Now-the AFTER Shot. “They’re robbing the market!” The news seared along The Block. A hundred manic looters surged past Vermont Square Shopping Center. Some swung axes, others crowbars; some had lock cutters. They smashed the windows at the ABC Supermarket. They snapped the lock at Sunny Swap Meet. They piled into a pickup and tried to bash through the steel shutter at the Best Discount housewares store. Then they plunged into Tong’s Tropical Fish store and ran out with boa constrictors, fish–even the turtles. When it was all over, Willie, eyes glinting, walked up to a Korean merchant studying the ruins. “Get out of here, motherf–,” he shouted. “I’ll burn your motherf–ass. I’ll bring ’em back to burn your ass a second time!”
What possessed everyone? With the shudder of a worn-out furnace, The Block transformed itself. People cut loose, scaring everyone, including themselves. The center didn’t hold. At the peak of the frenzy, there was one certainty: this catastrophe didn’t just happen.
To begin with the numbers, The Block lay within one of the country’s worst zones of crime and economic blight. In the neighborhood of Vermont and Vernon last year, there was about one murder every other day, along with 655 robberies each year, and 255 rapes. The median income was $17,410, a gasp above the official U.S. poverty line. In the area of South-Central, where The Block resides, almost 44 percent of black teens are unemployed. Still, if The Block offered hardship to its residents, it offered an opportunity, of sorts, to its small business people. “All the talk about ghettos not having any money is a myth,” says Wendell Ryan, a partner in a shopping strip that included the Pioneer Chicken franchise and Sea Blize Records. “As soon as somebody moves out, we have three or four people waiting to get in.”
Ryan’s waiting list was a tribute to a spirit of rugged entrepreneurship that persisted in spite of the odds. Eight years ago Julia Harris spent 12 weeks negotiating a $100,000 small-business loan, which she put together with $50,000 of her own to buy the Pioneer Chicken franchise. She paid $1,540 each month in rent and turned over one fifth of her take to the Pioneer chain; but she made enough to live outside the neighborhood on the more prosperous black turf of Baldwin Hills. For this, she paid the price The Block regularly exacted: punks robbed Pioneer Chicken 14 times; in 1985 they hit her shop four times in one week. At one point, crack dealers used her restaurant tables to cut their coke.
While the working woman behind the fast fry was an African-American, Robert Castillo, who owned the All Seas fish shop, came from Mexico. He came to the United States in 1973, worked for years as store manager, saved his pay and bought the place for $350,000 five years ago-$40,000 down and $3,100 a month for mortgage. He hired four black countermen, put up a photograph of Martin Luther King Jr., commissioned a mural showing a dark-skinned cowboy riding a huge fish across a lake. He worked hard, doubled the store’s take. To succeed, he told friends, you had to get along with the community. When two Korean businessmen offered him $500,000 for All Seas, he turned them down. “I told them to get the hell out of there,” he recalls. “If I sold to them I’d make money, but all my family would be out of work-they don’t hire Hispanics.”
The fires of race superheated the pressures of class. The Koreans weren’t all rich. When Byongkok Kim, 57, arrived in America six years ago, he had a family but no security for any loans. He used $10,000 in savings, scratched up $35,000 from Korean moneylenders, at 30 percent interest, and bought the C&C Market on Vermont and Vernon. By working seven days a week, 14 hours a day, he and his family made $6,000 a month.
Far above them stood Young Jin Kim, whom The Block called “a ghetto merchant”–a prince of poverty. Kim moved from Seoul to Los Angeles-eight years ago. He worked 18-hour days, splitting his time among a liquor store, a gas station and a tennis club. With his savings and family money, he bought a clothing boutique in downtown Los Angeles. The business prospered. In 1987 he put together $120,000 in family money and a $200,000 loan from the California Korea Bank, the state’s largest Korean-owned lender, to buy a building on Vermont Square from a Jewish landlord. He turned the building into a bazaar, subletting stands to 28 small dealers who paid him between $500 and $1,000 a month in rent. After meeting his mortgage payment, his utility bills and the payroll for his security guards, he still made a tidy profit.
Relations between the Koreans and the rest of The Block were uneasy. Although the stands in the Sunny Swap Meet changed hands every year or two, local blacks didn’t have the $10,000 to $15,000 needed to start up. Kim says none ever applied for a stall. New renters were predominantly Koreans. Kim did hire four African-Americans as security guards and sweepers. But the mom-and-pop stands were small and poor; they gave no jobs to anyone from The Block.
Subterranean forces started building. The Block’s drug and crime rates surged upward. Koreans, suspicious, padded down the aisles after blacks as they shopped. “The Swap Meet was one of the best businesses around,” remembers Harris. “But I tried to tell the Koreans all the time, ‘You can’t think you’re better than we are’.” They ignored her. They would sit in Pioneer Chicken, take up all the tables for a meeting–and order one Coke. Tensions escalated last year when a Korean shopkeeper shot and killed Latasha Harlins, a 15-year-old black girl whom she had accused of shoplifting. A judge sentenced the shopkeeper to probation. The Block swelled with rage. “It was like a bubble filling with water,” says Pupa Curley, a Belizean dance-hall singer who ekes out a living running Sea Blize Records. “Pretty soon, it burst.”
Then a jury acquitted four white policemen of stomping Rodney King. On Vermont Avenue, just across from the supermarket and Sunny Swap Meet, people were home watching TV when the verdict was announced. They poured into the street. Brad Long, 24, heard teens screaming, “We’re not gonna take this!” “Before long, everybody was outside,” he says. “Babies, mothers-it was like some kind of revolution.”
Long saw Louis Watson, 18, a popular graffiti artist, lead some friends down the street toward the ABC Supermarket. Eyewitnesses say Watson was standing in the shattered window frame of the market passing out food and Pampers to women from The Block, when three shots rang out. One struck him in the head. Watson’s friends threw him into a car and drove him to a hospital, where he died. Dwight (Fish Man) Taylor, 42, staggered into Michael Bell’s car with bullets in his chest and neck. Bell raced him through the burning streets to a firehouse. “Whenever he talked, blood came out of his mouth,” Bell remembers. “The last thing I heard him say was that he loved his wife-and he wouldn’t be seeing us anymore.”
Kim was home in Glendale Wednesday night when he switched on the TV news around 8 o’clock. “And then,” he said, “I see my building go up in flames.” Not far away, Harris made for her door, dodging shots fired by looters. “Get your black ass out of here!” shouted one. A fire toppled the back wall of her restaurant, burning $6,200 in cash she’d left on her desk. When Castillo saw the smoke and flames, he closed the fish market early and “got the hell out of there.” He didn’t return from his home in Norwalk till Friday. Then he discovered to his amazement that the All Seas hadn’t been touched.
A week later Jeeps filled with M-16-toting troops were cruising The Block. Next door to the Swap Meet, Harris stood in the waterlogged ruins of Pioneer Chicken with plastic bags wrapped around her feet. “This is a hard place,” she said, clutching a flashlight in the blackness of her burned-out store. “But I’m staying.” Kim surveyed the enormous pile of tangled metal, charred two-by-fours and melted plastic that had once been the Sunny Swap Meet. “Now I have to start over again,” he said bleakly. He thought his insurance would recover some of the $2 million value of the Swap Meet; he was talking to his bank about a six-month moratorium on payments. His shopkeepers weren’t as lucky: none could afford the $300 a month it would have cost for insurance.
The C&C liquor store didn’t burn that night. But the Kim family lost $85,000 in stolen merchandise and structural damage. The psychic damage was worse. John Kim, a son, said, “We were good to the people here. We had friends. We gave them credit.” As he spoke, his mother bent down in the rubble to pick up a piece of dirty paper. She used it to wipe her eyes. “We won’t come back here,” he said. “We are going back to Korea or another state like Hawaii, where there is justice for all.” Anywhere but The Block.
title: “Back On The Block” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-03” author: “Lynda Roman”
Ten years ago and just yards away, another young life ended at the corner of Vernon and Vermont, as 18-year-old Louis Watson took a.22 slug to his brain in the first hours of the Los Angeles riots. There was plenty of outrage that day, April 29, 1992; Watson, caught in a swelling mob of looters outside a shopping center, was the first of 55 people to die in three days of rage after the acquittal of four white cops in the frenzied beating of black motorist Rodney King. NEWSWEEK examined the riots then through the prism of this gritty intersection in South-Central L.A., where shops were looted and burned–part of the $1 billion toll of destruction. In the 10 years since, many scars from 1992’s violent spasm have healed over. Three quarters of the charred hulks were rebuilt; entrepreneurs who’d lost everything regrouped and reopened; even death took a brief holiday as crime rates plunged and the economy improved in the ’90s. But in 2002, Rivas’s killing, one of nearly three that occurs every week in this neighborhood, underscores how some basic facts of life in the violent inner city remain unchanged. “We face the same issues today as we did then,” says Lieutenant Wilson, who grew up in the neighborhood. “It all repeats itself.”
When the smoke cleared after the riots, it was hard to imagine that things at Vernon and Vermont could ever be the same again. The shopping center was a blackened, waterlogged carcass. The Korean swap meet and Best Discount Store had been pillaged and burned. All the animals at Tong’s pet shop were either dead or missing; the mob had even carried off the owner’s favorite bird, Snowball, and the boa constrictor. Across the street at Loans “R” Us, 65 guns had been stolen, and were now loose in South-Central.
Today, all but one of the damaged buildings on the Block has risen again. Owners scraped together loans, insurance payouts and savings to finance the re-construction of their businesses. Kenneth Kwon could barely eat or sleep for two months after he rioters destroyed his swap meet, but then he combined $1 million in loans and an insurance settlement to rebuild. Hojjat Moradi and his brother restored their Best Discount Store with $130,000 in low-interest loans from the SBA and Bank of America. The ABC Supermarket shelves were restocked and the neighborhood slipped back into its old rhythms.
Few of the much-touted governmental and corporate handouts ever made it here. “A lot of big promises were made about what was going to come to the area,” recalls A. H. Bowers, a black entrepreneur who operated the Cotton Club Dry Cleaners on the Block. “That did not materialize. Matter of fact, it might have gotten a bit worse.” The only visible signs of government largesse here are new bus kiosks and a faux red-brick crosswalk.
What has changed are the faces. The African-American majority that had dominated life and commerce on the Block for decades has been gradually replaced by a huge influx of Hispanics–many recent immigrants from Mexico and Central America. Today Hispanics make up 62 percent of the seven core ZIP codes in South-Central, while blacks represent just 35 percent. Much of the black population has moved westward toward the Crenshaw district, or out to the suburbs. Even in iconic black communities like Compton and Watts, Hispanics are now the majority. The shift has brought about a decline in black political clout. Last week the city’s most powerful black official, Police Chief Bernard Parks, quit after a battle with the white mayor that was fought along racial lines.
In the ’60s and ’70s, most of the businesses on the Block were black-owned. By the time of the riots, only a handful remained, among them Julia Harris’s Pioneer Chicken restaurant. Harris’s store was destroyed in the conflagration and she never returned. She took the $160,000 she got from insurance and bought a share of a restaurant in a safer area. But that business failed, and now she sells perfumes in the bathrooms of upscale restaurants at night and minds old folks during the day. There isn’t a single black-owned store left on the Block.
The shopkeepers who’ve remained have tailored their merchandise to keep pace with the changing face of their customers. Today the tenants at Kwon’s 25-stall Sunny Swapmeet Mart stock inventory that appeals to both black and Hispanic customers. A trade secret: blacks care about style. “They match the color from top to bottom,” confides Kwon. “Hispanic people, they care about price and quality.” The lessons Kwon has learned from shoppers don’t end there. Before the riots, African-Americans throughout L.A. complained that Korean shopkeepers were disrespectful–even brutal, they said, pointing to the 1991 killing of 15-year-old Latasha Harlins by a store owner who suspected her of stealing.
When the rioting erupted, Korean merchants became targets. The experience chastened Kwon. He no longer forces suspected shoplifters to sit for photographs, hung like wanted posters from the swap-meet walls. Now he plays let’s-make-a-deal. “We talk to them,” he says. “You treat customers good, no more riots.” And so far, he reports, his strategy has worked: “Right now, no problem.” Many of the shopkeepers on the Block say that race relations have improved since the dark days of April 1992. The supermarket, which back then was accused of gouging disadvantaged customers, has a new name, new owners and a new approach to business. Forty-eight-year-old Iranian-born Nick Dassian, a graduate of the London School of Economics, manages the Farm Fresh Ranch Market and puts customers first. Dassian employs a multiethnic crew that keeps the aisles clean, the food fresh and the prices fair. Shoplifting is no longer an issue.
Yet ethnic tensions on the Block lie just beneath the surface. Even after community efforts at reconciliation, some blacks and Koreans remain wary of one another. Kyou Paik, who owns the C & market, says, “Black people don’t like Orientals… so we watch them all day.” There is outright hostility between many blacks and Hispanics. “All they do is come here and take businesses from everybody else,” says Harris, the former Pioneer Chicken store owner, about local Hispanics. “They better watch out or there’s gonna be another riot.” She’s not alone in that fear. A new poll out of Loyola Marymount University shows that 49 percent of Angelenos think a riot in the next five years is at least “somewhat” likely. Salvadoran immigrant Vilma Borjas feels the sting of black resentment daily at her beauty shop on Vernon. After some black customers came into her shop for manicures and refused to pay, Borjas instituted a cash-upfront policy and even brandishes a big wooden club when she has trouble collecting. “They say I am a racist,” she says through an interpreter. “I am not a racist. But I have bad experiences with some black people.”
With its dense population and relatively low rents, the Block continues to offer the enterprising a first grip on the ladder of success. Immigrants from Russia, Korea, China, Thailand, Israel, Iran, Italy, Salvador, Jamaica and Mexico–with educations ranging from elementary school to M.B.A.–preside over commerce here, with varying degrees of success. “No one dies from hunger in this country,” says Best Discount’s Moradi, who moved to the United States from Iran in 1976 as a student and now lives in an upper-middle-class suburb of Palos Verdes. “If you work hard and are honest, you make it.”
The Arias family from El Salvador are the most recent arrivals on the Block. They opened a furniture store two months ago, and “so far, it’s been great,” says 20-year-old Stanley Arias, a student of computer-information systems at Cal State Los Angeles. That was hardly the case for Chalo Yoshika, the Japanese-born merchant who vacated the storefront the Ariases now rent. Yoshika’s party-supply store was robbed twice in recent months, and he finally decided to leave when Manny Rivas was shot just feet from his front door. “They killed my neighbor,” he said as he packed up his store one afternoon in late February. “I’m gonna leave before they kill me.”
At Loans “R” Us, a framed photograph of a smiling Rivas hangs on the wall. So far, detectives don’t have a single lead in the search for his murderer, and so the crew at the pawnshop are watching their backs even as they mourn their loss. Ever since the riots, owner David Makiri has been active in the community. This year the city honored him for his work with Operation Unity, an organization that sends inner-city kids to Israeli kibbutzim. “I think people know I care,” says Makiri, an Israeli-born Jew, 66, who himself survived two shootings. “I think people look out for me.” But others who witnessed the murder are having trouble sleeping. “To tell you the truth, I am still scared,” says Belyavtsev, Rivas’s friend. “I can’t forget about it.”
Lieutenant Wilson can’t allow himself to remember. “You have to be detached because you can’t function otherwise,” he says, eyes reddening as he recalls the sight of Rivas bleeding to death at his feet. Ten years after the riots, what stands out most to him as he travels his neighborhood are the vacant lots. When he sees so many kids in wheelchairs, he almost wishes he could blame the disabilities on a foreign war, not gang violence. He appreciates that the riots of ‘92 forced L.A. to look at its problems, but Wilson believes the city has yet to solve them. “I can’t predict what will happen in the future,” he says. “But I do know that we can’t burn down local neighborhoods and think the result will be anything positive.” As long as violence is seen as a solution, the unsolved murders of young men like Louis Watson and Manny Rivas will remain the terrible price exacted on the Block.
