For the Residents of Brentwood, Life Still Isn’t Normal

For 2 1/2 years, Brentwood residents needn’t have watched television to discover that something momentous was happening in the Simpson saga.

“I didn’t know there was a verdict until I heard the helicopters,” one resident of Brentwood Park said Monday afternoon.

But then, that has been Brentwood ever since two slayings transformed it: gawking tourists, helicopters circling overhead. A low-key community of lush trees, big houses and an unhurried sidewalk life that suddenly became the site of two tragic slayings and the man on trial, one way or another, ever since.

Monday, with the final decision in the final trial, maybe the spotlight would finally be off Brentwood.

Yeah, right.

“Oh, I don’t think it’s ever going to end,” said filmmaker Myles Berkowitz. “Brentwood is always going to have this ghost hanging over it--the place of the O.J. murders. People will always come to L.A. and drive up Bundy and drive up Rockingham just to see the houses. . . . I’ll tell you one thing: When I jog on San Vicente and tourists with cameras ask where Rockingham and Bundy are, I give them the wrong directions. I usually give them directions to Beverly Hills.”

At Mezzaluna, the restaurant where Nicole Brown Simpson ate her last meal, the restaurant where Ronald Lyle Goldman worked, the manager laughed at the notion that this would be Brentwood’s final hour in an ignominious spotlight.

“What makes you think it’s the last day?” she asked.

Still, some saw the verdicts as the beginning of closure.

“Well, it’s a start,” said one Rockingham resident who was a passing acquaintance of Nicole and O.J. Simpson when they were a couple. “We just wish he would move. I think it would be very uncomfortable to see him in restaurants, and most of my friends in the neighborhood say they would leave” a restaurant.

It may take a while longer to erase the odd mystique Brentwood still has.

“Not until something’s done with that house,” said Anthony Friese, a glazer who does work on houses in the neighborhood as he stood around the corner from Nicole Simpson’s Bundy Drive home. “Like demo it. That would probably be the best thing--although it’s a nice house.”

In fact, the new owners of the home--which has been a constant magnet for attention since the slayings--do seem to be trying to change its appearance radically.

Giant 8-foot walls of plywood now ring the lawns of the former Simpson townhouse. Through holes in the wood, you can see that the lush landscape, so familiar from television shots, is now a hill of dirt. The walkway where Nicole Simpson met her death is now covered in dirt and tools and a wheelbarrow. The only sound coming from behind the plywood walls Monday afternoon was the drone of power tools.

“It’s not back to normal, we still have looky-loos,” one of the residents around the corner on Dorothy Street said in frustration before closing his door and refusing to talk more.

People still go into Ben & Jerry’s and ask which flavor of ice cream Nicole Simpson bought the night of her death, reports one employee, Gabriel Silva.

“I think it was Rain Forest Crunch,” said Silva, who only occasionally works at the Brentwood store.

In other ways, Brentwood has tried to move on with community life that doesn’t revolve around O.J. Simpson.

At Mezzaluna, the patrons who made it a hip neighborhood place have gradually returned. Stewart Tanner, the popular bartender who was supposed to have met Goldman the night of his death, testified at both trials. He has now quit Mezzaluna. As television news shows prepared to broadcast the verdicts live Monday afternoon, the television over the bar in Mezzaluna was tuned to ESPN highlights of a basketball game.

“I’m busy dealing with my tables, I don’t have time to watch,” said the manager.

Fifteen minutes later, the television was tuned to local coverage of the verdicts.

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This Saturday, the first Brentwood Presidents Ball, sponsored by the Brentwood Chamber of Commerce and the Brentwood News, will honor the area’s Los Angeles City Council member, Marvin Braude.

“This is a positive event we’re having,” said Samantha Greenberg. “We’ve had so much negative publicity.”

Some residents of Brentwood who live closest to Simpson’s Rockingham estate say that development and new restaurants are more responsible for congestion problems of the past couple years than O.J. Simpson.

For some of them, life long ago returned to some kind of normalcy. They walk their dogs and talk about the weather and their dogs, not O.J. Simpson. For those who knew the Simpsons, the concern seems not for the community so much as for the two young children. One woman says she watches a bit sadly as the youngest, Justin, is ferried to his elementary school in a Rolls-Royce in the company of bodyguards.

“When you see him, he doesn’t give you eye contact,” said the Brentwood resident, who added that her 8-year-old daughter attends the same school. “I feel sorry for Brentwood, but I feel more empathy for the kids. They should be left alone.”