MTA to Pay for Nightclub Damaged by Sinkage

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority agreed Tuesday to rebuild El Sombrero nightclub on Lankershim Boulevard without admitting that its subway tunneling caused its floor to sink up to 15 inches.

Club owner Isabel Lopez said she was delighted to learn from Charles Stark, the MTA’s Red Line project manager, of the offer. But she said she remains skeptical and anxious.

“There’s no documents, it’s all word of mouth so far,” she said. “But I don’t think he would have called me if it weren’t true.”

MTA board member and Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said the arrangement, which he brokered, would cost the transportation agency at least $20,000. He said it amounts to the first step in a new era of responsiveness.

“This is an effort on my part to break with past traditions at the MTA in which the organization has treated the public as the enemy,” Yaroslavsky said Tuesday. “Mrs. Lopez pays our bills. She deserves respect and not contempt.”

Lopez was forced to close El Sombrero on March 11 and laidoff 23 musicians and waitresses after a city building inspector slapped a yellow tag on the building, barring entry until she repaired a 15-inch sinkage in the floor.

For more than a decade, Lopez had operated the club, which catered to a Central American clientele, on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights.

Lopez immediately suspected MTA tunneling 60 feet below Lankershim as the cause of the subsidence because she had felt vibrations from the subterranean work for the previous two months.

The MTA declined to take responsibility, declaring after a brief investigation that the subsidence appeared to have resulted from a preexisting flaw in her building’s concrete slab floor that grew worse when heavy rains washed away dirt that supported it.

On Tuesday, new MTA Chief Executive Officer Joseph Drew said his staff was still not convinced that subway tunneling had caused the broken floor and cracked walls, but that he had authorized the engineering work so that Lopez could get back in business before her insurance firm and the MTA’s decided who should pay the bill.

“We’re not going to go out and spend the taxpayers’ money unwisely,” Drew said. “But her problem was close enough to our [subway] alignment that we figured we should do the right thing now.”

The effort to dig twin subway tunnels through sandy soil under Lankershim from Chandler Avenue to Universal City has been halted repeatedly in the past year by subsidence problems. At least a dozen other businesses near El Sombrero have also reported cracked walls and floors because of ground subsidence, although most have been able to keep operating.

The tunnels are nearly a year behind schedule. By 2010, they are scheduled to be the northernmost extension of a system of subway tunnels that will connect downtown with the Wilshire corridor, East Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley.