Norm Langer, owner of the iconic MacArthur Park Deli, which has his name on the sign, received the call just after 8 a.m. Tuesday.
The caller was Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who had read my recent column in which Langer said he was seriously considering closing his restaurant unless city officials came together to address neighborhood health, public safety, homelessness, gangs, unauthorized sales and rampant drug trafficking.
“She told me, 'Now I have your phone number and you have mine,'” Langer recalled.
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The mayor also told him he was going to stop at a deli for lunch.
Bass ordered pastrami on rye and took notes as Langer explained the challenges of keeping the restaurant afloat as decades of loyal customers drift away. Now, most of the hardcore drug trafficking is a block or two north of the restaurant, but Langer said some customers don't feel safe walking from their store to the restaurant. Westlake/MacArthur Subway Station Or the deli parking lot a block away from the restaurant entrance.
Langer also resents the narrowing of sidewalks caused by dealerships and the hours-long parking along red curbs.
But pastrami-eating crowds returned Monday and Tuesday after local TV stations reported on Langer's possible closure. Waiter Frank Wurster said traffic had spiked by about 50 percent, with a line half a block long along Seventh Avenue by Tuesday afternoon. Diners told Langer they were there to support him and his calls for city officials to take action.
“We want to help,” said Maria Rosales, who was dining with her husband, Gustavo, saying the Hollywood couple had never eaten at Langer's before but had always wanted to go, so they thought it best to act quickly before the restaurant closed its doors.
Andrew Wolf, president of the MacArthur Park Neighborhood Council, was having lunch with his wife, Atsuko Kubota, wearing a green “Liberate MacArthur Park” T-shirt last week when he led me to a busy alley nearby that has become a drug den, where dozens of people gather every morning behind the Yoshinoya restaurant at the intersection of Wilshire Boulevard and Alvarado Street.
“That shouldn't exist,” Wolf said Tuesday as he and Kubota paid their bill.
Near the register, DoorDasher William Escobar, waiting for his takeout order, told me he'd seen some hardcore scenes before, but the scenes in and around the alley were horrifying. “I've seen people die there,” Escobar said. He's also seen people administer Narcan nasal spray to save overdose victims from near-death.
Street vendors sell their wares along the sidewalk at 7th Avenue and Alvarado Street, across from Langer's.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
Cheryl Conley and her friend Larry Branman came to the restaurant on Tuesday to support the restaurant, which has been inducted into the Times Hall of Fame in 2022, and Conley got the chance to pose for a photo with Mayor Bass.
“It needs to be cleaned up. There's too much trash,” Conley told me after the mayor had left.
Some people just can't stay away from Langer's. Drummer Neal Daniels, dining with fellow musician Jonah Nimoy, said he's traveled far and wide, but Langer's is his favorite restaurant in the world. On April 25, 2019, he and his girlfriend decided to get married, so they went to City Hall for the paperwork and to Langer's for the party.
“We hired a priest on Yelp,” Daniels says. “Frank [Wurster] While taking our order for pastrami she said “we are here to get together…”
While that day was one of enthusiastic support and great hope for the deli, Langer can recall other failed efforts to clean up the neighborhood.
“Two years ago we spent $1.5 million on this park and it's all gone,” Langer said of one of the many years of tackling the blight. He told Bass that as long as people continue to view the area as dangerous or unpleasant because of media coverage, “my heart just sinks deeper and deeper.”
But Ms. Langer was encouraged by the mayor's visit and genuinely wanted to hear what he had to say. As they chatted, Ms. Bass looked up from the table with a big smile and told the aide that she had just realized that she and Ms. Langer had attended the same middle school (Louis Pasteur) and high school (Hamilton).
There is common ground, and it's a start, Langer told me later.
I spoke with Bass a few hours after lunch, and she told me that a few years ago, she would dance at the salsa club and then go to Langer's for dinner (it's now open for breakfast and lunch only). She'd run into Langer a few weeks ago and told him she'd missed him, then read in the news that Langer might close, and moved up her plans.
“Langer's is a local attraction, so when I went there I knew I needed to go there more,” Bass said, adding that in the future he plans to hold business meetings over breakfast at the deli.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and Norm Langer browse cookies at a deli that's been in business for 77 years.
(Steve Lopez/Los Angeles Times)
As he left Langer's on Tuesday, Bass said he was approached by the owner of a nearby building who told him shopkeepers “basically have to pay gang members” for the privilege of doing business. “I'm not a lawyer, but to me it sounds like extortion. This needs to be addressed immediately,” Bass told me.
These actions are nothing new, which has only added to the frustration of residents and shopkeepers who feel like no one is paying attention to them, despite the obvious problems. And the same sentiments are heard all across Los Angeles, about all that's broken and taken for granted in the city.
During our conversation, Bass told me he had already spoken with LAPD officials about his concerns in MacArthur Park, and that he had also texted City Council Member Euniese Hernandez, who represents the Westlake/MacArthur Park neighborhood, suggesting they meet soon.
The mayor said he knew the alley behind the Yoshinoya restaurant I visited well, having driven through the area. “I've seen people inject drugs,” said Bass, a former physician assistant who later founded a nonprofit to serve the needs of a neighborhood ravaged in part by the crack cocaine epidemic.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
“This just speaks to our deep need for drug treatment,” she said.
Bass didn’t create all these problems, and he cannot address them alone in a divided city and county with divided leadership and competing interests. The rifts from social and economic breakdown span decades, cross political lines, and can be traced all the way back to Sacramento and Washington.
But in a city with thousands of homeless and drug addicts, and in the midst of a deadly and devastating fentanyl epidemic, how long will we have to wait until we see the kind of drug treatment Bass speaks of?
And how long will it take until there is enough affordable housing and a realistic, coherent strategy to put an end to neighborhood encampments and tent cities along highway on-ramps?
How long will it be before kids can safely play in MacArthur Park, like Norm Langer did as a boy?
“At the end of the day, we have to do whatever it takes,” Bass said. “We have to respond with urgency.”
Langer, whose family ran the deli before the Lakers and Dodgers came to town, hasn't had many emergency responses in recent years, but the mayor's visit gave him hope.
But promises have been made before. The question for him, other shopkeepers and residents is whether city hall will follow through this time.
Email: steve.lopez@latimes.com
