EARTHQUAKE: THE LONG ROAD BACK : Back in Business, Better Than Ever : Savaged by 1987 Quake, Whittier’s Uptown Is Rebuilt on Solid Foundation of Hope

As the battered cities of the San Fernando Valley survey the rubble left by Monday’s earthquake, they may find inspiration and hope by looking to the east.

Six years ago a 5.9 earthquake similarly battered the city of Whittier, destroying or severely damaging more than 100 businesses in the central business district. At the time it seemed to many people that the heart of the city, known as Uptown, would never rise again. Over the preceding years, it had begun sliding into lethargy and disrepair.

But now the Uptown district is booming with new businesses, new opportunities, new attitudes. People who live and work there now mark time “B.E.” and “A.E.”--Before Earthquake and After Earthquake. And though it may seem improbable to people who are just now realizing how fundamentally their lives have been changed by Monday’s earthquake, most people in Whittier’s downtown business district seem to agree that A.E. is better.

Of course, no one who has survived a massive earthquake would argue that such temblors are good things, or that rebuilding is easy. But Whittier residents such as Lane Langford know that sometimes progress can arise from tragedy.

“I think I know what they (people in the earthquake areas) are feeling right now,” said Langford, whose bookstore on Greenleaf Avenue was badly damaged by the 1987 earthquake. “I remember I was angry, angry that something like that could threaten my life and my livelihood. But I was determined to pull out of it. I think those people have the right spirit, the right attitude, to do the same thing. They can come back. It’s not an easy task, but it can be done. I know. It can be done.”

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Whittier was founded in 1887 by members of the Society of Friends (commonly known as Quakers) and named after poet John Greenleaf Whittier, a Quaker. From the beginning the downtown section of town along Greenleaf Avenue--called Uptown because it was up a hill from the railroad station--was the commercial center.

But in the years and months leading up to the abrupt change from Whittier B.E. to Whittier A.E., the Uptown business district in this city of 77,000--the community where Richard Nixon went to college and later opened his first law firm--was going through a decline common to many small town centers.

Former Uptown shoppers were heading out to the new malls, following the major stores--Woolworth, J.C. Penney, Montgomery Ward--that had long since left Uptown. Commercial lease rates were dropping, and buildings were being bought by absentee landlords who often appeared to hate spending a dime on maintenance. More vacant storefronts were appearing. The city’s once-grand movie palace, the Wardman Theater, had become a porno house.

Uptown was not yet a slum. There were still stores and offices where people were making their livings, and Greenleaf Avenue was still lined with ficus trees. But the area was tired, old-fashioned, set in its ways. At night it was like a ghost town.

“At 5 p.m. this place rolled up the sidewalks--tight,” said Casey Hazelton, executive director of the Whittier Uptown Assn. “You could have shot a cannonball down Greenleaf Avenue and not hit a soul.”

Then, at 7:42 a.m. on Oct. 1, 1987, the magnitude 5.9 temblor hit--the most powerful in the Los Angeles area since the Sylmar earthquake 16 years earlier. Three days later, a 5.4 aftershock hit the area. The quake claimed eight lives in Southern California, more than 200 people were injured and damage was set at about $358 million. No one died in Whittier, but about 60 people were treated for injuries at a hospital. About 5,000 homes and businesses suffered substantial damage.

Hardest hit was the 52-block Uptown area. When the smoke and dust cleared, 34 buildings housing 78 businesses had been destroyed or had to be demolished; 23 buildings housing 61 businesses suffered severe damage.

“I was at home about three miles away when it hit,” recalled Dale Huckfeldt, 71, whose family had owned Huckfeldt’s Furniture Store on Greenleaf Avenue for half a century. “I remember thinking: ‘Oh, this isn’t so bad.’ So I stayed around and helped my wife pick up the house a little bit and then I figured I’d drive down to check on the store. The closer I got the more I said, ‘Uh oh.’ When I got to my store my stomach was rolling, my heart was sick.”

Dave McCoy, who was completing his purchase of Sargent’s sporting goods store on Greenleaf that very day, said of the Uptown area: “It looked like a bomb had gone off.”

As the fear and shock wore off, the biggest question on everyone’s mind was: “Should we stay?”

It was not an easy decision. Uptown was a wreck. And there was more than a little cynical snickering when the Whittier Chamber of Commerce draped a banner near the ruins that said: “Whittier: It’ll Be Better Than Ever!”

Yeah, right, people said.

But as bookstore owner Langford put it: “The earthquake separated the wheat from the chaff.”

After the earthquake about 50 Uptown businesses closed or relocated.

“We didn’t know what we were going to do,” Huckfeldt said. “I was 67, about at the age when a lot of people retire. But finally my wife told me: ‘You’re never gonna be happy to just sit and watch the boob tube. Let’s do it.’ So we did.”

“A lot of people said: ‘Well, this is what we’ve been dealt, so let’s go make it better,’ ” McCoy recalled.

Damage was so severe that Whittier police kept the area cordoned off for 30 days, to guard against more collapses and to allow for demolition of structurally damaged buildings. To keep businesses open while the rubble was cleared, the Uptown Assn. set up trailers in city parking lots to house their shops. Grants and low-cost loans poured in from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Small Business Administration.

One important Uptown recovery program was as simple and mundane as sheets of plywood. To screen off ugly lots left vacant when buildings were demolished, brightly colored plywood walls were put up. The walls may sound insignificant, but Whittier residents agree that they had an important psychological effect.

Nobody in Whittier will even pretend that the rebuilding process was all sweetness and light. In damaged residential areas many homeowners, faced with extensive home repairs, sold out to developers who put up apartment buildings over howls of protest from neighbors. And in Uptown, the cost of structural repairs or rebuilding hit some business owners hard. Huckfeldt had to take out a loan on his Whittier home to augment a 4% low-interest government reconstruction loan. He will be 99 years old when his store is once again paid off, he said.

Meanwhile, city officials, Uptown Assn. and Chamber of Commerce members and citizens tried to work out a 30-year plan for Uptown’s future. There were seemingly endless meetings, endless proposals, endless arguments over stultifying and tedious details.

But out of it all a plan emerged to restore Uptown’s former small-town charm, to upgrade building fronts, to attract night life to the area.

“You had to be patient because it took a long, long time,” Langford said.

Eventually, it got done.

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“It’s just like the signs said,” said Hank Cunningham, Whittier’s assistant city manager, who oversaw the city government role in the Uptown rebuilding process. “Today it’s better than ever. Six years ago, who ever would have guessed it was possible?”

Numbers tell part of the story. Of the 23 Uptown commercial buildings that were badly damaged, 22 have been repaired; buildings now sit on 19 of the 34 lots. Retail sales exceed pre-earthquake levels.

New businesses, attracted by the success of old businesses, have moved in. There are farmers markets, sidewalk cafes, “beat-style” coffee shops, half a dozen art galleries and trendy restaurants. The theater that once was devoted to grainy porno movies is now a three-screen, first-run theater done up in Art Deco style.

Shoot a cannonball down Greenleaf Avenue at 5 p.m., or 9 p.m., and there would be heavy casualties.

The small-town charm is back, too; Hollywood says so. When producers of the TV show “The Wonder Years” needed a location for a small, all-American downtown for the show’s final episode, they came to Uptown Whittier.

“It really has come along, hasn’t it?” said Peggy Tullius as she served tea and espresso at Past Tyme, her newly opened combination tearoom, gift shop and coffee bar in a Greenleaf Avenue building that had been gutted by the earthquake. “I always knew it would come back, but I never knew it would come back this charmingly.”

“If a community wants it bad enough they can do it,” said the Uptown Assn.’s Hazelton. “Through a disaster you’re going to find the best in people. The strength comes out, the desire to see their community survive. It might have been easier to pull up stakes, but they chose to stick it out. Now when I look at it, it seems like just short of a miracle.”