Evictions Loom for Many in Wilmington’s ‘Third World’

Since World War II, a forbidding swath of eastern Wilmington has been known as the Third World: a grimy and tough square mile of junkyards, sulfur piles, dirt roads, goat herds and rooster coops.

Framed by two oil refineries, a murky channel and the Terminal Island Freeway, the surreal landscape has existed as a stronghold of car strippers, drug dealers and prostitutes, some of whom operate out of wrecked cars on nameless dirt roads.

“I refer to this place, lovingly, as Hell,” said Tom Mayfield, a junkyard renter who has lived in the Third World for seven years.

Now, many of the Third World’s rough-edged businesses are about to be wiped out to make way for the final stretch of the $2.4-billion Alameda Corridor rail project.

The last construction contracts to be signed for the 20-mile rail cargo expressway linking the area’s two ports to the train yards of downtown Los Angeles will absorb the northern half of the area roughly bordered by Anaheim Street a few miles west of downtown Long Beach.

Project officials this month began making offers on about half of the Third World, with much of the property slated to become maintenance yards, exits, overpasses and part of rail systems designed to handle 50 trains a day.

“I’ve been in this business for 35 years, but I’ve never had to relocate 200 roosters before,” said Jim Wiley, the project’s right-of-way manager.

By the end of the year, many of the Third World’s scrap metal scavengers, auto dismantlers, fortified offices, watch towers and goat slaughterers will be relegated to the past.

Legal businesses, including rooster farms, will be reimbursed, Wiley said. But no one will be compensated for losses related to any illegal activities such as cockfights.

“We’ve just begun our relocation efforts, and they won’t be easy,” he said. “The uses in that area are ones that every community fights to get rid of, especially Wilmington.”

About $23 million has been set aside to buy the property--all of which is within the city of Los Angeles--and relocate business owners and cover their losses of business goodwill.

As it stands, none of the area’s operators--legitimate or otherwise--are satisfied with the project’s initial offers, which they claim have averaged about $7 per square foot. Most have hired attorneys to help them negotiate rates of at least twice that amount, and to avoid condemnation proceedings.

In the meantime, they wonder how or if their way of life will survive the vast corridor which is 75% complete, on time and on budget.

Standing beside a tall old palm tree with an automobile transmission embedded in its trunk, Art Hanson, 57, got tears in his eyes as he surveyed the junkyard his father bought for him in 1957 for $700.

When winds kick up, sulfur blows over his maze of metal parts and old cars like a yellow fog. At night, surrounding streets glow in the light of bonfires set by crack addicts and vagrants. Countless times in recent years, thieves have plundered his 4,800-square-foot lot for speedometers, generators, wire and bumpers.

“I don’t want to leave this place, ever,” said Hanson, who works a day job as an employee of the city’s department of general services. “Yeah, its a cesspool, but that’s not the fault of the people who own businesses in here. The city let us go [downhill].

“Property like this--zoned for heavy industry near the ports--has become a priceless collector’s item,” he said. “I always wanted to leave it to my son.” As a result, Hanson said he plans to challenge the takeover in court.

Just down the road, trucking business owner Marcus Mo sat back in a chair in an office on the upper floor of the two-story brick headquarters he built a few years ago for about $1 million.

“I built this place expecting to retire here,” said Mo, 57, who founded the business 18 years ago. Nodding toward a series of large, unfurnished offices, he said, “Now, all my plans are on hold. Things have changed.”

Mo, like most other business owners in the area, proclaimed what has become a mantra in the Third World: “Things aren’t as bad as they used to be around here.”

At that particular moment, such optimism seemed out of step.

A block away, Los Angeles firefighters and paramedics were treating a man who reportedly stabbed himself in the chest in a junkyard office. Down the street and around the corner, Los Angeles Police Department investigators were questioning a group of men and women about illegal cockfights on the premises.

One street over, a nearly toothless woman, identified by locals as a crack addict and prostitute, strolled into a canyon of wrecked cars with a new customer. Nearby, a man stood beside a herd of goats that were munching on thistle and old rope. He cupped his hands around a crack pipe, inhaled deeply and then strutted down railroad tracks skirting immense piles of sulfur.

In the same block, a man who identified himself as a postal worker kept glancing at his watch and pacing nervously while waiting for a group of men to complete the job--on a dirty concrete floor--of slaughtering and gutting the $145 goat he had bought for a weekend feast.

None of this seemed to bother “Pete,” a former French teacher in Vietnam who asked that his real name not be used.

He hugged a rooster at the end of a narrow clapboard-and-sheet-metal passageway flooded by a broken water pipe. The diminutive man, sporting a white Fu Manchu goatee and wearing a T-shirt and a red loincloth, exhorted: “Welcome, my friends! But please, please, don’t tell anyone about my secret little hideaway.”

Swatting away clouds of flies, Pete proudly presented the roosters he has been raising in smelly coops hidden behind corrugated metal walls 12 feet high. As a precaution against theft, he recently covered his cages with “protective magic spells” scrawled with chalk in his native language.

“Whenever I’m sad, I come here because it reminds me of rural Vietnam and my old customs,” he said. “Raising roosters, smelling them, eating them and watching them fight is like medicine to me,” he said, flexing his biceps. “It makes me strong!”

Arturo Gomez, 44, who has tended roosters and hens on a rented portion of the same lot for 10 years, would not argue with that. “If I can’t find another place for my animals,” he said, shaking his head sadly, “I’ll be eating a lot of chicken in a hurry.”

Neighbor Felipe Angeles, 59, who tends roosters, hens and a dozen goats in dusty shacks he built of tarpaulin, clapboards and baling wire, has all but given up hope of relocating his business.

“The officials came, took pictures and then said they don’t want to pay for any of this,” said Angeles, who said he sells goat meat, goat milk and roosters to “Chinese, Cambodians, Puerto Ricans and Salvadorans living within a 15-minute drive from here.”

“I’m a renter, and they’re going to throw me out. What can I do?” he said. “All the work I’ve done to keep my animals safe and comfortable will be lost. The people who are doing this have lots of money and no sympathy for animals or the simple life.”

Barring unforeseen problems, the Alameda Corridor is scheduled to begin speeding $100 billion in commerce a year from the region’s two major ports in April 2002. The rail system will fork just west of the Dominguez Channel and north of Anaheim Street, with one set of tracks going to the Port of Los Angeles and the other going to the Port of Long Beach.

The Third World is just at that fork.

The area’s nickname is a slur coined years ago by locals who contend that its conditions resemble those in the most depressed undeveloped nations.

Old timers say the Third World’s curious history began in the 1920s, when the area was divided into a melange of odd-sized lots, which were sold to investors across the nation. Zoned M-3, which allows heavy industry as well as animal slaughtering and even the raising of venomous reptiles, the largest parcels went to oil refineries and shipbuilders during the boom years of World War II.

After the war, a variety of small, polluting businesses gravitated to the area, which never had sewers, flood control or refuse disposal services. Law enforcement effectiveness has always been muddled by a confusing overlap of city and port jurisdictions.

“The area never developed in a manner required by city laws,” said Dan Cartagena, assistant chief of staff for Los Angeles City Councilman Rudy Svorinich, whose district includes the area. “It evolved in its own timeline and in its own way. Now, taking care of day-to-day issues there can be overwhelming.

“We’ve spent over $500,000 hauling thousands of tons of trash out of there and trying to make the area secure,” he said. “When we came into office in 1993, some streets were lined with trash piled 30 feet high.”

Cartagena added that city officials are uniformly relieved that the Alameda Corridor will finally remedy a good deal of what he described as “the far east Wilmington challenge.”

Project right-of-way manager Wiley declined to discuss details of any of his offers. But he acknowledged that “for those who do not have a deep pocket to reach into, we will be eating the costs of cleaning up their property.”

“We are trying not to make a gift of public money; that’s against the law,” he said, weighing his words carefully. “Although it’s difficult to operate within the law and deal fairly with these particular people, we don’t want to hurt them.

“Trouble is, there are very few other places available for businesses like theirs,” he said. “To the extent that such places exist, they are probably in Riverside.”