Without Buses, Ends Don’t Meet on Berendo Street

Even before the buses stopped, the working-class residents of Berendo Street, the house painters and maids and construction workers and valets, were already making accommodations to get by on their meager salaries.

They are mostly Mexican and Central American immigrants who save money by shopping at discount stores. They hang wet laundry on fire escapes rather than pump coins into dryers, and they pack their own lunches for work in plastic grocery bags.

But last week, the residents on this one-block stretch between 7th and 8th streets west of downtown were forced to make even more difficult accommodations.

They started sharing car rides, walking or paying overpriced fees for makeshift jitney services. Some people simply stayed home, forgoing work, doctor appointments and school.

The people on Berendo Street are a microcosm of the 450,000 riders whose world has been turned upside down by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority strike.

The Berendo residents live in one of the most transit-dependent neighborhoods in the region, according to transportation officials. The median household income in that area is barely above the minimum wage, and more than 40% of the residents there do not own a car, according to a private demographics analysis.

“It’s as if someone is trying to punish us,” said Amparo Dominguez, a Berendo Street resident who hasn’t been able to get to her job as a housekeeper in Echo Park since the strike began. Her husband, a cook, has had to walk to work.

“I hope the buses come on Monday so I can work because the rent is coming due soon,” she said as she stood on the corner of Berendo and 7th streets early one morning last week, waiting to walk her son, William, 9, to school.

Berendo Street, lined on both sides by aging brick and stucco apartment buildings, is two blocks from the corner of Vermont Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard, where the MTA’s two busiest bus lines intersect.

The No. 720, which runs along Wilshire Boulevard, carries nearly 50,000 riders per day. The No. 204, which runs along Vermont Avenue, boards about 48,000 people a day.

Since those two lines stopped running, life has not been the same on Berendo.

On a morning just before the sun creeps over the horizon, Berendo Street is alive with activity as families scramble to find a ride or start a long walk to work or school.

At night, after the street lights flick on, foot-weary men and women, hauling backpacks and lunch bags, trudge home.

Yolanda Nunez, a mother of two young boys who is six months pregnant, usually takes the bus to the California Hospital Medical Center near downtown for her medical checkups. But she missed her appointment this week because she could not afford a taxi. Her husband is a grape picker working in Santa Maria.

“What can I do?” she said as she stood outside her three-story, ivy-covered apartment building. “I can’t walk there in my condition.”

Across the street, Jose Vale, a dishwasher at a restaurant in Jefferson Park, was on the third-floor fire escape of his apartment building talking about the strike with a neighbor, Sandra, a housekeeper.

Vale said he has been paying jitney van drivers $2 for rides to and from work. But Sandra, who declined to give her last name, said she cannot afford the vans, which charge $10 to take her to the Beverly Hills homes she cleans.

Sandra, who is also pregnant and missed a doctor’s appointment because of the strike, said her employers have refused to give her rides to and from work. She and her husband, Juan, a day laborer, pay $300 a month rent for a bachelor apartment. But without her salary, she worries that they won’t be able to pay the rent.

“The landlord won’t wait,” she said. “Instead, they will charge you more if you are late.”

Down the street, in a plain white stucco apartment building, Ignacio Mateo was leaning on a banister outside his apartment, also worrying about next month’s rent.

Mateo works as a day laborer and usually rides the bus, transferring three times before arriving at a corner in Beverly Hills where he finds regular work. His wife works in a textile plant on Olympic Boulevard, east of downtown Los Angeles. Since the strike started, she has been paying for rides in gypsy cabs and jitney vans while he has waited at home, hoping the strike will end quickly.

What irks him most, he said, is that he recently spent $84 for two monthly bus passes, one for himself and one for his wife. “I can’t afford this,” he said angrily. “If we can’t pay the rent next month, we may have to live under a freeway.”

Just then, one of Mateo’s old employers, a plumbing contractor, pulled up to the apartment in a pickup truck. Mateo broke into a smile, shouted to his wife that he found work for the day, and jumped into the truck.

“I’ll be back,” he said as he pulled away.