Norm Langer, owner of the iconic MacArthur Park deli that has his name on the sign, received a phone call shortly after 8 a.m. Tuesday.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was calling me. She had read my recent column, in which Langer said she was seriously considering closing her restaurant unless the City Council got its act together and addressed the neighborhood’s pressing problems of sanitation, public safety, homelessness, gangs, unlicensed vending and large-scale drug dealing.
“She tells me, ‘Now I have your number and you have mine,’” Langer recalled.
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The mayor also told him she would stop by the deli for lunch.
Bass ordered pastrami on rye bread and took notes as Langer described the challenge of maintaining a business when customers have drifted away after decades of loyalty. Most of the hard drug activity is currently located a block or two north of the restaurant, but Langer says some customers don’t feel safe walking to the restaurant from the Westlake/MacArthur Metro station or the deli parking lot a block from the restaurant’s door.
Langer has also been angered by narrow sidewalk passages occupied by street vending operations and by vendors who park for hours along red curbs.
But hordes of pastrami lovers came out in droves Monday and Tuesday after local television stations picked up news of Langer's possible closure. Waiter Frank Wurster said business was up 50 percent and a line stretched half a block along 7th Street by Tuesday afternoon. Diners told Langer they were there to support him and his call for City Hall to take action.
“We want to help,” said Maria Rosales, who was dining with her husband Gustavo. They live in Hollywood and said they had never eaten at Langer’s before, but had always wanted to and thought it best to act quickly or the place would close.
Andrew Wolff, president of the MacArthur Park Neighborhood Council, was having lunch with his wife, Atsuko Kubota, who was wearing a green T-shirt that read “Liberate the MacArthur Park Neighborhood.” Last week, Wolff had pointed out to me the nearby alley that serves as a drug den and where dozens of people gather each morning behind the Yoshinoya restaurant at Wilshire Boulevard and Alvarado Street.
“It shouldn't exist,” Wolff said Tuesday as he and Kubota settled their bill.
Near the checkout, DoorDasher employee William Escobar was waiting for a takeout order and told me he’d seen some pretty tough things in his life, but the scene in and around that alley is horrific. “I’ve seen people die right there,” said Escobar, who has also witnessed the administration of Narcan nasal spray to save overdose victims.
Street vendors sell their wares along a sidewalk at 7th and Alvarado streets in front of Langer's.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Cheryl Conley and her friend Larry Branman arrived Tuesday to support the restaurant, which will be inducted into The Times Hall of Fame in 2022, and Conley had the opportunity to pose for a photo with Mayor Bass.
“They need to clean it up. There’s so much trash,” Conley told me after the mayor left.
For some people, nothing can keep them away from Langer's. Drummer Neal Daniels, dining with his musician friend Jonah Nimoy, said he's traveled everywhere, but Langer's is his favorite restaurant in the world. When he and his fiancée decided to get married on April 25, 2019, they went to City Hall to complete the paperwork and to Langer's for the party.
“We hired an officiant from Yelp,” Daniels said, “and while Frank [Wurster] He was taking our pastrami orders and saying, “We’re gathered here…”
It was a day of ardent support and great hope for the deli, but Langer can recall other failed efforts to clean up the neighborhood.
“We spent a million and a half dollars on the park two years ago and it all went down the drain,” Langer said of one of many attempts over the years to address the deterioration. He said he told Bass that as long as people continue to think the area is unsafe or unpleasant, thanks in part to media coverage, “I sink a little deeper.”
But Langer was encouraged by the mayor's visit and felt that he really wanted to hear it. As they chatted, Bass looked up from the table with a big smile and told an aide that she and Langer had just realized they had attended the same middle school (Louis Pasteur) and high school (Hamilton).
There are commonalities, Langer told me later, and that's a start.
I spoke to Bass a few hours after lunch, and he said that years ago, he used to go dancing at a salsa club and then go to dinner at Langer's (it's now open only for breakfast and lunch). He ran into Langer's a few weeks ago, he said, and told him he wanted to meet up with him, then moved the date up on his calendar after reading about its possible closure.
“Langer's is a community institution and when I was there I felt like I needed to go more,” Bass said, adding that he plans to hold future business meetings over breakfast at the deli.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and Norm Langer look at cookies at the deli, which has been open for 77 years.
(Steve Lopez / Los Angeles Times)
As he left Langer's on Tuesday, he said, the owner of a nearby building approached him to tell him that merchants “basically have to pay gang members” for the privilege of doing business. “I'm not a lawyer,” Bass told me, “but it sounds like extortion to me and it needs to be addressed immediately.”
That kind of activity is nothing new, and it's part of what has led to so much frustration in the area for residents and merchants who feel like no one cares about them, despite all the obvious problems. And I hear that same sentiment, about everything that's broken in the city and seemingly taken for granted, in every part of Los Angeles.
During our conversation, Bass told me that he had already spoken with LAPD officials about concerns about MacArthur Park. And he said he had texted Councilwoman Eunisses Hernandez, who represents the Westlake/MacArthur Park area, and suggested they meet soon.
The mayor said she knew the alley I visited, behind Yoshinoya, because she had driven through the area. “I’ve seen people doing drugs,” said Bass, a former physician’s assistant who later created a nonprofit to address the needs of a community torn apart in part by the crack epidemic.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
“This just speaks to our deep need for drug treatment,” he said.
Bass did not create all these problems, nor can she solve them alone in a fractured city and county with divided leadership and competing interests. The fissures of social and economic collapse stretch back decades, across political parties, and into Sacramento and Washington.
But in a city with thousands of homeless and addicted people, in the midst of a deadly and devastating fentanyl epidemic, how long will we have to wait for the drug treatment Bass speaks of?
And how long will it be before there is enough affordable housing and a realistic, coherent strategy to end the squatter camps and tent villages along highway ramps?
And how long will it be before children can safely play in MacArthur Park, as Norm Langer did when he was a child?
“The bottom line is we have to do whatever it takes,” Bass said, “and we have to respond urgently.”
Langer, whose family has operated the deli since before the Lakers and Dodgers came to town, hasn't seen many urgent responses in recent years, but was hopeful after the mayor's visit.
But promises have been made before. The question for him and other traders and residents is whether the city will be able to keep them this time.
