1990 in Review : Year of Steps Forward but Few Gains : Coping: For Glendale and nearby communities, it was 12 months of growth, change and a struggle to stay abreast.
It’s been a year of coping, sometimes with the promise that things were getting better, other times with the more limited goal of simply getting by.
Whether the story was overcrowding in schools or the crimping of city services, the threat to historical landmarks or the danger of future water shortages, the proliferation of cars and apartments or the spread of gang violence, the images of 1990 in Glendale and the surrounding communities represented growth, change and the struggle to stay abreast.
Glendale school officials instituted a new cross-town busing system and prepared for year-round school in an effort to relieve overcrowding, yet the schools were still crowded.
To avoid a deficit budget, the city raised taxes and chipped away at services, eliminating, among other things, a Montrose fire engine. One day later, in the midst of a June heat wave, the worst fire in the city’s history overwhelmed the resources of the Glendale Fire Department. That’s the kind of year it was.
The Alex Theatre had a special night recollecting 65 years of glory and brightening its prospects for preservation, while all year long the city’s oldest Victorian house deteriorated while the city and a developer who owns it wrestled over plans to save it.
In northeast Los Angeles, bond money was put aside to preserve the city’s last prewar police station as a museum, yet, ironically, a gang-spurred homicide wave overtaxed the present-day police force.
Glendale bought an historic train station to use as an interurban transportation hub and the Salvation Army opened a transitional home for people on the brink of homelessness. As far as anyone could tell, neither traffic nor homelessness got measurably better.
But those who paid attention couldn’t help noticing a change in the way Glendale addressed its own image-making. With banners, City Hall festivals and regular pronouncements, Glendale began to celebrate its burgeoning cultural diversity almost as much as it waved the flag. Its police chief won an award for fighting hate crimes.
In brief, here are some of the year’s most memorable triumphs, disappointments, struggles and hesitating steps into the last decade of the 20th Century:
Urbanization
Glendale’s emergence as a major city became ever more evident in the constant change of its downtown skyline where the office development boom has paid no heed to the Southland’s construction slowdown.
Groundbreaking for the city’s first major hotel--a $36-million Red Lion Inn--was followed by the dedication of the new headquarters building for the Carnation Co., the first international corporation to move to Glendale.
Tall cranes for lifting steel beams to other high rises have assumed residence year-round as other new buildings rise on North Brand Boulevard and Central Avenue.
City Hall got in on the action, when it awarded a contract for construction of a new public service building in the civic plaza.
The Glendale City Council spent most of the year fine-tuning an ambitious growth-control program to restrain the construction of condominiums and apartments, despite complaints from property owners who feared that the new building rules would decrease the value of their land.
Council members argued that if they did not curb construction, Glendale schools would become even more crowded, traffic jams would become widespread and the city’s sewer system would be overtaxed.
By the end of the year, the council had approved a residential downzoning program that will allow fewer dwellings on each lot, and a building cap that will limit the number of building permits issued annually for apartments and condominiums. The city’s 2-year-old moratorium on new condominiums and apartments ended in December after the downzoning program was approved.
The repercussions of urban growth kept Glendale lawmakers busy on many fronts.
With complaints coming from residents, store owners and restaurateurs, the council in May increased the licensing fees and imposed new operating restrictions on vendor trucks that sell sandwiches, fruit and other items on the city’s streets.
Also in May, the council adopted mandatory water conservation rules, aimed at cutting consumption by 10%. Later, the council ordered city staff members to expedite their efforts to use reclaimed water produced at a sewage treatment plant co-owned by Glendale and Los Angeles. In 1991, Forest Lawn Memorial Park is expected to begin using some of this reclaimed water for irrigation.
Responding to a community task force conclusion that there is a child-care crisis, city officials wrestled for several months over an ordinance that would make it easier to open large child-care centers in commercial, industrial and multifamily neighborhoods. But in a split vote, the council kept such centers out of single-family residential neighborhoods.
To curtail urban blight, the council in November approved a tough new anti-graffiti law aimed at spray-paint sellers, property owners and vandals. It allows the city to remove graffiti at a property owner’s expense, if the property owner fails to do so.
To help reduce traffic, the city expanded its Beeline shuttle service, made plans for a commuter shuttle and purchased the historic Southern Pacific Railroad Depot, which it hopes to develop as a commuter hub. Officials expect to spend up to $13 million to link Amtrak trains and a proposed light-rail system with shuttle buses, van pools and possibly a trolley line into downtown Glendale.
Concerned about construction on Glendale’s scenic slopes, the council last spring imposed an 18-month moratorium on hillside development. The freeze is not expected to be lifted until new building guidelines are adopted, probably by October, 1991.
At the same time, there was plenty of fallout from urbanization that resisted simple legislative cures.
City planners held two public hearings on the expansion needs of Brand Boulevard auto dealers, who generate millions of dollars for Glendale annually in sales tax revenue. But, with strong opposition from nearby homeowners to any commercial intrusion, they were unable to find a solution by the year’s end.
Even less in the way of progress was achieved in two of the city’s open-ended dilemmas--the day laborers who gather on Broadway and San Fernando Road and the homeless people on Brand Boulevard and adjacent streets. Behind-the-scenes negotiations to establish a new city-sponsored day-laborer site fell through and city officials continued to maintain that the homeless are part of a nationwide problem that should be addressed by federal officials. The homeless in Glendale were even ignored by federal census-takers who tried to count the nation’s homeless population in one spring night.
Glendale officials did, however, give the Salvation Army $200,000 to open a short-term center for homeless families. Mayor Larry Zarian also intervened personally to arrange new living quarters for Creadel Jones, a homeless man who was occupying a veterans memorial outside City Hall, surrounded by shopping carts. Like most everything else in 1990, the results were equivocal: Jones reappeared after a few days, dissatisfied with indoor living, but this time he set up his encampment across the street at the Courthouse.
Urban stresses became more noticeable everywhere, from City Hall to the wealthiest hillside neighborhoods.
Glendale City Manager David Ramsay said the city’s growth and the demand for additional services required a significant increase in the 1990-91 budget. But his original request for a $9-million boost in general fund expenditures drew a scolding from City Council members. They trimmed Ramsay’s proposal by more than $1 million, but still had to increase utility fees and raise the city’s hotel bed tax to balance the budget.
Public opposition killed a plan to cut automobile congestion in southside apartment districts by requiring residents to obtain permits to park their cars.
Hillside homeowners repeatedly packed City Hall to oppose developer Ken Doty’s proposal to build 25 houses in Glenoaks Canyon. Though Doty was ruled exempt from the hillside moratorium, the council rejected his plan and asked him to scale it back. Resolution awaits the new year.
Meanwhile, impatience with the legislative process spawned two initiative proposals that appear to have sputtered for now.
The Glenoaks Canyon homeowners had vowed to put together a ballot measure that would allow the city to sell bonds to buy and preserve undeveloped hillside land. But it now appears that the ballot measure will not be ready for the April 2 election.
A small group of City Hall dissidents, the Coalition for Election Reform, threatened to change the way that council members are elected. The group gathered thousands of signatures on a petition that called for council members to be elected from five districts instead of citywide. Coalition leaders said their goal was to bring political power to the more densely populated neighborhoods that the coalition says are being neglected by the council. The drive fell short by about 2,000 signatures because its backers misread the state election law, which had been changed to require more signatures than under the previous law. They were then rebuffed in a court case attempting to hold the city responsible for the shortfall.
Urbanization--and the reaction to it--also crept north to La Canada Flintridge and the unincorporated territory of La Crescenta. The Crescenta Valley Town Council, formed just last year in a quest by residents to control their own destiny, won its first major battle--a ban on giant billboards.
The rejection by voters of an effort to oust incumbents in a snappish La Canada Flintridge election was almost immediately followed by approval--ending a six-year debate--of Sport Chalet’s plan to build a Foothill Boulevard shopping center. Yet the council threw a moratorium on other development along Foothill Boulevard and controls on hillside development.
Though northeast Los Angeles couldn’t be said to have urbanized on the same scale as Glendale, its civic life was dominated by the reaction to big city pressures. Plans promoting a pedestrian shopping district for Colorado Boulevard in Eagle Rock were adopted by the Los Angeles City Planning Commission.
A private developer spent nine months and $23 million cleaning up toxic residues from the former Franciscan Ceramics factory site in Atwater Village, only to have to go begging for funds to build a massive shopping center there. Franciscan Promenade, a subsidiary of Schurgin Development Co., had the 45-acre site readied for development in September, but has neither been able to proceed with construction nor sell the land. So the property may remain for months or years a great lake of earth awaiting a future. The Los Angeles Board of Education has been considering buying the property for a new high school.
Historic Preservation
As the pressures of change mounted, a new appreciation for the need to preserve monuments from the past appeared to gain strength, even as some of the area’s monuments face the imminent threat of destruction.
The year wrote the final chapter in the saga of the Glendale Elks Lodge, which was finally torn down nearly five years after it was gutted by an arson fire. The 101-year-old Goode House continued to deteriorate as the developer who was denied permission to build apartments around it threatened for a second time to tear it down.
But other old buildings appear to have a brighter fate: money was set aside to preserve and revitalize the Alex Theatre after more than a decade of discussion. Glendale made plans to buy the historic Lanterman theater pipe organ from La Canada Flintridge and move it to the Alex.
Detailed architectural plans were developed for the renovation and expansion of the 52-year-old Civic Auditorium.
Glendale prepared to give historic status protection to a small collection of arroyo stone houses and planned to restore Miss American Green Cross, the totem of a seminal conservation movement born in Glendale.
The city also has blended the old with the new. Upscale restaurants, shops and a modern theater are attractions in The Exchange, a combination of renovated stores around a brick plaza and multilevel parking garage.
Los Angeles Councilman Richard Alatorre committed money from a bond measure for earthquake repairs to restore two popular monuments of the 1920s--the old Northeast police station on York Boulevard and the Eagle Rock Library on Colorado Boulevard. One will become a police museum and the other a community center.
Another monument, old Fire Station 56 on Rowena Avenue, was put on the auction block and snapped up by the owner of a recording studio next door who planned to use it for offices without changing its appearance.
Crime
In Northeast Los Angeles, street crime forced itself into public consciousness with a virulence unknown before. Going into the final week of the year, 48 people had died in homicides--nine more than last year’s record toll. The majority were at the hands of youth gangs who were no longer merely shooting each other. Among the victims were an Atwater Village sheet-metal worker who took on graffiti writers near his shop, a youth who stopped on his way home to Pasadena to use a pay phone on Riverside Drive and an aspiring actor accosted by a group of thugs as he walked with friends near his Silver Lake apartment.
Thirteen of the homicides remained unsolved by detectives who, at the worst times, had two or three new slayings a weekend added to their caseloads in the bloodiest year ever.
Glendale fared better in slayings--there were only three--but had its own wave of violent crimes as robberies went up 45% and assaults 21% in the November tabulation.
This year three notorious crime stories ended in court--all with guilty verdicts--and three more came along.
The guilty verdicts:
Former city parts worker William Conway, 29, was convicted in February of vehicular manslaughter for killing two mothers and two daughters on a Glendale street while driving drunk. He was sentenced to 11 years in prison for killing Patricia Carr, 36; her daughter, Caren, 6; Valerie Cramer, 32, and her daughter, Brianna, 9, in the 1988 accident. The four, returning home from an evening walk, were waiting on a traffic island to cross Verdugo Road.
After his second trial, Alfred Giordano, 28, was given 14 years in prison for the machine-gun shooting of an armored-car guard during a foiled robbery attempt in Glendale on Dec. 31, 1987. His first trial had ended in a deadlock after the paralyzed victim initially identified his look-alike brother as the gunman. The jury acquitted Giordano’s brother of driving the getaway car. But the second jury found Giordano guilty, basing its decision largely on the testimony of his ex-wife in spite of defense attorneys’ claim that she had a sexual relationship with the key police investigator in the case.
In one of the strangest local cases on record, neurologist Richard P. Boggs was convicted in July of murdering a stranger and faking the victim’s identity in a $1.5-million insurance scam. He barely escaped the death penalty. Jurors who found him guilty of killing Burbank accountant Ellis Henry Greene deadlocked 10 to 2 in favor of capital punishment. But a second sentencing jury in December gave Boggs, 57, life in prison. Prosecutors successfully argued that Boggs was part of a scheme involving two partners in a failing Ohio athletic clothing firm to kill Greene and misidentify his body as one of them so the other could collect on life insurance. One of the businessmen is in custody awaiting trial and the other is being sought.
Yet even as Boggs faced the jury, other unusual cases were unfolding.
Daniel Miralle, La Canada Flintridge father of three, seemingly turned himself in as his wife’s killer after a friend pressured him to suggest that sheriff’s deputies check the identity of a body found burning in the desert. It was his missing wife, Tessie, and he will stand trial next month for her slaying.
The hillside city was still abuzz with the Miralle slaying when 78-year-old resident Roma Jaul Jacobs was shot and stabbed to death as she called 911 for help one morning in October. Outside her residence, police arrested Victoria Madeira, 43, of Anaheim, who has a history of mental illness, and Madeira’s 11-year-old son. Madeira was wearing military fatigues and her son was dressed in girls’ clothing. Both have pleaded not guilty to murder charges.
Two former Santa Monica schoolteachers, both with masters degrees, remain murder suspects in the disappearance of retired Glendale accountant Gordon Johnson, who sold his house to travel in a motor home. The couple, found in Las Vegas spending Johnson’s money and traveling in his motor home, face sentencing in January after being convicted on federal theft charges. Authorities suspect the body may be in Lake Shasta.
Education
At its worst, 1990 made crime an education story. Two stabbings at Eagle Rock High School in May triggered protests by local parents and students over a Los Angeles Board of Education decision against automatically expelling students found with weapons at school. Aggressive lobbying by Eagle Rock protesters, led by teacher Rudy Cordero, helped convince the board to adopt tougher discipline measures for weapon-carrying students.
Otherwise, the education system, as with every other segment of the community, was trying to cope with growth.
Glendale’s Board of Education, with more than 25,000 students in its 27 schools and no end in sight to an ethnic influx, started out with small steps to solve classroom overcrowding: More portable trailers were added to campuses and more than 300 students, unable to attend their crowded neighborhood schools, were bused to less crowded schools. The fall marked the first time junior high school students were among those bused.
But the board took a giant leap in June by voting to begin year-round education in 1991 at six elementary schools, with two more to follow in 1992. The decision was met with only modest opposition by parents, but some confusion over how the new schedule will work.
Starting in July, students at Balboa, Columbus, Jefferson, Keppel, Mann and Marshall elementary schools will attend classes for three months, then vacation for a month. Edison and Muir will adopt that schedule a year later. The plan is expected to increase each school’s enrollment capacity by 25% and to reduce the need for busing and portable classrooms.
Higher education faced its new challenges when quiet Occidental College erupted in a show of student raucousness that was inevitably compared to the upheaval in Eastern Europe.
Occidental President John Slaughter, who took command of the Eagle Rock campus in 1988, spearheaded development of a master plan for the 103-year-old private university. Both Slaughter and the plan have encouraged racial and cultural diversity and stronger ties to Eagle Rock and Los Angeles. But some students have demanded change at a faster pace. In November, after administrators canceled a proposed rap and culture concert, several hundred students staged a five-day sit-in in the campus administration building to protest lack of student involvement in Occidental affairs. The protest led to a series of forums on student involvement, financial aid and other issues.
As Los Angeles public schools faced change on a scale unknown in the past, several Northeast area schools were at the forefront. Two have been approved by the district for school-based management, a restructuring process aimed at giving administrators, teachers, parents and residents more say in how their school is run. Marshall High School has used the process to link students’ grades to their attendance and to change the school schedule. Teachers and parents at Allesandro Elementary School are trying to assume more control over the school’s budgets. Three other Northeast schools are seeking to adopt school-based management.
Disaster
In this year of social strain, political clashes and rigorous self-examination, what the city of Glendale surely didn’t need was a disaster. And so, naturally, it got one.
Late in June, the temperature climbed to 110, the wind roared and the vegetation turned crackly dry. An unidentified person threw a rigged lighter at the bottom of College Hills.
In minutes, the fireball whooshed over the hills and down the canyons. It jumped the Glendale Freeway, burning up and down residential streets on the other side.
Spot fires continued to burn, raising temperatures and igniting some houses even after the brunt of the fire--and most of the fire engines--had moved on. For four hours, one of Glendale’s usually most placid neighborhoods degenerated into scenes of harried police screaming at unlistening residents to leave their houses and residents pleading for help that never came.
When it was over, 41 houses were destroyed and another 23 damaged. By Christmas, only one of the scores of displaced families had returned home. For many of the others, caught in financial, architectural and emotional tangles, it appeared that it might be more than a year before the last families return home.
Groping for some meaningful response, the City Council decided to force hillside homeowners to remove vegetation, or have it done by the city at their expense. The council also restored the Montrose fire engine to the budget. But the council rejected an order for the replacement of wood roofs.
Homeowners in the fire area sharply criticized Fire Chief John Montenero and his department, maintaining that firefighters neglected some areas to concentrate on others. Montenero conceded as much in a minute-by-minute summary of the blaze released this fall, but said he had no other choice in dealing with a fire that completely overwhelmed the department’s resources. He said the strategy saved as many as 700 residences in the San Rafael Hills by cutting the fire down just east of the freeway.
A homeowner group demanded Montenero’s dismissal, which the City Council ignored.
Like so much that happened in 1990, it appeared that the Glendale fire would pass into legend with a pro and a con attached.
