Will South L.A. Liquor Stores Be Rebuilt?

In the columns of black smoke that rose from Los Angeles during three days of rioting, some of the city’s most powerful symbols of racial tension and community disenfranchisement disappeared from the landscape they once dominated.

For decades, the cramped and faded liquor stores of South Los Angeles were a flash point of conflict over issues that have drawn, in many ways, from the same well of emotions that overflowed in the days of rioting.

The liquor stores had come to stand for much of what was ugly in this city: the spreading crime and decay, the poverty and powerlessness of communities, the seemingly insurmountable cultural barriers that often turned one group against another. They spawned a litany of grim images over the years: groups of unemployed men drinking cheap liquor on street corners, angry community boycotts, and customers and shop owners dying in a seemingly endless series of shootouts.

But what a decade of meetings and protests never achieved was accomplished in three days of rioting. Through large pockets of South Los Angeles, the liquor store exists no more.

“All gone,” said Jean Park, a Korean liquor store owner, as she stood desolate amid the scattered and broken remnants of her business. “Everywhere, they’re burned.”

The question now, as the city looks toward healing the wounds caused by the riots, is whether the liquor stores will be rebuilt.

On Monday, the Planning Commission will consider a proposal requiring liquor stores to undergo closer scrutiny than non-controversial businesses before being rebuilt.

City Councilwoman Rita Walters has proposed a change in state law restricting liquor stores in areas where there are already too many. She has also proposed requiring the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control to obtain approval from local officials before licensing new liquor outlets.

But on the streets, shop owners and residents are wrestling with the issue on a more visceral level, far removed from the vagaries of politics and the arcane rules of land use.

For Korean liquor store owners, who suffered much of the damage during the riots, it has boiled down to a simple question of survival: To stay or to leave?

“It’s hard to say right now,” said Jin Hyuk Chang, whose liquor store at Western and Slauson avenues was burned to the ground. “I would like to return, but I don’t know if it is safe.”

On the glass-littered streets of South Los Angeles, many black residents are asking the question in a different way: Will we allow the liquor stores to return?

“It’s bad that someone lost a business,” said Gus Harris, an African-American who includes his own Jefferson Avenue store as part of the problem. “But we don’t need another ethnic group to come down and take money out of our community. If we don’t do something about it, then shame on us.”

For successive waves of immigrants, the liquor stores of South L.A. have been a gateway to the American dream--a cheap investment that with hard work and long hours could pay for a child’s college education or another business in the suburbs.

The stores have rarely been passed on to the next generation but have instead been sold to the next group of entrepreneurs eager to find their way.

The history of the liquor store in urban Los Angeles is captured in the fading storefront signs bearing the names of the various groups that have owned them: Jewish merchants, then Japanese and African-Americans and, most recently, the Koreans.

Jewish shop owners began moving out after the Watts riots, selling their shops “dirt cheap” to African-Americans and others, one former owner recalled.

The deregulation of liquor prices in 1978, which made operating a liquor store even more tenuous than before, sparked a new round of selling--this time to the growing group of Korean immigrants.

Jack Anderson, a 55-year-old black resident of the neighborhood, has seen most of the changes over the last three decades.

At Western Avenue and Jefferson Boulevard, he paced in front of the boarded-up storefront of a looted liquor store. “Used to be black-owned,” he said. “Sold out two years ago.”

The new owners were Koreans, he said. Now he’s not sure what will happen with the store, which sold not only liquor but also crayons for the children, aspirin, and Popsicles for a boiling hot afternoon.

“You’re damned right it’s a hassle,” he said, grumpy at the heat and confusion. “Nowhere to shop around here.”

For Anderson, the long and complicated debates over economic problems and racial tensions boil down to the basics: the high price of cigarettes and milk, the look in a shopkeeper’s eyes.

“I have nothing against the Koreans, but it’s their business practices,” he said. “They started selling single cigarettes for 10 cents, then they see the people go for that so they go to 15, then 25. They tried 30. They just keep going up to see how far you’ll go.”

Proprietors say that running a liquor store is a tough and dangerous business, marginally profitable even in the best of times.

Some residents say they can understand some of the hardships. Over the decades, there have been good store owners and bad ones, those who lived in the community and those who would seek haven each night in suburban peace, they say.

But the store owners have been, at least in recent years, predominantly non-black--a fact that has left a trail of bitterness. “We’re the ones who made these people rich,” resident Lewis Herman, 55, said.

For a community that has always been beset by poverty, the sheer number of liquor stores and the stream of business people who have made livings off the area have been both depressing and infuriating.

“What are they going to do, send the Russians down here now?” Gus Harris asked bitterly.

In the early 1980s, black, Anglo and Latino members of the South-Central Organizing Committee, a church-based community group, renewed an effort to stop the proliferation of the liquor stores.

It became an issue not only of safety, but also of a community’s right to control its own environment.

A survey this month by the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control found 728 current liquor licenses in a roughly 70-square-mile area of South Los Angeles. In five years, the number of licenses has dropped by only 35, according to the department.

The riots, however, have given the community an unexpected chance to assert itself again.

“My dream is that we won’t see any more liquor stores. There absolutely has to be a lessening of the number,” said Councilwoman Walters, whose district includes part of South Los Angeles. “We have to say enough is enough.”

Walters said she intends to fight against the proliferation of the liquor stores, but she conceded that the rights of the property owners to rebuild and the inexorable push to build liquor stores in the area may defeat her.

“I don’t know if we will be any more successful than those in the past, but we have to try,” she said.

State Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control officials said they have no way to stop liquor outlets from rebuilding.

Licenses to sell hard liquor, which fetch about $15,000 on the open market, are issued to specific addresses and are valid only for those addresses, although a license holder can apply to transfer the location. Once issued, they are rarely revoked.

“We have to follow the law,” said Jay R. Stroh, department director. “Unless new legislation is passed, those owners can open their liquor stores again.”

For many Koreans, the question of whether to return has transcended much of the debate over zoning and politics.

The conflict over their liquor stores that had simmered for so long boiled to the surface during the riots. Their stores were burned and looted. They were forced to arm themselves, ready to fight back.

For three hard and bitter years, Paul and Jean Park ran a liquor store at Western Avenue and Jefferson Boulevard. They experienced the robberies, the angry stares of customers and the waves of suspicion that washed through with each shooting death--both Korean and black.

Their store was looted in a daylong frenzy that cleaned out most of their hard liquor, beer, crayons, potato chips, aspirin, cigarettes, candy and instant noodles. They estimated the damage at more than $200,000.

When the Parks heard that looting had begun, they and their son rushed down to their business. There they saw dozens of looters streaming from the store, their arms full of booty.

They stayed in the car for an hour, afraid to get out, and watched their store torn apart.

“I was so mad I was going to fire in the air, but I didn’t,” said Mike Park, the couple’s son. “We just watched. That’s all we could do.”

For the Parks, the decision to stay or leave has not been easy. Their son is adamant about leaving. “My feeling is absolutely to close,” he said. “We’re going to try to get the hell out of here. At this point, we’ve had enough.”

But his parents are less certain. After three years of doing business in the area, Jean Park said, she has many friends. Although running the store was hard, it was a good business and they are hesitant to abandon it, even with the looting.

“We would like to make a second start,” Paul Park said.

They are somewhat encouraged that not all the Korean liquor stores were burned or looted in the riots.

A few miles west of the Parks’ store, merchant Ui Man Chung beamed as he stood behind the counter of his unscathed store. “I’ve got good neighbors,” he said, adding that he has no intention of moving out.

“He treats us right,” one black customer yelled out.

The Parks feel they too have forged good relationships over the years and that many customers see them not as store owners, but as friends.

Jean Park proudly noted that their store was only looted and not burned, as so many others were.

She said several customers have come by since the riots and told her that they helped put out fires set inside the store by other looters.

Her customers have admitted to her that they too were inside stealing what they could.

But in the strange and desperate logic of the times, Jean Park was heartened that some customers felt enough for them to refrain from burning their store down--even if they did take some things.

“It’s no problem. It’s OK,” she said. “I would rather have my friends take the liquor than some strangers.”