A Clean Break

From mean streets to clean streets, Larry Lieswald has watched Los Angeles’ transformation from a perspective few can match.

For 33 years he has piloted a street sweeper along a 20-mile downtown route bounded on one side by skid row and on the other by the city’s glitzy financial district.

When he started scrubbing streets in 1965, the tallest commercial building in town was 13 floors, and street crime consisted mostly of benign winos drinking in public.

That didn’t last long.

As the downtown skyline started to climb, the quality of life at street level seemed to sink.

Working alone in his 15-ton sweeper in predawn hours, the 61-year-old Lieswald has been robbed and attacked at gunpoint, and has watched as murders unfolded in front of him.

Once, he said, he inadvertently scooped up a bag of robbery loot dropped next to a curb. Another time he accidentally swept up a gun used in a fatal shooting and then helped police retrieve it from his trash hopper.

More than once he has chased suspects in his lumbering yellow machine. One memorable night he faced down a carload of rock-throwing vandals and used his sweeper to push their car backward for nearly a mile before they managed to flee.

But the street sweeper bristles at any suggestion that L.A. is beyond hope.

From his gutter-level vantage point, the city has been bouncing back in the last few years.

“Things have gotten so much better,” said Lieswald, who will give Los Angeles his last brushoff a few days from now when he retires from the job he has come to love.

“Crime is down. You don’t have to worry about anything now when you go to work,” he said. “Los Angeles is a lot better than it used to be, in terms of crime and everything else.”

That may sound surprising, coming as it does from a street-level point of view. But Lieswald can tick off some of his reasons:

* People are tidier. Recycling initiatives have reduced the numbers of bottles and cans tossed into the street. Hermetically sealed high-rise buildings have ended the year-end tradition of tossing millions of calendar pages out office windows.

* Police are tougher. Officers under former Chief Willie L. Williams and current Chief Bernard C. Parks are more aggressive in patrolling and in fighting routine street crime than they were under former Chief Daryl Gates, Lieswald says. In those days, he contends, police often ignored criminal activity occurring in front of them.

* Technology is kinder. Those new thin-glass throwaway bottles don’t slice through sweeper tires nearly as often as heavier soda and liquor bottles used to.

Despite the sometimes hair-raising trips in his $127,000 sweeper, Lieswald was never tempted to trade his gritty downtown route for a more placid daytime assignment in the suburbs.

“I’ve always been a night person,” said the Rosemead resident, whose final sweep along 40 miles of curb--counting both sides of the street--between 5th and 9th streets and Figueroa Street and Central Avenue will start at 3 a.m. Sunday.

*

There’s always a particular beauty and a special rhythm to dawn in downtown when street lights wink out, Lieswald said. That’s when the sky turns from black to purple to blue and the first golden rays of the sun glisten off the top of Bunker Hill’s glass towers.

Lieswald didn’t believe it three decades ago when he first heard that skyscrapers were coming to Los Angeles.

He noticed trucks tracking dirt into the street from a fenced-in vacant lot at 6th Street and Figueroa. When he stopped to ask what was going on, workers explained that they were doing soil tests for what would be the tallest buildings west of the Mississippi.

Sure, thought Lieswald to himself.

But, sure enough, the Arco Towers were built. And the exodus of the Los Angeles financial district from Spring Street to the new high-rise sector was underway.

Streets around empty low-rise offices that were left behind were soon taken over by an emerging underclass unlike anything Los Angeles had ever seen.

Desperate drug users replaced the friendly winos of the past. And skid row’s regular group of transients--men in their 50s and 60s--gave way to a young generation of emotionally troubled Vietnam War veterans, Lieswald said.

It wasn’t long before drug dealers were stopping Lieswald at 5th and Spring and trying to sell him narcotics. “They’d tell you [that] if you didn’t buy from them, they’d get you,” he recalled.

Brazen thieves stole Lieswald’s tools from his moving sweeper. Alleys were so bad that sweepers had to come to a halt to avoid running over prostitutes and their customers.

One night a badly cut man running from a knife-swinging attacker on Flower Street jumped aboard Lieswald’s sweeper. When the assailant tried to follow, Lieswald hoisted his brushes, gunned his machine and drove the victim to safety as he radioed for police and an ambulance.

Lieswald said he was accosted at gunpoint by several men on 7th Street one night when he climbed down from his sweeper to clean debris from its brushes.

“I grabbed the gun and [the gunman] pulled the trigger twice, but it never went off,” he said. “They took off running down an alley, and I chased him with the sweeper. I was going to run over him, but I grabbed the wrong lever when I tried to raise the rear broom, and the brakes went on.”

He said he used the 15-ton sweeper for self-defense when a carload of vandals throwing rocks at him made a sudden U-turn and headed straight for him in a game of chicken. “I had a big steel bumper, and I pushed the guy’s Dodge Coronet back about a mile,” Lieswald said.

After the 1965 Watts riots, Lieswald and other street sweepers received death threats. During the 1992 riots, his sweeper was among equipment sent to clear streets so firefighters could respond to arson blazes.

“They wanted us to open a path down Broadway for the Fire Department,” he said. “We got the middle of Broadway cleared. Buildings were burning. It was scary, scary.”

Lieswald said he has never mentioned the frightening parts of his job to Beverly, his wife of 38 years. She is retiring June 23 from her job as a special education teacher at Mark Keppel High School in Alhambra. The two of them are motorcycle enthusiasts who plan to take an extended road trip to Newfoundland.

At the city’s 2nd Street maintenance yard, his friends and co-workers say they will miss Lieswald’s gung-ho attitude. Los Angeles’ 93 street sweepers are responsible for cleaning 12,771 miles of curb.

It’s unusual for someone to have the same route as long as Lieswald has, said Tom Thomas, a Bureau of Street Maintenance supervisor. “He’s always gone the extra way.”

Indeed. “He washes his machine every day and wipes it down with terry-cloth towels,” marveled fellow street sweeper Sam Hogan. “Larry even mixes his own windshield cleaner.”

And at Nick’s Cafe on North Spring, where Lieswald rumbles to a stop on sweeper No. 24780 at 9 each morning, co-owner Nancy Kelel and her cooks will miss the jokes he cracks--and those he prints out for them off the Internet. Kelel hands out copies of them to her other customers.

“We see him pull up out front, and we set out his water and coffee and put on the ham, eggs and cottage fries,” Kelel said.

“Sometimes we substitute a turkey sandwich, just to keep him healthy.”

Like a good sweeper should, Lieswald always cleans his plate.