City Assesses Changes

7:42 a.m. Oct. 1, 1987:

City Councilman Myron Claxton was eating breakfast at a Bright Avenue restaurant when the 15 seconds of shaking began. When he ran outside, he could see rising clouds of dust to the north. Falling bricks from uptown buildings raised the dust, he would later learn. To the west, he saw black smoke from a burning house. Ruptured gas lines led to the fire.

As Claxton drove east toward his own home, he noticed the clock at City Hall had fallen. And glass from broken street lights glittered up and down the asphalt of Mar Vista Street.

The disaster was plain to see.

But other changes, just as significant, could not have been foreseen by Claxton and other residents that morning.

11 a.m. Oct. 1, 1990: Three years later.

Claxton, a lifelong area resident, watched as Mayor Thomas K. Sawyer presided at a ceremony to mark the third anniversary of the 5.9-magnitude Whittier earthquake. Claxton stood in front of a new building that was a pile of bricks three years ago.

He listened as Sawyer told a crowd of reporters that the city was well on its way to recovery.

“The earthquake was a godsend in a way,” Claxton mused later, “in that it happened when it did, before schools and businesses opened. And no one in Whittier got killed.

“And it got people organized and thinking about the future of Whittier.”

In 15 seconds, the course of the city’s future had altered forever.

When that quake and its powerful aftershocks rumbled through Whittier, they did more than shake down or disable more than half the buildings downtown and cause an estimated $90 million in damage. The quake crippled a struggling downtown business district. And it made house guests and apartment dwellers of homeowners, forcing them to struggle with repairs and new mortgages.

The temblor rattled local politics, as well, in this city of 77,000 residents.

“There developed a broad-based feeling in the community that something had to be changed quickly because the Whittier that people had known and grown up with was being lost,” said Bob Henderson, who said quake-related problems were what prompted him to run for office.

In April’s council election. Henderson and Helen McKenna-Rahder swept into office promising to change the way Whittier’s government handled post-quake development. They said they wanted to slow down the proliferation of apartments, lower the density of new apartments and improve their quality and appearance.

They have pursued a similar platform when it comes to commercial developments, asking the city to raise its standards and slow down. The council passed new commercial development standards this week and will soon be voting on new residential development standards.

The earthquake brought these issues to the forefront. In 1986, the city issued permits for building 169 apartment units. In 1988, when earthquake reconstruction was at its peak, the city issued permits for 323 units. The new construction primarily involved razing single-family homes and replacing them with apartments or tearing down existing apartments to build higher-density complexes.

The construction was perfectly legal. Many of the city’s oldest, most stable residential areas were zoned for apartments. Nonetheless, the development “stirred up a groundswell of protest” among homeowners, said Henderson, a 50-year-old insurance agent.

Many homeowners sold out to apartment developers rather than face costly repairs, said Richard Hubinger, the city’s director of building and safety. The developers offered good prices because all they wanted was the land. If not for the quake, he said, some homeowners might not have sold out.

Most of those who did stay have new mortgages, to pay for earthquake repairs. But most also have renovated, safer homes. Four rebuilt homes were the subject of a realtor-sponsored home tour earlier this year.

Other homeowners are still consumed with rebuilding. There are still houses missing chimneys all over town. The unreinforced brick chimneys were some of the first to fall.

About 4,200 homes were damaged, said O.L. Lewis, the city’s building rehabilitation manager. Incredibly, substantial repair work has yet to begin on 13 homes because of delays in government aid. Thirteen other homes are still being rebuilt. Most of these families are still living with relatives, Lewis said.

With luck, it won’t be long before displaced homeowners will no longer need his help, Lewis said. “I look forward to doing nothing for a while. I’m going to retire in December, unless there’s another earthquake,” said Lewis, 63.

The quake also changed the face of commercial Whittier. As buildings went down, some of them dating from the town’s early history, small shopping plazas appeared in greater numbers. Other blocks had empty lots.

In the downtown business district, called the Uptown, the earthquake destroyed 34 buildings, about 50% of the district, and severly damaged 23 others. All that in an area just a quarter-mile square. In all, 75 commercial buildings were declared unsafe. Police kept Uptown roped off for 30 days. For about 18 months, more than two dozen businesses operated out of trailers.

Some business didn’t make it. Even after three years, there are about 70 fewer members in the downtown business association than at the time of the quake. Major retailers were among the permanent evacuees, including a market and large sporting goods and office supply stores.

Three years later, sales figures for the Los Cerritos Center, a regional mall to the south, are more than 10 times as large as sale figures for Uptown. Even without adjusting for inflation, Uptown generated $600,000 less commerce in the second quarter of 1990 than it did in the second quarter of 1987, just before the quake.

And Uptown was hardly prospering even before the temblor. Larger retailers such as J.J. Newberry, Montgomery Ward, J.C. Penney and Woolworth had long ago left downtown Whittier.

“Central business districts in general were left in the dust as regional malls developed,” said Hank Cunningham, the assistant city manager for community development.

Just before the quake, however, Whittier replaced its street signs, sidewalks and avenues to create more of a village look. A Hilton Hotel had moved into the area.

“We were beginning to hit a crest,” Cunningham said. “That’s why the earthquake was so devastating.”

Whittier’s image suffered as badly as its buildings. TV showed blocked-off streets, piles of rubble and houses leaning at crazy angles.

Today, nearly 90% of Uptown buildings are either replaced, rebuilt or under construction. As the quake’s third anniversary approached, city fathers decided that it was time to repair the city’s reputation. That’s why the city and the Chamber of Commerce budgeted $90,000 this year to hire Thayer Keener, a public relations firm.

The effort included the third-year anniversary media bash last week, which was essential for marketing Whittier, Cunningham said.

“A year ago, the second anniversary, there wasn’t nearly as much physical, tangible evidence of improvement to the area,” he said.

“A lot of things have happened. Restaurants, theaters have opened. Visually speaking, in terms of television and that sort of thing, you don’t have nearly the number of vacant lots. Last year, much of the building was half done or not even started.”

The strategy worked. Channels 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13 and others arrived to shoot new buildings and beaming city officials. Whittier is ready and able to accept shoppers and businesses, they said, in hope of lowering Uptown’s vacancy rate of 16.5% for retail and 21.5% for office space.

The city’s overall image campaign includes buying trolley-like buses to replace its current van shuttles, an urban design contest to create models of inspired development, an alleyway project to improve streets and parking access and vigorous efforts to recruit movie theaters and restaurants.

Already, the three-screen Whittier Village Cinemas has opened in a refurbished Art Deco building that screened X-rated movies before the quake. And unlike other Southland cities, Whittier has a downtown populated by earthquake-resistant buildings.

In other parts of town, however, Councilman Henderson said he can point to badly planned mini-malls and apartments, developments the city will probably have to live with for the next 30 years.

No one denies that the pace of activity and change has been swift. “The earthquake probably took a 10-year period of time and compressed it into maybe two years,” Henderson said.

A number of downtown businesses, those that were declining anyway, never came back, said Janet Crossman, the office manager for the Whittier Uptown Assn.

Shirley LaRue did return, however. LaRue’s Floor Covering Inc. had been in Uptown since 1969. The quake blew out all the store windows and forced the eventual demolition of her building on Greenleaf Avenue.

For a month after the quake, LaRue and her husband operated their business by phone out of their home. Then they moved to an industrial park in Santa Fe Springs. Last February, they opened their new building on the original site, thanks to a $426,000 loan from the Small Business Administration.

She remembers other stores that weren’t so fortunate: “The muffin shop, they’re gone. A shoe repair store is gone, a whole bunch across the street.”

As for her, “You never completely recover what you lost,” she said. “But I have an earthquake-secure building here. And the last two months have been the busiest I’ve ever had.”

BACKGROUND Three years ago, on Oct. 1, 1987, an earthquake, centered near Whittier, rumbled through Southern California. The 5.9-magnitude quake killed eight people, injured more than 200 and caused more than $368 million in damage in Los Angeles and Orange counties. Three days later, a major aftershock measured 5.4. No one died in Whittier, the hardest-hit city, but the quake caused about $90 million in damage to more than 4,000 homes and businesses.