In Hawaiian Gardens, a Blue Monday

Until last Monday I never had been to Hawaiian Gardens. Many times I had driven past Hawaiian Gardens on the San Gabriel River Freeway. I had seen it mentioned in the newspaper, typically back in the far pages where nameless gunshot victims go to die two-paragraph deaths. And I had wondered about it, mainly because of the name. Why Hawaiian Gardens? Was there a garden and was it lit, as I imagined, with tiki torches? Did the townsfolk dance the hula on Main Street?

The answer to these questions, it turns out, is no. The name dates back to prohibition days and a thatched-roof fruit stand that was operated on a horse trail near what is now the corner of Carson Street and Norwalk Boulevard. The proprietor, it is said, had a talent for moonshine, and farmers would trot over from their lima bean fields and dairy barns to lubricate their agrarian muses with spiked lemonade.

Surrounded by farmlands, the town sprang up near the confluence of the San Gabriel River and Coyote Creek. It was settled by field hands, dust-bowl refugees and, later, military factory workers. There were periods when lots sold for $10, houses for $5,000. Don Schultze, now a City Council member, moved here in 1962, just as the unincorporated community was gearing up to make itself into Los Angeles County’s 75th city: “Most people say, ‘Why in hell did this little piece of unincorporated land ever become a city?’ The answer was that this land wasn’t good enough for cows.”

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Schultze had wandered into the office of Jack Cooper, the interim city manager. Cooper was brought in a few months ago, after it became clear that the city was in fiscal trouble. Cooper has been forced to dissolve the police force and make plans to reduce the City Hall payroll by two-thirds. He also has met with the bankruptcy lawyers who shepherded Orange County through its troubles--just in case.

The current hole in the budget was created last summer. Dr. Irving Moskowitz, a Miami developer who owns a hospital in Hawaiian Gardens and, through a foundation, operates its bingo parlor, cut off his monthly $200,000 contribution to the city. It’s a much-debated point whether this was an act of tough love to wean an overspending bureaucracy from charity, or rather it was done in a snit over criticism of Moskowitz’s proposed card room. Either way, it is Cooper’s problem to fix.

This is a second tour of duty for the 54-year-old consultant. Three decades ago, fresh out of Cal State Long Beach, he was hired as city manager. This was back when Hawaiian Gardens officials still wore aloha shirts--especially to ceremonial palm tree plantings. Cooper served eight years, helping oversee the community’s first strides away from its shantytown past.

Dirt streets were paved over. Flood control channels were built, as was a new City Hall. Still, there was a long way to go. In 1971 young Cooper took a Times reporter on a tour. He pointed out the shacks squeezed onto 25-foot-wide lots, the blocks of blight and poverty and, in a memorable moment, a poor woman in her frontyard, inexplicably cleaning clothes by hand in an automatic washer.

“Never thought,” he said, “that you’d see that in Southern California, did you?”

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A similar tour Monday with Cooper and Schultze produced no scenes of peasant appliance confusion, but there were signs aplenty that Hawaiian Gardens’ march toward metropolitan greatness has not been conducted at double-time. The town of 14,000 sits on a single square mile, intersected by a commercial strip. Much of the housing stock looks like the slapped-together artifacts of a farm labor camp. It is surrounded by wealthier communities like Lakewood, Cypress and Long Beach. The fences of those houses that back up to Hawaiian Gardens, as Schultze pointed out, “are pretty tall.”

Somehow, Hawaiian Gardens has managed to miss the waves of prosperity that have rolled over the region. The oil boom early in the 1900s created a run on tiny “oil lots” in town, but no oil was found here and the oil-less lots scared away developers: They prefer unfettered, wide open, cheap land. The auto plaza craze came and went, helping shore up the post-Proposition 13 tax base of many cities; Hawaiian Gardens lost its lone dealership to Cerritos.

Now people like Schultze see a card room as its last hope. Land has been cleared, costing the town a popular produce market--a trade-off that says something about these crazy times, no? There are, however, entanglements, and at present the Hawaiian Gardens Casino remains but a vacant lot, overrun with stunted fan palms. In the middle of the lot, a transient woman was throwing together a hut of old boards and tree branches late Monday afternoon. I waved and shouted aloha. She waved back. Thus, I can conclude this Hawaiian Gardens travelogue on a high note: The natives, as least, are friendly.