Beneath the Excavator, a Bit of History Is Prepared for the Grave

History, wrote Milan Kundera, is the thinnest thread of what’s remembered, stretching across an ocean of what’s been forgotten.

On a bright morning in Culver City, in a narrow space crowded on both sides by apartment buildings, Romero Romero is crunching apart a quirky bit of Los Angeles’ past, dragging it down to the rubble of unremembrance.

Romero is a stocky man with smiling eyes who wears his yellow hard hat with the brim pointed backward. He is from the Mexican state of Michoacan, as are the eight other dusty-booted men in his crew.

Although only 20 years old, Romero Romero is an artist at the control sticks of a 22 1/2-ton excavator. He conveys a preternatural ease and sureness in maneuvering the iron behemoth, with its heavy-jawed bucket, “the way some guys have a natural golf swing,” says his boss, John Thomas of Thomas Demolition Contractors.

At Romero’s behest, the excavator rears and dips its great head. It opens its jaws wide, stretches its neck, bites down on the tops of walls and with great, splintering cracks drags whole sections of them down toward the middle of the gutted two-story structure at 4307 S. Centinela Ave.

Spongy redwood boards that haven’t seen sunlight in 75 years lie piled on the ground amid desktop-sized scabs of greenish stucco. Bent plumbing pipes stick out from the debris, swinging back and forth. One of the other workmen hoses everything to keep the dust down. It is the old Centinela Feed Building’s final ablution.

Thirty-eight-year-old Chris Nakagawa is videotaping all this and simultaneously talking on his cell phone to younger brother Dwight. “Why don’t you come on down to the old store?” he says. “They’re tearing the building down. Tell Art to come, too.”

A bit of history: Before the building at 4307 became a feed store in the late 1920s, it was the city hall of a short-lived independent town founded by a circus impresario.

Alpheus George Barnes Stonehouse, known professionally as Al. G. Barnes, established the off-season camp of his eponymous trained animal circus on and around this site in 1910 at the invitation of local civic boosters. Over time, though, Barnes, his animals and his sometimes dilapidated employees began to grate on some of the local homeowners.

Presumedly to protect his interests, Barnes legally incorporated his winter camp, as well as some adjacent neighborhoods, as a new, 41/2-square-mile city with about 2,500 residents, not including monkeys and goats. He named it after himself, Barnes City, California.

The city’s first board of trustees, presumedly handpicked by Al. G. Barnes, was sworn in on Feb. 17, 1926. The unused 2-year-old building at 4307 S. Centinela was designated city hall and became the focal point for continuing civic discord. Barnes City existed only 14 months. Disgruntled homeowners forced an election, threw the Barnes faction out of office and annexed the town to Los Angeles.

Thomas Nakagawa, father of Chris, Dwight and Art, was unaware of all this when he bought the building for $60,000 in 1974. After five years in a liquor store on Venice Boulevard--five years of 14-hour workdays and too many holdups--entering the feed and pet supplies business was like finally exhaling.

The Nakagawa boys invested large chunks of their boyhoods in the Centinela Feed Building. After school and on weekends, they cleaned the bathroom, swept the floors, bagged birdseed, waited on customers and learned the rigors of being in business. Romping and bicycling through the neighborhood were for envied other kids.

Over the years, apartments tightly girdled the building. By 1990, Cenintela Feed was the last commercial establishment on the block and city officials served notice that the property would be rezoned residential. So the Nakagawas built a new store on Venice Boulevard and boarded up 4307.

Preservationists begged them to save the building and refurbish it for apartments, but the Nakagawas didn’t have the money. “At the end of the day, the historical guys don’t talk in terms of dollars,” Chris says, “but we have to.”

In time, termites and taggers turned the building into a hazard, bait for Romero Romero’s excavator. “There’s some sentimental value; this is where we got our start,” says Dwight Nakagawa. “But it’s good to see it go.”

Al. G. Barnes is dust now, his enterprise absorbed by American Circus Corp., which was absorbed by Ringling Bros.

Thomas Nakagawa owns a pet store in Pasadena. He couldn’t bring himself to come and watch the old feed store be torn down.

Chris, Dwight and Art Nakagawa now run Cenintela Feed and Pet Supplies, which has six stores on the Westside.

The old building at 4307 sleeps dismembered in landfills and lumber and concrete recycling centers; it is a fiber in Kundera’s thread of history that is working loose, headed for the ocean below.

Romero Romero is resting today. Tomorrow he’ll be out on another job, he and the excavator, creating a little more room for the future to flow into.