The sorry state of MacArthur Park is a testament to the vacuum of leadership in La La Land

MacArthur Park in downtown Los Angeles, in better days. Courtesy Alamy.

The Los Angeles Times, which surprisingly still commits occasional acts of journalism, published a piece on Saturday that can only be described as infuriating. Almost anyone who grew up in L.A., anyone who has lived here for any significant amount of time, and quite a few who have visited over the years, knows Langer’s Deli. It’s a multigenerational institution in a city that doesn’t have many. It’s up there with Nate ‘n Al’s, Canter’s, Factor’s, and Grandma’s. Langer’s pastrami is as beloved in this town as Dodger dogs and In ‘n Out Double Doubles. In our notoriously protean metropolis these are the places and experiences that, to paraphrase The Dude, really tie the place together. Personally, I vividly remember the first time I bit into a pastrami sandwich at Nate ‘n Al’s. It was one of those childhood moments when my brain said, “Wait a minute, food like this exists in the world? What else might be out there?”

The reason the Times piece is infuriating is its portrayal of what’s happening in Langer’s neighborhood of MacArthur Park. Like Langer’s, the sprawling 35 acre oasis of lush grass and shade trees, towering palm trees, and the eponymous, naturally spring fed lake is a jewel in the city’s civic crown.

At least, it used to be.

How to destroy a beloved public space, in one easy step

Over the last 15 years – let’s call it the “Bassetti Era” – what passes for political leadership in this town has allowed vagrants, criminals, and addicts take over the park and make it their own, virtually to the exclusion of everyone else. A few hundred miscreants, many from out of town and out of state, have stolen this precious space from 3.8 million other people. The city’s political class hasn’t just stood by and watched it happen, they’ve enabled it. They’ve all but guaranteed it. When a city’s government allows a public space, much less one like MacArthur Park, to descend into post-apocalyptic mayhem and violence, that city government is telling the world that it’s open season on law and order.

Politicians come and go, but public spaces are forever. The profound disappointment that is Mayor Karen Bass, and the neighborhood’s councilmember, the noxious Eunessis Hernandez, have no right to do what they’ve done to this people’s park.

With few exceptions, L.A.’s political class is hell bent on sustaining a system in which lawbreakers get free pass after free pass, no matter what they do to the city and its citizens. A tweaker from Minneapolis can get off a bus at Union Station with nothing to his name but a bag of meth and a sense of entitlement, and within an hour he can be toking in broad daylight in one of the most beautiful parks in the state, if not the country, safe in the knowledge that he will not be bothered by the police, much less prosecuted by the fraud who is the current District Attorney. He can shoplift, vandalize, and terrorize, all with impunity. There is an excellent chance he can commit sexual assault without fear of repercussions. This is the L.A. that people like Bassetti and Hernandez have created.

When did vagrants attain the privilege of shitting on their adopted neighborhoods? When did criminals acquire more rights than the rest of us? When did “homeless advocates” become the loudest voices in City Hall? For that matter, when did “homeless advocacy” become a thing for which people can get paid?

Side note: I use the word “vagrant” advisedly. The vast majority of hardcore homeless, the kinds who have taken over MacArthur Park, are not our “unhoused neighbors.” I have a well of empathy for those who allow themselves to succumb to addiction, and an even deeper well for those who suffer from mental illness. However, my empathy does not extend to “go ahead smoke your fentanyl, take a dump on the grass next to the picnic tables, piss in the lake, and strew your garbage all over a beautiful park, it’s everyone else’s responsibility to deal with it.” This should not be a controversial opinion.

Collateral damage — or is it?

Times columnist Steve Lopez interviewed Norm Langer in his deli. Thanks to Bassetti’s and Hernandez’s handiwork, Langer said he is considering closing down the 76 year old restaurant.

Let that sink in for a moment. A beloved Los Angeles Jewish deli, a place were countless thousands, possibly millions of people of every conceivable background, identity, and class have communally broken bread for three quarters of a century, may shutter because the politicians can’t keep criminal vagrants out of a public park. The dereliction of duty is almost incomprehensible. It’s no wonder that many Angelenos feel our city is under assault by the very people entrusted with its well-being (then again, it must be pointed out that we keep electing these fools, so…).

Hernandez’s predecessor, Gil Cedillo, showed that protecting the park is possible. In 2021 he had the vagrants cleared out of MacArthur – many of them received housing, of course, free of charge at taxpayer expense – and he had a fence erected around a section of the park while the City spent $1.5 million on cleanup and remediation. His office claimed to have housed 326 people. Lucky them. All they had to do was shit on a cherished public space for a few years, and they were rewarded with free housing and services. This town is truly through the looking glass.

Under the “Democratic Socialist” (again, when did that become a thing in this country?) Hernandez, all of that hard work was undone in a matter of months. Like so many of the city’s and state’s current political class she has never had a real job in her life. Unlike Norm Langer she’s never created a single job. She has no idea what it takes to make payroll, wrangle with suppliers, deal with maintenance, and keep employees happy, all while sustaining a high level of quality for nearly a century. She doesn’t have the foggiest. What she does have is a bachelorette’s degree in criminology from Cal State Long Beach and an elephantine sense of self-satisfaction. So, obviously, she’s expert.

The absolutely bonkers part is that people like her view law-abiding, taxpaying, responsible citizens as the enemy. Want a beloved public park cleared of dangerous criminal vagrants so that working class families can enjoy it again? You fascist! Point out that the Homeless Industrial Complex preys on those selfsame vagrants, all but guaranteeing they will continue their hellish descent into addiction, criminality, and, eventually, inevitably, madness? Nazi!

For much of L.A.’s political class, this is a picture of the enemy.

People like Bassetti and Hernandez fancy themselves to be empathetic “progressives.” They are nothing of the sort. They are, in fact, monstrous. If you can look at people descending toward their final, fatal overdose while screaming at demons only they can see, shitting their own pants, and assaulting passersby including children, and say, “Yup, that’s about right,” you are a monster. Period. A body was found in MacArthur Lake two months ago!

In a just world, Bassetti and Hernandez would be the homeless ones.

2+2=5

The political class are assaulting MacArthur Park and the surrounding neighborhood on more than one front. The City is considering closing Wilshire Boulevard, which bisects the park. Wilshire is one of a half dozen main boulevards that connect Santa Monica and the Westside to downtown. According to the Los Angeles Department of Transportation it carries between 55,000 and 60,000 vehicles per day, which translates to roughly 100,000 people.

Hernandez told ABC7 earlier this month that “MacArthur Park is the overdose epicenter of the city of Los Angeles and it’s something we can’t turn away from.” Rather than clear the encampments, rather than deploy LAPD to intercept drug pushers, rather than incentivize people to leave the park, her solution is to close a street that serves 100,000 working Angelenos every day. Think of how blinkered a person’s worldview has to be for them to look at the situation in the park and conclude it’s the damn street’s fault.

The proposed closure is also about “social justice,” because of course it is. According to someone called Rocio Rivas, who apparently serves on the LAUSD School Board, “This reconnection is about social justice. It addresses racial discrimination, environmental injustice and unequal health and educational outcomes. The lack of access to parks and green spaces has impacted urban communities.”

The political class tell us that removing the main thoroughfare that allows people from all over the city to visit the park will improve access to the park. Closing a street is a “reconnection.” War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

Still have any questions? You shouldn’t. They’re not even trying to hide their true agenda anymore.

Bring the whole family to L.A.’s beautiful MacArthur Park (but watch out for the needles)

Having watched and lived L.A.’s seemingly implacable decline over the last decade under Bassetti, having studied and written and reported on it extensively, I have come to the conclusion that the political class is out to break us. Businesses like Langer’s aren’t collateral damage or unintended consequences. They are targets. The political class have seen the enemy, and it is all of us. They want Langer’s gone. They want public spaces to devolve into lawlessness and violence. Most of all, they want everyone exposing and fighting their corruption and incompetence to give up, to cry Uncle. They want us to go away, just like they want an independent small businesses like Langer’s to go away. Ideally, they’d like us to join the more than 600,000 people who have left the state altogether since 2022.

Why? It’s simple: We don’t need them. The sick irony is that if they were actually competent, they’d be invisible. For most of my life I could name a couple-three members of the city councils in the places I lived, maybe – and I’m a lawyer. It wasn’t that I was unengaged. I didn’t know their names because I didn’t have to. Every four years I’d brush up on the issues and vote according to my principles. Then, secure in the knowledge that representative democracy worked, albeit imperfectly, I went back about my own business. Reasonably competent people were handling the business we the people elected them to handle, and there was an independent, skeptical media on the watch over them. There was graft and there were grifters, but that was just part of the cost of big city living.

Over the last ten years in Los Angeles, and overall in California, that bargain, that trust, has been fundamentally broken. Bassetti and Hernandez do not represent constituents, actual human beings. They are in thrall to their own ideology, one which views individual success, prosperity, and security not as universal human goals but as impediments to their goal of total control.

Are Angelenos finally waking up? And is there still time?

When all is said and done, the situations at MacArthur Park and Langer’s are on us. As long as we keep sending the same cast of corrupt, incompetent ideologues to city councils, mayors’ offices, boards of supervisors, and the state legislature, we will get more of the same. Actually, that’s not quite right. If we keep electing these same frauds things will get worse. Much, much worse. If we keep electing them, pretty soon the entire state will look like MacArthur Park, and there will be no more Langer’s anywhere. There will be nowhere left to run, and the monsters will have won.

A decade ago, when I first became deeply engaged in L.A. and California politics, I often wondered aloud what it was going to take to shake people out of their political stupors. Would it take a horrific crime, a gruesome rape or a murder? Would it take a devastating fire started by a criminal vagrant? These days, the question is how many rapes, murders, and fires it’s going to take. Five years ago a young graduate student was gang raped, beaten, and left for dead in a Venice Beach public bathroom. It didn’t even make the evening news. These days a headline like “Woman in Venice Canal sexual assault declared brain dead, taken off life support” is just another Tuesday afternoon.

The good news is that more people are waking up every day. More people are seeing through the simulation, the hallucination, that the political class has erected around them. Angelenos are about to elect an erstwhile Republican, Nathan Hochman, to replace the odious George Gascon as District Attorney. Unlike Gascon, who has only ever been in courtrooms as a defendant in the many civil suits brought by his own prosecutors, Hochman is a seasoned federal prosecutor. Similarly, in 2022 voters on the Westside sent moderate Democrat and veteran municipal lawyer Traci Park to City Council. These are reasons for cautious hope.

MacArthur Park, and the fate of Langer’s Deli, are among the many fronts in the war for the soul of Los Angeles. The frauds and the lunatics, the Bassettis and Hernandezes, the Hugo Soto-Martinezes and Nithya Ramans and Katy “I used my maiden name like a good feminist until I needed my hubby’s family name to get elected” Yarovslavskys, they cannot be reasoned or compromised with. They have no interest in meeting in the middle. For that matter, they have no interest in serving their constituents. They are religious fanatics, fundamentalists who brook no dissent and abhor concessions. They are a California Taliban. The only option is total political war. They must be destroyed, with extreme prejudice.

On the Westside, Angelenos showed how it can be done. We waged a concerted, multiyear effort to destroy the worst city councilman in Los Angeles history, Mike Bonin. By the time we were done with him he literally could not show his face in public. His every social media post was met with a deluge of attacks. He ultimately dropped out of his own reelection campaign. The destruction was cold-blooded and complete, and good Christ was it beautiful.

The question, then, to every voter in the City and County of Los Angeles is simple: Can you replicate what happened in CD 11? What is more important to you, your own political purity or the fate of the place in which you live? Do you care more about beloved institutions like MacArthur Park and Langer’s, or blending innocuously into the crowd at your next cocktail party?

We are on the brink, Los Angeles. Compare Park’s handiwork cleaning up another cherished open space, Ballona Wetlands, with Hernandez’s dereliction at MacArthur, and ask yourself what future you want for you city, your neighborhood, and your family.

It is time. It is on you. It’s on all of us.

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