Red Line Riders Are a Tonic for Languishing Deli

This week, a deli was reborn.

Venerable, old Langer’s, whose pungent pastrami on chewy rye has been a Los Angeles institution for decades, could barely withstand the tide of crack dealing and gang shootings sweeping through its bustling MacArthur Park neighborhood.

Denizens of the Westlake district--once middle-class Jews, now mostly CentralAmerican refugees--were not inclined to shell out $6.95 for a Kosher sandwich, no matter how tender, succulent or delicately spiced the beef.

But while other old-time shops succumbed to inexorable shifts, Al Langer held on. The delicatessen’s 80-year-old patriarch cut back his night hours from 3 a.m. to 9 p.m. Locks were installed on the bathroom doors. The restaurant donated six bicycles to help Los Angeles police patrol the streets. Finally, Langer’s began offering curbside service for customers too skittish to leave their cars.

“The last couple of years have been pretty rough,” conceded the man who at age 12 learned the deli business because his mother needed help paying for his bar mitzvah. “If you had come by last week, there might have only been three people in here.”

But last week there was no Red Line, no seven-minute ride through the bowels of downtown, bringing an onslaught of lunch-bound women and men who are making a pastrami run the likes of which Langer’s has never seen before.

Every few minutes, they come surging from the Metro tunnel in power suits and business dresses, walking the half-block down Alvarado Street to 7th, past Payless Shoes, Cisco’s Juice Bar, Kimmy Wigs and La Original Botanica del Pueblo.

“It’s nuts,” said Al’s son, Norm, who was born two years before his father opened the deli in 1947.

On Monday, pastrami sales tripled. On Tuesday, at least 60 people were in line by noon, with some standing in the street as they waited for a table at the packed 135-seat eatery. “Where do we sign up?” a customer shouted as he pushed his way through the door. “Movies are being shown in the back,” joked another.

“This has to be a gold mine,” said Gordon Levitt, 55, a civil engineer from Tarzana as he headed back with full stomach to the subway station. “There is no doubt in my mind that they own a piece of the Red Line.”

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The final westbound stop on Los Angeles’ first modern subway takes you to what is probably the most colorful, maddening, dynamic, violent neighborhood in the city.

MacArthur Park, an idyllic 32-acre expanse of palm trees and green lawns, has been overrun in recent years by crackheads, dice players, the homeless and prostitutes. On almost any corner, you can score a baggie of rock cocaine or a counterfeit green card.

In the surrounding neighborhood, which forms the core of the LAPD’s Rampart Division, there are 40 active street gangs, which last year accounted for 64 homicides. Among them is a Salvadoran gang that some authorities have described as the city’s most violent. Another is a more traditional Mexican-American gang that, with an estimated membership of 6,000 to 10,000 countywide, is probably the largest gang in the nation.

Everywhere in between there are crowded tenements filled with the hopes and dreams of tens of thousands of Latin Americans, most of them from the war-torn countries of El Salvador and Guatemala. They have created some of Los Angeles’ most vibrant street life--evangelists pounding tambourines, cumbias blaring from dance halls and street vendors hawking single cigarettes, bootleg cassettes and mangoes with chili powder.

But all that could change.

Two years ago, a large chunk of the park was fenced off with barbed wire, while the lake was drained because of subway tunneling. Police have been putting extra pressure on the drug dealers and gangs. The RTD has plans to develop a shopping and entertainment center across the street, with a movie theater, restaurants and an airy apartment complex that would serve the influx of new commuters expected to disembark at the Red Line station.

Chase, a 38-year-old Vietnam veteran who smokes crack and goes by the title “The Manhattan One,” can see the writing on the wall. Standing at the northeast corner of the park, amid other addicts and homeless men, he shook his head and continued raking clean the dirt patch that serves as his bed.

“When they put in all that beautiful stuff, they won’t want to see us around,” he said, scratching the scar on his bare back left by a recent stabbing. “I consider this to be a very unique place. But they look at us as scum.”

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The rest of the neighborhood is responding with gusto.

The healers and psychics, known as curanderas and consejeras, have a lively competition going--one that has left the sidewalks littered with flyers advertising the services of such practitioners as Yahaira, Olga, Lilia, Margarita, Victoria, Mara and Yessenia.

“This has been like a carnival,” said Silvestre Hernandez, 26, who moved his newsstand featuring Mexican novelas and skin magazines onto Alvarado two weeks ago, hoping to capture the Red Line market.

And the folks at Langer’s, who were counting on a boost from the subway traffic to survive, believe their prayers have been answered. They are even considering a special promotion that would include paying the return trip of any customer who ventures out on the Red Line.