The Long Journey to Ground Zero

The best thing about a city laid out on a grid is you can get to anywhere in it from anywhere else. Plug into the grid and it will take you wherever you want to go. That’s the theory, anyway, one sorely tested this week by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority strike.

It’s uncertain, for example, whether the street pattern is helping Josafath Aparico get to work these days. One certain thing is that Aparico is seeing a lot of different streets.

Aparico lives in North Hills in the San Fernando Valley. He works south of downtown Los Angeles at a company that dyes buttons. Aparico usually takes the Red Line from the Valley to downtown, transfers to the Blue Line and, bingo, he’s at work.

On Wednesday, he rode his bike. It took him two hours each way. Aparico will gladly give you his route: Sepulveda, Ventura, Lankershim, Cahuenga, Highland to Washington. Like any good Angeleno, he will, without prompting, give you alternates. One thing he won’t give you is any sense that he’s happy about this.

“They’re striking for their benefits,” he said of the transit drivers. “I guess my benefit is my health, but I don’t know how long I can do this.”

The neighborhood where Aparico works is virtual ground zero of the strike. If you look at a map of transit routes, you could fairly conclude that much of the region’s transportation infrastructure is designed precisely to get people to and from here, the arc of land immediately to the south and southwest of downtown Los Angeles.

The Santa Monica Freeway dissects west to east. The Metro Rail Blue Line and the Harbor Freeway cut south to north. A series of surface arterials crosshatch it every which way.

The area lies within what urban theorists sometimes call a zone of discard, meaning the businesses were at some point in the past discarded from the downtown. Generally, high rents and traffic congestion do the pushing out.

In many cities, these neighborhoods become derelict geographies, empty except for people and things that’ve been thrown away. There’s some of that in Los Angeles, too, but for the most part, the zone of discard here has become part of a broad swath of medium- and light-industry that is already immense and is growing.

When the rest of the world gets around to assigning its next new definition to Los Angeles, if it’s at all in keeping with the reality of the place, it will have to include some sense that the city is one of the most industrialized places on the planet. It isn’t necessarily the sort of thing one thinks of when one thinks of industrialization--dyeing buttons--or what comes to mind when you think of L.A., but it is one direction in which the city is changing.

It makes the neighborhood south of downtown one of the biggest employment centers in the region and one of the most heavily affected by the transit strike.

Look at Vladimirs Fashions, a small sewing shop a few blocks from the button-dyeing plant. Actually, you can’t really look at Vladimirs. At least not from the outside.

It’s off the street, down a ramp, underneath a neighborhood strip mall. Vladimirs has, depending on the ever-fluctuating workload, about 20 employees. They cut and sew all sorts of clothes, according to whatever whim the marketplace dictates that day.

It’s typical of much of Los Angeles’ industry in its small size and nearly complete anonymity.

On Wednesday, two women were finishing an order of jackets resembling checkered flags. They were to be shipped overnight to Indianapolis for an auto race. Others stitched cotton pajamas, trimmed in a pattern of dog footprints. Some piled stretch denim pantsuits high on the floor.

Three-fourths of Vladimirs workers ride the bus. They are among what a recent study estimated to be a quarter of the employed population of Los Angeles County who could be classified as working poor. That’s a million people, according to the study, released last month by the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy.

At Vladimirs, the workers are patching together transportation this week. It’s a slapdash operation, though, changing according to whose kid needs to get to which school, whose boyfriend can get off in time, who’s got the guts to ride that mountain bike across the central business district.

The jobs here, like most throughout the garment district, are piecework employment. People get paid for what they produce. Because the market at its best is fickle, there isn’t always as much work as everyone would like.

“When there is work, we can buy things. When there is no work, there’s nothing we can do. We all go home,” manager Inocente Pacheco said.

Lately, business has been brisk. In that sense, the strike couldn’t have come at a worse time. On Monday, a customer was at the shop waiting to pick up merchandise before most of the workers even arrived to sew it.

Almost everybody showed up late to work Monday and Tuesday. Some didn’t make it at all. One man spent his life savings--$90--on a bicycle, and now fords crosstown traffic on it despite a complete ignorance of whatever traffic rules he’s supposed to follow. Another walks from Echo Park.

Teresa Huerta walks her young son 30 minutes to school in the morning, then catches a ride with a friend one way. She figures the hours she missed cost her $50 in wages. The effect of the lost income is real--either the rent doesn’t get paid or she doesn’t go to the market this week, she said, an option her two children might not welcome.

One worker called Pacheco Monday morning, the first workday of the strike, about an hour after she was supposed to be sitting down behind her sewing machine. She told Pacheco she had waited for a bus that never came. She hadn’t even heard about the strike.

She knows about it now.