Norm Langer, owner of the iconic MacArthur Park deli with his name on the sign, got a phone call just after 8 a.m. Tuesday.
L.A. Mayor Karen Bass was on the line. She had read my recent column, in which Langer said he was strongly considering closing his restaurant unless City Hall got it together and tackled the neighborhood’s festering problems with sanitation, public safety, homelessness, gangs, unlicensed vending and wide-open drug activity.
“She says to me, ‘Now I have your number, and you have mine,’” Langer recalled.
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The mayor also told him she’d be stopping by the deli for lunch.
Bass ordered pastrami on rye and took notes as Langer described the challenge of maintaining a business when customers have been falling away after decades of loyalty. The bulk of the hard-core drug activity is currently 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 door of the restaurant.
Langer has also bristled about narrow sidewalk passages squeezed by vending operations, and vendors parking for hours along red curbs.
But the pastrami-eating hordes were out in force on Monday and again on Tuesday, after local TV stations picked up the story of Langer’s possible closure. Server Frank Wurster said business had surged about 50%, and a line half a block long stretched along 7th Street on Tuesday afternoon. Diners told Langer they were there to support him and his call for City Hall to get cracking.
“We want to help,” said Maria Rosales, who was dining with husband Gustavo. They live in Hollywood and said they had never eaten at Langer’s but always wanted to, and figured they better move fast, lest the place close.
Andrew Wolff, president of the MacArthur Park Neighborhood Council, was having lunch with his wife, Atsuko Kubota, who wore a green “Free the MacArthur Park Neighborhood” T-shirt. Last week, Wolff had directed me to the nearby teeming alley that serves as a drug den, with dozens of people assembling each morning behind the Yoshinoya restaurant at Wilshire Boulevard and Alvarado Street.
“It should not exist,” Wolff said Tuesday as he and Kubota paid their tab.
Near the checkout stand, DoorDasher William Escobar waited for a takeout order and told me he’s seen some hard-core things in his time, but the scene in and around that alley is a horror. “I’ve seen people die right there,” said Escobar, who also has witnessed people administering Narcan nasal spray to bring overdose victims back from the brink.
Street vendors sell their wares along a sidewalk at 7th and Alvarado streets across from Langer’s.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Cheryl Conley and her friend Larry Branman came in on Tuesday to support the restaurant, a 2022 inductee into The Times’ Hall of Fame, and Conley got a chance 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 departed.
For some people, nothing can drive them away from Langer’s. Drummer Neal Daniels, dining with his musician pal Jonah Nimoy, said he has traveled everywhere, but Langer’s is his favorite restaurant in the world. When he and his girlfriend decided to get married, on April 25, 2019, they went to City Hall for the paperwork and to Langer’s for the party.
“We hired an officiant off Yelp,” Daniels said, “and while Frank [Wurster] was taking our orders of pastrami, she was saying, ‘We are 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 decay. He said he told Bass that as long as people think of the area as unsafe or unpleasant, thanks in part to media coverage, “it buries me a little deeper.”
But Langer was encouraged by the mayor’s visit and felt as though she genuinely wanted to hear him out. While they were chatting, Bass looked up from the table with a big smile and told an aide that she and Langer had just realized they’d gone to the same junior high (Louis Pasteur) and high school (Hamilton).
There’s common ground, Langer told me later, and that’s a start.
I spoke to Bass a few hours after the lunch and she told me that, years ago, she used to go dancing at a salsa club and then go to Langer’s for dinner (it’s open only for breakfast and lunch now). She bumped into Langer a few weeks ago, she said, and told him she wanted to meet with him, and then moved it up on her calendar after reading about his possible closure.
“Langer’s is a community institution, and I felt when I was there like I need to go more,” said Bass, adding that she plans to conduct future business meetings over breakfast at the deli.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and Norm Langer look at cookies in the deli, which has been open for 77 years.
(Steve Lopez / Los Angeles Times)
When she left Langer’s on Tuesday, she said, the owner of a nearby building approached to tell her that merchants “have to essentially pay gang members” for the privilege of doing business. “I’m not an attorney, 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 that’s part of what has led to so much frustration in the area for residents and merchants who feel like no one is looking out for them, despite all the plain-as-day problems. And I hear that same sentiment, about all that’s broken in the city and seemingly taken for granted, in every part of L.A.
During our conversation, Bass told me that she had already spoken to L.A. police officials about MacArthur Park concerns. And she said she had texted Councilwoman Eunisses Hernandez, who represents the Westlake/MacArthur Park area, and suggested they meet soon.
The mayor said she was familiar with the alley I visited, behind Yoshinoya, having driven through the area. “I’ve watched people shoot up,” said Bass, a former physician assistant who later established a nonprofit to address the needs of a community wrecked in part by the crack cocaine epidemic.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
“It just speaks to our profound need for drug treatment,” she said.
Bass did not create all these problems, nor can she address them alone in a fractured city and county of divided leadership and competing interests. The fissures of social and economic collapse can be traced back through the decades, across political aisles, and all the way to Sacramento and Washington.
But in a city with thousands of homeless and addicted people, in the middle of a deadly and devastating fentanyl epidemic, how long do we have to wait for enough of the drug treatment Bass speaks of?
And how long before there’s enough affordable housing and a realistic, coherent strategy to put an end to neighborhood encampments and the tent villages along freeway ramps?
And how long before kids can safely play in MacArthur Park, as Norm Langer did as a boy?
“The bottom line is, we have to do whatever it’s going to take,” Bass said, “and we have to respond urgently.”
Langer, whose family has operated that deli since before the Lakers and Dodgers came to town, hasn’t seen many urgent responses in recent years, but he was hopeful after the mayor’s visit.
Promises, though, have been made before. The question, for him and other merchants and residents, is whether City Hall can deliver this time.
steve.lopez@latimes.com