‘Chill City’ Tries to Rise From Ashes : Riot aftermath: Snow-cone stand to benefit inner-city youth can’t find a home.

Among the monuments to the riots is a newly built snow-cone stand stored at an industrial supply shop in Monrovia.

The green, orange and black kiosk represents a modest dream that started at a Watts church during the summer and captured the imagination of a slew of volunteers--from the architecture designer in Silver Lake to the lawyer in Pasadena to the handyman in Diamond Bar.

They put almost $4,000 worth of effort into designing and building the small stand, envisioning it as an enterprise that would give a handful of inner-city teen-agers the experience of running a business.

Now there’s just one problem.

They’ve got no place to put it.

Finding a friendly shopping center is all that stands between the story of the “Chill City” snow-cone stand and a happy ending.

Fittingly, the protagonist, Peggy O’Neil, is a screenwriter. There are enough characters in this one for a TV movie.

As the city burned last spring, O’Neil saw television news pictures of actor Edward James Olmos at work with a broom amid the rubble.

“That inspired me,” she said.

O’Neil, 45, a single mother of two, made nearly 200 sandwiches in her Claremont home and then, with her oldest daughter, Kate, a Caltech student, headed for South Los Angeles, where news reports indicated severe food shortages.

Driving randomly, they wound up on Central Avenue at 104th Street, across the street from the Grant African Methodist Episcopal Church.

She introduced herself to Madeline Pinkard--the wife of the church’s pastor, Daniel Pinkard--who told her the donated food was needed at the nearby Nickerson Gardens housing project.

As they chatted, the two women found they had something in common. They had both been born in the same Houston hospital. There was also a difference. Madeline Pinkard had been born in the hospital’s basement, where the black maternity ward was located.

O’Neil and her daughter came back to the church the next day, and on virtually every weekend for the next three months. O’Neil volunteered to help expand the church’s Saturday academic tutoring program and helped start a children’s garden.

Before the riots, church leaders had expressed interest in a program that would teach business skills to young people, but it remained just an idea.

Then O’Neil got on the telephone. She was thinking about helping the church set up an ice-cream stand until her daughter suggested the less-expensive idea of crushed-ice snow cones.

Hoping to exploit the corporate good will that seemed to be busting out all over in the wake of the riots, O’Neil telephoned the national headquarters of the Home Depot home-improvement chain in Atlanta. Officials there connected her with the Monrovia Home Depot, which agreed to donate the raw materials for the kiosk and provide consulting assistance.

Through an architect friend, O’Neil found Robert Levit, an architectural designer. He agreed to draw the plans.

Levit, through a friend of his, found Peter Walberg, a record-company graphic designer from Venice. He signed on too.

Another friend of O’Neil, Pasadena attorney Coralie Kupfer, was having her home remodeled. She talked to one of the workmen, Tony Barrios, a retired iron worker who now makes his living as a handyman. He volunteered to build the snow-cone stand, eventually putting in more than 100 hours. Kupfer let him use her back yard for the construction and then got another friend, Dick Izbicki, to store it at his Monrovia shop.

Looking for a shopping mall with ample foot traffic where she could set up the stand, O’Neil called Food for Less Supermarkets Inc., largely because its corporate office happened to be in her town of Claremont. She later discovered, driving around South Los Angeles, that the chain operated a Boys Market in the Kenneth Hahn Plaza shopping center at Wilmington Avenue and 119th Street.

Food For Less agreed to let the church set up its kiosk just outside the store.

As O’Neil and Daniel Pinkard saw it, the snow-cone stand would be the first of many. They would design and build a network of them, creating more jobs for young people. The church would pay workers the minimum wage and set aside a percentage of the profits to finance classes at trade schools or colleges.

O’Neil, who supports her screenwriting by working as a legal secretary, was exhausted but delighted at the progress.

“This is just what people who feel like doing something can do,” she said. “To have community end at your next-door neighbor’s house is not enough.”

Pinkard began lining up young men and women from his 2,000-member congregation to staff the snow-cone stand.

Something had to go wrong and it did.

The company that holds the master lease to Kenneth Hahn Plaza, the Alexander Haagen Co., noted that the area O’Neil wanted to use was a “common area” in the center, not part of the land sub-leased to Boys Market. Haagen told O’Neil in September that she and the church would have to get approval from the county, which owns the land, and all 29 tenants of the center.

“We get so many requests. We try to be consistent,” explained Haagen’s property manager, Steve Naval.

O’Neil and the church believed those conditions would be impossible to meet. And so “Chill City” was left all dressed up with nowhere to go.

For the volunteers, the experience has been both exhilarating and sobering.

“I grew up comfortably. I was married to a stockbroker,” said O’Neil, an unabashed idealist who recently moved into a loft in downtown Los Angeles’ industrial district because she wanted to be closer to the city’s urban core.

“I know how things can work. I know if the right person picks up a phone, ‘yes’ answers are forthcoming. To be doing this from this angle is very humbling, in the best sense of the word. It’s forcing me to work within the system and get things done,” she said.

“At the same time, it hasn’t gotten me very far--outside of the fact we have a great-looking building in Monrovia.”