The Great Divide : Striving to Bring Together Vastly Different Immigrant Groups, Residents Want a New Face on West Hollywood's Neglected East End

By KEN ELLINGWOOD

Jan. 27, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

You don’t need a map to tell where one West Hollywood ends and another begins.

The western end of Santa Monica Boulevard is the flashy hub of the city’s large gay community, marked by neon-blazed clubs and boutiques where sidewalks bop with partyers even on a Monday night.

Two miles east, the bright buzz gives way to a darker nightscape ruled by mumbling vagrants and transvestite hookers working the shadows of pawnshops, boarded storefronts and the fortress walls of a Warner Bros. movie studio.

If the glitzier west end bears a family resemblance to next-door Beverly Hills, the boulevard’s poorer east end is the grubby-faced kin of neighboring Hollywood.

And right now a lot of folks are standing by with the scrub brush.

Residents, who blame the seedy image on neglect by City Hall, are flexing their muscles through an ambitious new group calling for old-fashioned crime-fighting. City officials, meanwhile, are promoting an economic renaissance featuring stylish stores and sidewalk cafes like those that have drawn the cappuccino crowd to the west end and Melrose Avenue, tantalizingly close to the east end.

The spotlight is revealing the neighborhood’s blemishes--and its possibilities--as never before. On placid, tree-lined streets off Santa Monica Boulevard’s east end, homeowners complain of break-ins and drug dealing and say they are tired of removing used condoms and syringes from their lawns.

At night many residents refuse to answer their doors. “You just don’t open. You don’t know who it is,” said a longtime Poinsettia Place resident who once saw a badly beaten hooker dumped across the street.

Trying for a new image, residents have joined under the Alliance of Citizens for the East Side and have even stopped calling the neighborhood the east end, as it’s been known.

“ ‘East end’ sounds so demeaning,” said William Senigram, a 30-year resident active in the group, known by its acronym, ACES. “It sounds more quality to call it the ‘East Side.’ ”

Officials hope a face-lift--guided by an 80-page revitalization plan--will make people feel safer by improving lighting on streets and alleys. The plan suggests designating the area a redevelopment zone as one way to attract the kinds of businesses--from studios to restaurants--that would clean up the area’s image and jump-start its economy.

West Hollywood’s poorest live in the east end--one-sixth of its residents live below the federal poverty level, a rate 1 1/2 times that of the entire city--as well as one-third of the city’s seniors and most of its school-aged children.

The area, a half-square-mile of 10,000 people east of Fairfax Avenue, may be one of the Westside’s more overlooked quarters. It is also one of the more unusual--a bundle of such widely contrasting faces that it stands out even amid its polyglot surroundings.

By day, babushkas trundle home groceries from any of half a dozen stores bearing Cyrillic window signs and stocking everything from black caviar to Russian film classics on video.

The boulevard is being transformed by the thousands of Soviet Jewish emigres who, during the past decade, have poured into an area long a magnet for Jewish refugees. The Russian immigrants, many of whom arrived in the recent post-perestroika years, now make up 10% of the city’s population of 36,000.

Hand-labeled copies of Russian videos line the shelves at Sam’s Store, a little nook whose younger customers would rather see movies with Steven Seagal and Arnold Schwarzenegger. On sunny days, crowds of Russian men play rummy and dominoes around picnic tables at Plummer Park--dubbed Little Gorky Park--while women play at separate tables.

Armenian businessman Leon Balasanyan had this clientele in mind when he opened Odessa Grocery on Santa Monica Boulevard on New Year’s Eve. Jars of Russian walnut preserves and cherry syrup sit alongside American ketchup and mayonnaise. The cooler is stocked with Russian sausages, fish and cheeses.

“It’s a Russian neighborhood,” he said. “We took a chance. We’ll see what happens.”

American neighbors haven’t picked up a taste for Russian gingerbread or pickled tomatoes yet, but they are catching on to other customs. The immigrants, many of whom don’t drive, stroll once-deserted sidewalks--a habit that is encouraging longtime residents to come out of the house again.

At times it has been an uneasy detente. Officials have had to mediate disputes between local gays and Russian youths who harass them. Older newcomers, most of whom speak little or no English, remain a riddle to American neighbors who sometimes find them brusque and clannish. Some people grumble about housing subsidies and government paychecks many emigres receive.

“They shop in Russian stores. They pay Russian mechanics. They buy produce on the streets,” said David Bartlett, himself a transplant from England who has lived in West Hollywood about eight years.

The city, which often provides Russian interpreters at east side meetings, may soon have to add Spanish to accommodate a Latino population that has nearly doubled since 1980.

Now, one in eight east-enders is Latino, although they own few businesses in comparison to the many taco shops and pupuserias spicing the boulevard farther east in Hollywood.

The two immigrant groups have brought a novel sight to the city: children. Many recent emigres are young couples who have--or are soon expecting to have--children, said Daphne Dennis, a city social service specialist. “Now it’s, ‘So you’re a regular city. You’ve got to (offer social) services, too.’ ”

Day-care businesses are sprouting and a preschool at Plummer Park is practically filled with the children of Russian immigrants--a big shift in a city with an under-18 population that is less than a third of the county average and where social services have focused on the elderly and people with AIDS.

“The east side is a melting pot,” said longtime activist Ruth Williams, who founded the ACES group. “We have the gay community. We have families. We have the Russian population and Latinos coming in. That’s part of the uniqueness of the east side that you don’t see on the west side.”

But many residents can do without the other east-end hallmarks--pawn shops, thrift stores and X-rated hangouts. The sidewalk in front of the Tomkat movie theater bears the handprints of porn legends such as John Holmes. From noon on, live dancers perform between hourlong films with names such as “The Protector” and “A Male Tale.” Down the street, past three Russian stores, two bars and a car wash, the style at the Paris House modeling studio is nude, nude, nude.

At night the card-playing set in Plummer Park gives way to the homeless, and as many as 100 street hustlers work the boulevard into the wee hours. The hookers will hop back and forth across the city border near La Brea Avenue--a cat-and-mouse ritual they play with the sheriff’s deputies patrolling West Hollywood.

Somehow a Main Street feel manages to survive despite the strip malls, adult book stores and the anonymous bunkers used for movie production, leftovers from the boulevard’s industrial past. Dusty little shops offer to fix vacuum cleaners, while nearby parts stores serve a string of auto-repair shops. A Trader Joe’s market anchors the east end’s biggest shopping center.

Rent control has drawn seniors and poorer residents to the boxy apartments south of Santa Monica Boulevard, and yuppies have discovered the quiet charms of shaded homes just to the north.

Nevertheless, the refrain on these residential streets is one of complaint and discontent: We’re left behind.

“The city has paid more attention to building up the west side of the city because the majority of the (city) council members live on the west side,” said Senigram of the ACES group. (Actually, six of the nine residents who have served on the five-member City Council since West Hollywood incorporated 10 years ago have come from the midsection, not the west end. Still, only one--Councilwoman Abbe Land--has lived in the east end, and she recently moved to another neighborhood.)

Some reject the idea of an east-west divide in a city of only 1.9-square miles.

“Part of me really resists the whole notion of splitting the city,” said Councilman John Heilman, an advocate of redevelopment for the area. “It’s a mistake to make it an us-against-them mentality.”

While officials acknowledge that the prostitution on the east end is particularly vexing because it is so easily seen, statistics show total crime there is no higher than for the rest of the city. Those defending City Hall’s treatment of the neighborhood tick off a host of block grants, storefront improvements and other programs based there.

The east end, which sprouted from a railroad junction near what is now Fairfax Avenue, was the area’s wild side going back to Prohibition. Yellowed newspaper clippings tell of judges and movie executives rounded up in speak-easys--and even then residents were complaining about the neighborhood’s sleazy image. “As far as (the east end) being new to the night life--that’s not new to the east end,” said local historian Ralph Feeley, who is writing a book on the West Hollywood area. “That’s been its lot in life.”

After World War II, longtime residents say the east end took on a more Rockwellian look--of small-town dress shops and lemonade stands along the boulevard.

Prostitution, though, has ebbed and flowed there at least since the 1960s. The problem had become so bad by 1980 that business owner Terry Walker plotted with a neighbor to get rid of two bus benches serving as hangouts for hustlers and thugs near his movie-sound studio. In the dark of night, he recalled coyly, the benches just disappeared. “I think they got on a truck and went somewhere,” he said.

Now more optimistic than a decade ago, Walker and crime-weary neighbors are banking on the city to revamp the area. Zoning changes under consideration would allow bigger buildings in order to invite more post-production movie facilities near the Hollywood border. Walker said such a change would allow him to expand his audio business, which sits across from the Warner Bros. studios.

A few blocks west, the revitalization plan calls for the kinds of retail businesses and housing that would generate pedestrian traffic--a move some hope will push out the street hustlers. The plan calls for an overhaul of Plummer Park, improved parking and better upkeep of private properties. And, in one sign of the east end’s new front-burner status, the council will host a town hall meeting--its second in just more than two months--on Monday.

Already, 100 specially designed pedestrian street lights have gone up along the east end of Santa Monica Boulevard and discussions are under way to hire private security guards under a joint arrangement with businesses.

The city also will hire a consultant to study the neighborhood’s suitability for redevelopment, an often-controversial approach that typically uses a city’s power to acquire small properties and designate them for big projects. Such a scheme was shelved for the east end six years ago for lack of support on the council.

The fate of any rejuvenation effort will hinge largely on whether Warners goes through with an approved overhaul of its aging 11-acre lot, an auxiliary to the studio’s main quarters in Burbank. Supporters portrayed the proposal last year as an economic boost, but the studio is making no promises about when it will begin the $75-million modernization project. Executives say it will depend on production needs and the film industry’s long-term outlook.

For all the hopeful notes, it isn’t hard to hear the skeptics in the community.

Some critics say the revitalization plan was written without adequate east-end representation. Others worry a huge redevelopment may extinguish what remains of the strip’s mom-and-pop flavor. And some shift blame for the anemic streetscape from the hookers to businesses, such as the Russian specialty markets, that don’t cater to a wide clientele.

“You can put all the pedestrian lights and pretty benches and trash cans in there and take every pedestrian off,” said Ralph Mayo, who runs an AIDS program geared toward the hustlers. “Santa Monica Boulevard is not going to turn into the Third Street Promenade or Melrose.”

Todd Elliott, a member of the revitalization committee, said the liberal city will have to loosen rent-control rules to encourage the gentrification that businesses need for an upscale customer base.

Williams and other residents are buoyed by renewed interest in the neighborhood--and its potential.

“I don’t know whether it’s the election year,” she said. “But I’ll tell you--we’ve got their attention.”

Neighborhood Portrait

East end population: 10,560

Total city population: 36,118

White: 8,429

Latino: 1,358

Black: 365

Asian: 361

Other: 47

People of Russian ancestry: 2,289

Median ’89 income: $21,501