Growing Pains : Westwood--a Transformation Into a Volatile Playground

In the 22 years that he has ridden his bicycle to work, Prof. Henry W. McGee Jr. has seen firsthand the transformation of Westwood Village from a sleepy little college enclave into a volatile playground for thousands of boisterous youths.

“It’s really become a recreational playground for people outside the community--it’s like Disneyland and Universal Studios rolled into one,” said McGee, a UCLA law professor who lives in Santa Monica. “So you get a wide sociological range of visitors, and it doesn’t take much to set off a conflagration or riot in this carnival atmosphere.”

So when hundreds of youths went on a rampage in Westwood Village Friday night after the opening of the movie “New Jack City,”--looting stores, fighting and vandalizing cars--McGee was not all that surprised.

“It has happened before,” he noted.

Indeed, Friday’s melee was at least the third time that youths have erupted in anger and violence since 1988 and changed Westwood into a virtual battle zone during the showing of a just-released movie. “New Jack City,” starring volatile rap artist Ice-T, is a story about the violent rise and fall of a Harlem drug lord.

To be sure, say McGee and others, several immediate factors played a role in the riot, which led to as many as nine arrests and several slight injuries. Hundreds of angry customers, many of them African-American youth from other parts of the city, were turned away from the Mann Westwood Fourplex Theater after waiting hours to see the movie.

Racial tensions throughout Los Angeles already were strained after the highly publicized beating of a black motorist by Los Angeles police several days earlier.

But in a way, Westwood Village itself is also to blame, according to Shel Starkman, owner of the Old World Restaurant.

Starkman and others say “the village” has changed dramatically in just a few decades. “The affluent adults are going elsewhere,” said Starkman. “And on Friday and Saturday nights it’s like being on a high school campus.”

Westwood Village used to be a quiet college town--a wholesome little village with its own food market, bookstores, hair salons and service-oriented merchants.

But in the late 1960s and early 1970s, new movie theaters began coming, to the point where there are now at least 15 screens, each seating hundreds of people. Suddenly, Westwood was drawing thousands of people from other areas of the city. As its night life grew and Westwood’s popularity rose as a weekend “hot spot,” the crowds got ever bigger. Stores that didn’t cater to them were replaced by ones that did.

For Starkman, the turning point came in the early 1970s, when a local movie house showed the premiere of “The Exorcist” and the crowds came.

“Westwood was shocked to find that along with the turn-away crowds came thievery, vandalism, (urinating) on lawns and what have you,” said Starkman, who has worked at the village eatery since 1972 and went to UCLA long before that. “If I may say so,” Starkman said, “the movies brought in the elements, including gangs, that we have to deal with today.”

Often the movies release literally thousands of young people at around the same time and start taking in thousands more--a potentially combustible mix.

As the years passed, some of the unruly element stayed, and panhandlers became a more common sight. More high school and college-age kids came into the village to party, and the movie houses accommodated them by showing their kinds of movies.

Also in the mix are the sporadic fights that break out among drunken college students, often requiring police intervention.

To thwart the overcrowding and ugly incidents, city officials began partially closing off the village to vehicle traffic on weekend nights, and at times instituted a complete ban on cars onto the village’s main drag. But some merchants complained bitterly that the barricades hurt their businesses while doing nothing to keep out the young crowds that have caused the problems.

“And we got a scary reputation” as a result, said Kevin Delk, manager of the Dole Cafe.

Meanwhile, adults who spent more money and behaved themselves better moved to other areas of town, such as Century City and the newly refurbished Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, some merchants say.

By 1988, police began noticing another trend--groups of gang members and gang wanna-bes were spending their weekend nights loitering around Westwood Village. That year, nationwide attention was drawn to the village after window-shopper Karen Toshima was felled by a bullet fired by a gang member at his rivals on a crowded street.

“The village had gotten rough at times,” said Police Sgt. Nick Barbara, who has patrolled the area for the Los Angeles Police Department for eight years.

Barbara said Sunday that the incidence of car burglaries, robbery, drug dealing and some violent crimes in Westwood Village has increased “sharply” in recent years, and so has the number of gang members.

Because the area is so accessible to freeways and bus routes, gang members come “in droves, from all over,” Barbara said. “Westwood has become an ‘in’ place for them--they can loiter relatively easily, and things can go downhill quickly from there.”

Although Mann theater representatives could not be reached for comment Sunday, movie houses in general have denied contributing to crowd problems in the village, or to any influx of crime. They point out that without the thousands of moviegoers spending money in the area, many shops and restaurants would have fewer customers.

Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky puts the blame squarely on a few movie houses, saying they are unfairly ruining Westwood Village’s reputation. The area has a low crime rate for the high concentration of people, he says, and most weekends go by without even a minor incident.

“Obviously, we’ve got some problems in the village, but nothing that can’t be resolved,” Yaroslavsky said. “The problems are serious and need to be brought into control, largely by the businesses themselves, especially the movie theaters. If the movies cannot control their own patrons, the city will have to step in and protect the people in the village.”

After an August melee that followed the showing of Spike Lee’s “Mo’ Better Blues,” Yaroslavsky met with movie house officials and Los Angeles police to discuss the prevention of further violence.

Yaroslavsky said Sunday that the movie houses had promised to notify police when they would be showing a premiere of any movie in Westwood Village, but that no such notification occurred before the showing of “New Jack City.” “They communicated with no one, knowing full well the problems they could create,” Yaroslavsky said.

At the height of Friday’s riot, as many as 1,500 people tore through Kinross, Gayley and Weyburn avenues, Westwood Boulevard and Lindbrook Drive before being dispersed by about 100 officers in riot gear. By Sunday, the area appeared to be back to normal, although moviegoers occasionally gathered in front of the theater to see if Mann’s decision to stop showing the movie had been lifted. So far it has not.

While the theater’s operators decide whether to again show “New Jack City” in Westwood, Yaroslavsky said he will begin seeking ways to ensure that theaters pay for more security to avoid another riot.

In the meantime, police in other cities reported violence at theaters showing the movie over the weekend.

In Brooklyn, an 18-year-old man was arrested in the death of Gabriel Williams, 19, who was killed by a single shot to the chest during a shoot-out in which more than 100 shots were fired outside the UA Duffield Theater in Brooklyn Heights.

In other incidents:

* A passerby was shot in the leg when rival gangs exchanged 15 to 20 gunshots at a downtown Chicago theater after a screening.

* Eighteen people were arrested at a Las Vegas theater, where two gang brawls erupted. No one was seriously injured, but one of those arrested was carrying a semiautomatic gun.

* Three police officers and a civilian were hurt when a fight between two people in the lobby of a Sayreville, N.J., theater escalated into other fights.