Liquor Ban Upheld at Main Street Store : Zoning: Alcohol sales will continue while an appeal is pending. Residents say the market is a magnet for crime.

Venice residents won another round this week in their fight to bring order to a Main Street market they say is a magnet for drunkenness, drug abuse, prostitution and a variety of other crimes.

The Los Angeles Board of Zoning Appeals on Tuesday left in place a city zoning administrator’s revocation last summer of the Trading Post store’s conditional use permit to sell liquor.

Store owner Jung Whan Lee had asked the board to have a hearing to reconsider the revocation. But with just three of its five members present, the board could not muster enough votes to rule on the matter. Instead, the appeal will go next to the City Council.

Lee said that if she can’t sell liquor, she will have to close the business she has operated for 14 years just north of the Windward Avenue traffic circle. She said she would appeal to the Los Angeles City Council to continue alcohol sales at her small brick shop.

Liquor sales will continue while the appeal is pending. But when the case comes to the City Council sometime early next year, Councilwoman Ruth Galanter has said she will ask that alcohol sales be permitted to continue only under a strict set of conditions. If the store does not comply with the conditions within three to six months, liquor sales would be stopped, said Susan Wagner, a deputy to Galanter.

Neighbors said they were pleased that city officials are continuing to pressure the liquor store for improvements.

“I feel this is great,” said Dean Ossiander, who has lived about a block from the store for six years. “I just wish it would come to an end.

“It’s a nightmare there; people yelling and screaming every night,” he said. “There is crime--prostitutes and derelicts hanging around. There are lots of drug sales.”

Another resident who lives nearby said she sometimes runs a stoplight near the Trading Post rather than stop her car alongside the rowdy group of men who often congregate near the front of the store.

Los Angeles police agreed at a hearing last summer that the store has been the hub of substantial criminal activity. A zoning administrator called it a “nuisance . . . (that) has endangered the safety of persons residing in the surrounding area.”

Lee’s attorney, C. David Serena, blamed the Trading Post’s problems on “new upscale people who are the complainers. The longtime residents have not been complaining.”

The neighborhood around Main Street and Windward Avenue has experienced a renaissance in recent years with the arrival of several new boutiques and restaurants. But old-time businesses like Lee’s still cater to the poor residential community to the east.

Serena said it is unfair for neighbors to blame crime problems on the liquor store. “You are starting out with an area that has never been the best part of town,” Serena said. “There is probably not a cleaner, neater establishment than the one Mrs. Lee has there.”

Lee said she recently has tried to improve the atmosphere around the store by refusing to sell single servings of alcohol, individual cups or ice after 7 p.m. She said the rules are designed to discourage drinkers from loitering outside.

“This is my living,” said Lee, who lives in Koreatown. “For 14 years I’ve worked hard over there, and in just one day, they try to take it away. I haven’t done anything wrong.”

But Ossiander, a free-lance video cameraman, called Lee an absentee owner “who couldn’t care less about the neighborhood.”