Vendors Bring New Way of Life to Los Angeles Streets : Entrepreneurs: Their future, and nature of the city, are on the line as council vote on legalization nears.

On the streets of Los Angeles you drive past people who have come here looking for something--something they haven’t found yet; people trying to sell you something--something you don’t really need.

Lime green leopard-skin-patterned fake sheepskin auto seat covers. Plaster-of-Paris busts of Cleopatra and Beethoven. Framed posters of Michael Jordan. Zebra rugs. Paisley pillows. Bags of peanuts. Popsicles.

And, of course, oranges--bags of oranges swinging from young men’s hands like signals at seemingly every freeway off-ramp.

Almost all of it is illegal. But for the first time in recent Los Angeles history, some of this flourishing trade could gain official sanction next month, when the City Council is scheduled to debate the licensing of street vendors.

The tempest in a pushcart raging around the issue mirrors a much broader debate on the nature of Los Angeles:

Is the city destined to be an urban, polyglot capital of the Third World, nurturing a crazy quilt of hundreds of cultures bringing their habits to its streets? Or can it somehow again become a staunch bastion of suburban values, including the separation of house and mall--a haven for escapees from colder, more crowded cities who cherish the tidy over the teeming, uniformity over diversity, signage in English and produce in sanitary plastic wrap?

For those who value the second set of ideals, reality already has overtaken their paradise.

The city’s thousands of street vendors are Guatemalan and Korean, African-American and Iranian. They have taken over boulevards trashy, brutish and long--streets largely deserted by the well-heeled, who whiz past on their way to curving suburban drives and climate-controlled shopping centers.

On these open-air gallerias, the merchants sell according to traditions most of them brought with them from somewhere else. Many come from Latin-American cultures where the life of the street--the crowds and food smells and wares spilling onto sidewalks--is the very heart of the community.

Some call this street life the vitality of a great metropolis, the portent of vibrant entrepreneurship. Others say it’s urban chaos produced by an all-engulfing immigrant population explosion.

To Dora Alicia Alarcon, a mother of five who makes $30 a day selling Christmas cards at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Western Avenue, the cultural debate is moot. This is one of the few ways she can make a living.

“Thanks to God I have work,” she says in Spanish.

But to Gertrude Schwab of Wilmington, the Dora Alicias of the world don’t belong on the sidewalks of Los Angeles.

“We’re getting to be a Third World country,” says the long-time homeowner, who has taken her complaints to Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores. “It’s nasty. It’s not clean. . . . They set up outside like a fruit market. They’re selling pillows on a stick. They’re going door to door selling tamales. It’s disgusting.”

The question, it seems, is whether Los Angeles is a city like any other, where people meet to buy and sell on the street, or, rather, some kind of non-city--somehow different, somehow better.

More than 50 years ago, Los Angeles leaders decided it was different. Not for Los Angeles were sidewalks crowded with peddlers and jobbers, the hustle and bustle of huddled masses actually displaying their yearnings to make a living on the street.

By the 1930s, the city fathers had passed Municipal Ordinance 40.00, Section D. Ringing more of pre- perestroika Moscow than a great capital of commerce, it states:

“No person . . . shall on any street offer for sale, solicit the sale of, announce by any means the availability of, or have in his possession, control, or custody . . . any goods, ware or merchandise which the public may purchase at any time.”

That rule makes Los Angeles one of the few major metropolises in the world that, at least on paper, absolutely forbids vending on its sidewalks (with the exception of newspapers). Paris, Tokyo, Washington and New York either license or tolerate sales of food and goods in public spaces.

Los Angeles’ uniquely Draconian restriction on commercial activity was apparently designed to maintain the city’s vision of itself as an urban suburb. But now, with the reality of street vending overwhelming the letter of the law, the City Council is considering the legalization and licensing of one of the few sectors of the economy that is flourishing in hard times.

The ordinance proposed by Councilman Michael Woo would license rather than outlaw vendors of food and other goods, impose standards of hygiene and taxation and charge license fees to pay for enforcement personnel.

“The unoccupied streets of Los Angeles are a criminally wasted resource, given the weather and our ethnic diversity,” says Woo, who established a city task force on vending last year. “We should be encouraging these people to work for a living.”

Some residents plan to fight Woo tooth and nail, calling his plan a basic violation of the Los Angeles ideal. To many homeowners, civilization demands that commerce be confined to malls--or at least stores with roofs.

“Michael Woo thinks (street vending’s) quaint,” gripes homeowner Schwab. But to her and many others, street vending is only the most galling of many signs of a coming immigrant apocalypse.

“Everything’s going wrong in L.A.,” Schwab grouses. “They let in all these people and they are bankrupting our health system and our schools. They are coming here and having babies and taking advantage of the medical system. People here are getting laid off. Why don’t they stop these people from coming over in the first place?”

Julie Jaskol, a spokeswoman for Woo who worked on the vending task force, has little patience with such sentiments. “The people complaining about street merchants are the descendants of pushcart vendors on the Lower East Side (of New York),” she says.

There are other ironies in the battle.

Many of the merchants of Olvera Street, the downtown tourist attraction designed to resemble a Mexican market, are opposed to legalizing the kind of trade their grandparents once engaged in at the same location.

These second- and third-generation Mexican-Americans think the Salvadorans and newer Mexican immigrants who have invaded Olvera Street in recent years, selling tamales and lemonade from carts and boxes, offer unsanitary goods and take business from their tidy kiosks.

Like many other rent-paying, taxpaying merchants, the Olvera Street business people argue that it is unfair that the street vendors--whom the task force estimated at 2,000 to 3,000 citywide--compete without contributing to city services.

Two years ago, they asked the police to clear out 70 or so illegal vendors. Now, Vivien Bonzo, president of a merchant’s association, is trying to persuade her members that they should support legalization on a trial basis. But she admits it won’t be easy.

“My pitch to merchants is: ‘Once your grandparents were in the same situation, and somebody had to help them.’ ” But, she acknowledges, “there has been friction.”

The attitudes of street vendors and their neighbors often are worlds apart. What is illegal in Los Angeles is second nature in most of the world.

The failure of immigrants to comprehend the “criminal” nature of their enterprise is apparent, for example, in the file of accused at the Los Angeles City Department of Buildings and Safety, which is in charge of stopping illegal sales from private property. (Police, when they have time, which is rarely, are in charge of keeping sidewalks clear.)

Under a red and white sign that says CITATIONS, inspector Steve Beltran pulls down a long cardboard box filled with hundreds of 4-by-6-inch yellow warnings and citations--and pictures of the violators who weren’t able to produce a photo ID.

They smile and grimace and mug at the camera in a David Hockney-style composite Polaroid portrait of L.A. street life.

A shameless young man poses boldly in front of his carpets. A woman, looking chagrined as a child caught at the cookie jar, guards a pile of stuffed animals on a patch of gas station asphalt. A seatcover seller toasts the camera with his plastic foam cup. An old woman, a broad intersection splaying out behind her, grins at all the attention directed at her and her mangoes.

And there are lots of battered white vans. So much of the stuff seems to spill out of white vans.

In reality, according to sources on the streets and in the wholesale district near Skid Row, the street merchants fall into several distribution systems.

There are the women--usually mothers--who come from El Salvador and Guatemala and have experience selling at markets in their own countries. These independent businesswomen sell sliced mangoes, children’s clothing and toys they’ve bought from Korean and Chinese wholesalers around Los Angeles Street downtown or from the wholesale produce market at 9th and Alameda streets. Vermont Avenue and the Pico-Union district are among their favorite haunts, and they make $30 to $40 a day.

There are the young men from Mexico and Guatemala, often new to street sales, who are hired to sell oranges at freeway off-ramps on commission. Their employers--who are said to keep an iron grip on these workers--buy second-rate oranges or, according to some reports, pull them out of the trash at the downtown wholesale produce market. On good days, the men make about as much as the mango women, but don’t risk their own capital.

There are the rug sellers, about 250 men from Iran, Arab countries and elsewhere who buy from one of two wholesalers--an Armenian in Glendale or an Iranian who works out of a building marked “Dave’s Hardware/International Rugs” in South-Central Los Angeles. Most of these vendors have business licenses and pay at least some taxes. On weekends the rug sellers operate nearly permanent “stores” anywhere there is an empty lot with a chain-link fence.

Then there are the African-Americans who buy prints and clothes from wholesalers downtown. They sell in corners of gas stations and other locations in black neighborhoods, providing much-needed retailing for areas poorly served by major stores. Some are independent and some are organized by Muslim groups.

One black merchant marketing pictures and flower vases from a corner of a Mid-City gas station says he’s a “civil servant” from Monday to Friday, but sells on weekends, because he can’t survive and make child support payments on his 9-to-5 pay. He says he earns $150 a weekend, working outside because the Koreans who run swap meets won’t rent him space.

Down the road, Martin, 23, is selling roses. He came from Cleveland seeking the bright lights of Hollywood and ended up lugging a 50-pound bucket of flowers, selling on commission for his employer, a small entrepreneur.

What does Los Angeles look like to a young black man standing at the side of the road, hawking roses at a dollar a pop?

“A lot of scared people out there,” he says. “People see me, and they roll up the windows, lock the doors. I used to take it personally, but not anymore.”

On this same street, Rufino is selling fruit as well as flowers. He says he came to the United States from Puebla, in central Mexico, to work in a garment factory. But given the chance to work outdoors, he chose this job, working for a man who drops him off every morning and lets him keep 30% of his gross, from which he is trying to save for a house back in Mexico.

Downtown, on a corner of 4th Street in the wholesale toy district, Nathan is trying to sell fancy skateboards to anyone who walks by.

After he left Iran at 17, the young man sold rugs in New York, Texas, Chicago, Hawaii and Seattle before coming to Los Angeles. Most other places, he sold door to door; in Hawaii, he snagged Japanese tourists on the streets and took them to his van. But the chain-link fences around empty lots provide a natural display area here.

With the money he saved selling rugs, Nathan bought a 48-foot container of Chinese skateboards for $37,000. A year later, he still hasn’t unloaded them all and is thinking of returning to the rug trade.

Mario is a rival of Nathan’s who once nearly got into a fistfight with him over a prime fence-side location. A Greek-Italian from Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, N.Y., he sells rugs by bullying and cajoling customers with a New York flair.

“I came (to Los Angeles) for the fun, the sun--the usual,” he says. “New York is Old World, the past.” But with a significant poke of his finger into your arm, he adds: “Los Angeles is like a big ocean full of fish and nobody to catch you if you drown.”

Like Nathan, Dora Alicia, the Christmas card seller from El Salvador, values her independence, even if it means uncertainty.

After working her way up from jobs as a domestic and a garment factory laborer, she became an independent businesswoman. Investing $1,300 in loans and savings, she bought a cart that meets Health Department standards for selling cut fruit. But the police won’t let her keep it on the sidewalk.

Undaunted, she’s switched to greeting cards, and says she is proud of her business, even though she spent a night in jail after a police sweep of street vendors.

The main thing is, she never wants to work for somebody else again. “I am not friendly to being exploited,” she says.

She’s even going into politics. Dora Alicia is president of a 500-member association of mostly Central American, mostly female merchants with an agenda--the legalization of street vending.