Fences on Burned South-Central Lots Double as Billboards

The chain-link fence at the corner of Florence and Normandie avenues guards an empty lot that housed an auto radiator business set ablaze during the 1992 riots.

Behind the steel links, weeds now sprout. On the fence itself, other signs of life abound.

Business signs, to be precise.

As the memories of sentencings, fires and videotapes begin to fade, the fenced lots remain as billboards for a new set of hand-to-mouth businesses in neighborhoods where office space is sparse and joblessness is endemic.

If nature abhors a vacuum, so does the free-market system--unless, of course, that vacuum is being employed to help clean five carpeted rooms for $85. (“Remember,” boasts the sign, “You’ve Tried The Rest, Now Try The Best.”)

On a recent day, 42 separate placards were affixed to the fence at the intersection known across the world as epicenter of the riots--hawking services ranging from trash-hauling to bathtub-reglazing, hair-braiding to one-day diets.

“It’s like the apple vendors during the Depression,” said USC Professor Martin Krieger, a specialist in urban planning and entrepreneurship. “It’s about the fact that there’s no money around so there’s even less farther down the ladder.

“I assure you that if there were $18-an-hour jobs available, things would be different.”

Street advertising is by no means unique to South-Central Los Angeles. Paid billboards abound in Los Angeles and across the nation. On the Westside, boarded-up construction sites are often plastered with eye-catching posters advertising hot new films or record albums.

“But it’s a different kind of sign you see in south Los Angeles,” Krieger said. “Instead of selling a movie with 1,400 people getting murdered, it’s for a phone number for how to resurface your bathroom.

“It’s the desolation and the implications that are entirely different.”

The signs of South-Central Los Angeles come in myriad shapes and sizes and are in various states of repair. Some have been printed on vinyl by professional graphic firms; others are scrawled on scraps of cardboard with felt-tip pens.

To many residents and property owners in riot-ravaged neighborhoods, fences chockablock with homemade advertising serve as ugly reminders of urban blight. Yet the placards also make telling statementsabout economic and social realities.

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“I’d like to see something done about the signs,” said Alfred Willoughby as he stood at Florence and Normandie. “They’re ugly and they bring down the neighborhood.

“But I’d like to see something done about the lack of jobs too. “

Willoughby, 38, made his comments as he waited for a bus, a white smock and a pair of sneakers in his hands. He had just quit his position as a soul-food restaurant chef after a brief verbal spat with the boss. Earning only $115 a week for 72 hours of work, it just wasn’t worth the abuse, he said.

Like the missing teeth in the mouth of a hockey player, properties made vacant by the riots--more than 350 at last count--dot the city’s landscape where businesses once stood.

For entrepreneurs such as Joseph Kretchet, the lots spell opportunity.

Kretchet, whose company helps renters fight eviction notices, says he places his placards across South-Central

Los Angeles.

There’s a science to hanging them, he adds.

“When we first started, we put up cardboard signs with a wire,” said Kretchet, co-owner of Tenant Services. “But there’s always a landlord in the area who will tear down our signs or mutilate them.

“So I’ve learned over time that we have to mount them on wood with rivets. Now they’ll last, oh, anywhere from six months to a year or longer.”

Kretchet, whose ads offer “free information” to tenants facing eviction, said his best response comes from fences next to bus stops.

There, people have more than ample time to jot down his phone number, he said.

Kieko Johnson, on the other hand, says homemade signs work just fine.

Johnson braids hair to earn spending money, and at $30 a head, she’s one of the cheapest braiders in town.

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To advertise, Johnson posts corrugated paper placards on the fences of South-Central.

“Florence and Normandie, I get a lot of people from (there),” said the part-time college student. “Crenshaw and Florence is good. Normandie and Manchester is good. And I had about two people from Slauson and Crenshaw.

“I first used little bitty (pieces of cardboard) boxes. Then I started using real big boxes and a lot of people started calling because they were so visual from across the street.”

Enough, perhaps, to put a higher-priced competitor--”Individual Braids by Jane, $75”--out of business.

Jane’s sign was recently posted just a couple of feet from Kieko’s at Florence and Normandie. A call to Jane’s advertised number found her phone disconnected.

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“It’s hard times right now and women don’t want to pay that much,” Johnson said. “Since I came in, they call me and check me out first.”

Because the business signs are generally posted on private property, city officials say it is the responsibility of private property owners to deal with them. Johnson said most of her handmade signs are torn down over time. It doesn’t seem to faze her.

“I keep some in my car and just put up new ones,” she said. “What I worry is that when they rebuild all these buildings, where am I going to advertise then?”