Cyber South-Central

Operation Hope Cyber Cafe doesn’t look like much when you drive by it on South La Brea Avenue--just a blue storefront in a slightly grungy strip mall. But step inside and it all changes. This cafe and computer center is an authentic Internet outpost, mixing high-tech and industrial elements--galvanized steel, glass, plywood, strandboard, exposed screw heads, oversized stuffed furniture--and a color scheme of sage green and terra-cotta red. All these materials might be more likely to be found in the offices of dot-com companies in Santa Monica and West Hollywood than in South-Central Los Angeles.

“We call it Starbucks meets Star Wars,” said Alex Ward, an architect in the Los Angeles office of Leo A Daly, who designed the cafe.

Awet Teame, a 25-year-old Baldwin Hills resident, was immediately taken with the look of the place when she first walked in off the street four months ago in search of a rental computer.

“I love spots like this,” she said. “There’s a gang of spots like this on Melrose, but not in this part of town. Now I don’t have to go so far just to chill.”

In part prompted by a visit by former Vice President Al Gore, the cafe opened in April, the first of three to be built by Operation Hope Inc., a nonprofit group incorporated shortly after the Rodney King riots that provides banking services and financial advice to inner-city residents. The trio, which includes a second in Watts-Willowbrook that opened in December and a third in Maywood still under construction, all are set alongside banking branches of Operation Hope.

To some eyes, the free-style decor of the cafes might seem to clash with the adjacent prim-and-proper branch banks, which connect with the coffee bars. If the two styles collide architecturally, however, they harmonize in purpose: These cyber cafes are an attempt to bridge the so-called digital divide, the shortage of Internet access in some urban neighborhoods that threatens to widen the economic gulf between the plugged-in and the not.

Operation Hope serves as a community center for computer use, and it offers on-site classes in Microsoft Windows, Adobe PhotoShop and other popular software. UCLA Extension has begun offering an information-technology certificate program at the cafes, from which about 100 people are expected to graduate yearly. Cyber cafe patrons can rent computers for $4 to $7.50 hourly--the cost depends upon the time of day. Monthly and annual memberships are also available at rates considerably lower than those of Westside establishments.

The high-tech architecture at the La Brea and Rodeo Road location acts as a marketing tool, according to Operation Hope founder and chief executive John Bryant, who described the cafes as “pulling agents” to bring people into the banking offices. The pull, he said, will be “the sexiness and attractiveness of this social gathering place, where people can connect to the World Wide Web on high-speed lines, sip gourmet coffee and interact with their community. And using that environment, we can enroll them into programs that are designed to empower them.” The same can be said of the second cafe, located at 11858 Wilmington Ave. in Watts.

Although Gore did not invent cyber cafes, he was the unwitting midwife of the first Internet coffee bar to be built in South-Central. Last March, in the midst of the presidential race, Gore read a memo regarding the cyber cafes and contacted Operation Hope. Believing the project was already in place, he said he would like to visit one to publicize an address he would be making at the Inner-City Economic Summit in L.A., another project of the same organization. The only problem was none existed yet, or even was planned. And the vice president was due to arrive in less than five weeks.

At that point, “there was no funding, no location, no partners” for the cyber cafe program, Bryant said. After a moment of near-panic, Bryant arranged a hasty set of conference calls with both government and industry. In two weeks, he had a grant of $200,000 from the U.S. Commerce Department to build the first cafe and a matching grant from a group of technology companies.

Bryant entrusted the breakneck task of building the cafe to Aham Nwede, a senior project manager for Turner Construction, which contributed its services to Operation Hope on an at-cost basis. “They were asking me to do an impossible thing,” he recalled. “I had no architect and no plans.” Yet Nwede knew the cyber cafe would need visual panache.

“People do not want to come to a drab, dreary space,” he said. “They want to come to an exciting space where they are not bored.”

Nwede enlisted architect Ward to prepare a preliminary design. Ward, who is accustomed to spending years on designs for airports, found himself with the challenge of developing an entire project--albeit a small one--in just a few days.

From the beginning, the process of designing and building the cyber cafe had an almost off-the-cuff quality. When Nwede told the architect he needed a drawing to get a building permit from the city’s Building and Safety Department, Ward dashed off a free-hand sketch on a piece of yellow tracing paper, which Nwede then hurried to City Hall.

“The men at the plan-check desk started to laugh,” Nwede said, because they had never seen such a casual application for a building permit. But the construction chief was adamant.

“This is not a joke,” he recalled saying. “Mr. Al Gore is going to visit this place in 2 1/2 weeks.” He got the permit. Ward said the “big payoff was to get something built right in front of my eyes.” Working closely with the construction crews--while making many design decisions on the spot--allowed the architect to bridge what he called “the process gap” between design and construction.

In fact, much of the design was improvised, depending on what materials were both available and easy to use. “It was really like jazz,” Ward said. After a crew rough-cut boards for furniture, the architect decided he wanted a more angular look, so the crew immediately recut the boards to his preferences.

Ward suggested a room divider made of a tilting screen covered in frosted plastic, but the material was not available, so Nwede suggested perforated metal. “Fine! We’ll use that,” said Ward, who sent a construction worker out to buy the material. The crew completed the screen that evening.

One of the dominant materials of the cyber cafe interiors is oriented strandboard, an amalgam of wood fibers and a binder that is compressed into boards. Not originally intended as a finish material, strandboard has since gained cachet among architects for its scruffy, chaotic look.

Nwede suggested using strandboard on the walls to save time that would otherwise be spent on conventional drywall and plaster. A tense moment came when designer Cynthia Ray of the Daly office first proposed the reddish-greenish color scheme, including sage green for the ceiling of the La Brea cafe. Operation Hope officials were “totally dead against” the vibrant colors, Nwede said. Once again, he stood his ground.

Tensions eased when the same officials saw the colors in place on the walls. “They stopped in their tracks,” Nwede recalled. “They loved it.”

Gore, too, was similarly surprised, according to Nwede, who recalled the vice president expressing surprise at the sophisticated interior when first entering the newly completed La Brea cafe last spring.

For Teame, the cafe’s best time is Thursday nights, when people gather for impromptu poetry readings and other performances. She likes that she can now “hang” at a coffeehouse in her own neighborhood. “I love my black people,” said the Eritrean-born Teame, “and it’s nice to know we can actually hang at a place like this, so it’s cool.”