When he was about 12 and his parents were busy running the family restaurant, Norm Langer would spend hours across the street in MacArthur Park. Back then, it was a chic urban oasis, with lollipop-shaped palm trees towering over a lake fed by natural springs.
“I grew up in the park,” Langer said, sitting in a booth at the famed deli he now owns at 7th and Alvarado streets. “I played in the park, went boating, took naps. There was a whole area on the 7th Street side where older people played shuffleboard, backgammon, gin, all kinds of card games.”
Today, that carefree child of yesteryear is 79 years old.
Langer's Deli is number 77, with the number in bold yellow print on the back of the employees' uniforms.
California is about to be hit by a wave of aging, and Steve Lopez is taking advantage of it. His column focuses on the advantages and disadvantages of advancing age, and how some people are challenging the stigma associated with older adults.
And Langer’s childhood park, which dates back to the 1880s, is no more. It hasn’t been there for decades, and residents and police told me that long-running urban nightmares — crime, gang extortion of local merchants, camping, sales of stolen goods by street vendors and rampant, open drug activity — have reached new levels in the impoverished, mostly Latino immigrant neighborhood.
Not long ago, I came across a zombie-like scene: contorted people gathered in the northwest corner of the park, their bodies stiff from overdoses of fentanyl or other lethal drugs. That's two blocks from Langer's Deli, and I thought about it and how disconcerting it can be to grow old in a world other than the one we remember or imagine.
Rosalinda Romero, right, manager of Langer's deli, stands near the front door as a homeless woman screams outside. Norm Langer, owner of Langer's, says he is upset by the multiple public safety issues that are worsening in the MacArthur Park neighborhood.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
“I'm considering closing,” Langer told me, though he considers his customers and employees “100 percent safe,” perhaps in part because uniformed police officers frequent his store and the southeast corner of the park is relatively quiet.
Is Langer's closing? That would be a breathtaking discovery.
Los Angeles is constantly changing, but perhaps that's why its time-tested, resilient establishments hold a special place in our hearts. Philippe, Guelaguetza, Pink's, El Cholo, Musso & Frank and Langer's are all Hall of Famers. It's hard to imagine MacArthur Park (and the city) without one of its most iconic landmarks.
“It's an important consideration,” Langer insisted, saying he is exhausted by the City's failure to respond to the basic needs of nearby residents and merchants.
A woman pushes her stroller across MacArthur Park Lake with downtown Los Angeles in the background.
Restaurants come and go, but that wouldn't be the case for any business that's closing. Langer's has been in Los Angeles longer than the Dodgers and the Lakers. It's an anchor, an institution, a touchstone. You open the door and are handed that familiar, spicy deli drink, and customers happily offer to tell you about their first visits, decades ago, with their parents or grandparents. The restaurant still appears on “best of” lists.
But Langer told me he’s “tired of pushing the cart uphill,” of cajoling city officials to clean up the streets, restore public safety and make MacArthur Park a destination again, rather than a place to avoid.
“That park is very important to the people who live in this area,” Langer said. “We need to give it back to them.”
The 35-acre park still has safer, less disruptive areas, and it still hosts youth sports and live music. But Rosario Argueta, who sits on the MacArthur Park Neighborhood Council, told me she doesn’t let her three children use the park. And Ivonnenanette Machado, who sits on the same council, told me her daughter keeps a husky for protection.
Everyone knows that the Westlake/MacArthur Park subway station, such a vital link for students and commuters, is a risky proposition because of crime and drugs. Andrew Wolff, the neighborhood council president, said police presence has decreased over the past two years. (Langer agrees, and bristles about it, noting that Eunisses Hernandez, the City Council representative for the area, had called for defunding the police.)
Wolff said drug activity is particularly blatant in the neighborhood's alleys. In one, he said, “you see bodies on top of each other, completely passed out, with the stench of fentanyl everywhere, and when you look down the alley, there's a haze of smoke from everyone smoking, and people walking around like zombies. It's a disgrace that it exists.”
A man walks with his belongings across the street from Langer's Deli in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
People gather in an alley next to MacArthur Park in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles.
One day I went to check it out and Wolff was right. Later I met a couple of Rampart Division officers outside Langer's and they told me they were launching an offensive.
The City Council has a big change in mind for the neighborhood, but it's not something that makes sense to Wolff or Langer. In July, officials announced a proposal to close Wilshire Boulevard as it runs through MacArthur Park and expand open space. Hernandez described it as “a bigger, better dream for a community in critical need of deep investment.”
But Wolff said that as an architect, he believes the plan “is a joke” and would simply create more room for unchecked illegal activity while affecting the surrounding area with diverted traffic.
The top priority has to be public safety, Langer said, and he wants to see “better lighting, more police patrols, extension of social services and targeted cleanup efforts.”
For all he and other merchants have contributed to local culture and commerce and to the city's treasury, he says he wants something in return. And the good news, for fans of brisket and matzo ball soup, is that the more I talked to Langer, the more I got the sense that he'd rather keep his business going than walk away. He can afford to retire tomorrow, but to him Langer's business is more than a business or a job.
“Do you know I'm at the train station?” he asked one day, and then took me on a half-block walk to the Westlake/MacArthur Park station, where there's a mural of him and his father on the wall above the platform, the two of them chatting at a deli stand, hunched over a sandwich.
A security guard, David Portillo, was chasing away two men who appeared to be high on drugs. When they left, he asked if he could pose with Langer for a photo in front of the mural.
A pedestrian, reflected, walks past the window of Langer's Deli, which has been in Los Angeles longer than the Dodgers and Lakers.
Back on the street, Langer noticed vendors crowding the sidewalk and pointed to a spot where a produce dealer had stacked boxes of potatoes on the street.
“What does a red curb mean?” he asked me before answering his own question. “It means no stopping and no parking.” But vendors park their vehicles on red curbs for hours every day, he said.
“What's the point of having a law if we're not going to enforce it?”
At the restaurant, Langer’s longest-serving employee, Flaviano Naranjo, emerged from the kitchen and sat with us in a booth. He is 73 years old, 53 of them on the job, having started as a busboy and worked his way up to chef. Langer has always been supportive of him, Naranjo said, and he hopes the restaurant stays open.
Langer said his 40 employees are unionized, have health insurance, sick leave, vacation time and two free meals a day of their choice, “except smoked salmon and steaks.” And they are the main reason he wants to stay open.
His staff and customers. Langer says business is down a third from before the pandemic, but it can still be tricky to get a table for lunch. One day, Robert Bihr, a 65-year-old customer, was working on a pastrami sandwich in the booth next door and said he’s been coming since he was 10. Yes, he said, the neighborhood can be rough. But the food, the atmosphere, the tradition, the memories — they continue to draw him back.
At another table, Andre Burton, 36, who was off-duty from his patrol job with the Los Angeles Police Department, sat with two cousins who lived out of town. He was a child, Burton said, when his grandfather started taking him to the deli.
A man lights a cigarette in the MacArthur Park area of Los Angeles.
More than once, Langer looked down at me and, in his “pay attention to me” voice, shared his philosophy on how to live a purposeful life.
“Every man needs two things: he needs a place to go when he gets up in the morning and he needs people who will depend on him,” Langer said.
“I’ve had lung cancer five times. I’ve had the top part of both lungs removed. I’ve had prostate cancer. I’ve had 45 radiation treatments. I’ve had both knees replaced. But I’m here… I should be lying down somewhere, but I’m not. Why? Because I have somewhere to go. And there are people who need me.”
Langer said he would like to continue his career, depending.
His message to the City Council: “Let them come to an agreement and I won’t go anywhere. What do you think?”
Norm Langer remains concerned about multiple public safety issues in the neighborhood.
As someone who ordered a perfectly seasoned, smoky pastrami on rye bread, with coleslaw, fries, and a dill pickle with just the right kick, and dipped the crispy corners of the rye bread in a coating of spicy mustard before each bite, this sounds good to me.
