3 Years After Quake, Lunch Is Served

A broad smile crept across Allan Weiner’s face as he leaned against a serving window in the lunch pavilion at Cleveland High School on Wednesday.

A throng of students swarmed around the affable assistant principal as they rushed to the windows to place their lunch orders--something they hadn’t done since the 1994 Northridge earthquake toppled the pavilion.

For the first time in more than three years Wednesday, students ate lunch and socialized in the refurbished pavilion, which was officially reopened earlier in the day at a ceremony attended by school personnel, Los Angeles Unified School District officials and a representative from Los Angeles City Councilwoman Laura Chick’s office.

“It’s just as important for kids to have a social experience as it is for them to have an academic experience,” Weiner said. “What students need is a central place on campus that they can call their own.” With the reopening of the pavilion, Weiner said, students can begin to feel reconnected to one another and to their school.

The pavilion had been the social center on the 37-acre campus, where students ate, listened to announcements broadcast over the public-address system, assembled for school events and chatted with peers. But all that came to an abrupt end on Jan. 17, 1994, when the 6.7 temblor leveled the structure. While administrators lobbied school district and Federal Emergency Management Agency officials for funds to fix the building, students and food service workers made do with what they had.

The cordoned-off pavilion served as a backdrop for a makeshift cafeteria under a tent in an adjacent parking lot. Six times a day--during breakfast, midmorning break and lunch--mostly women cafeteria workers rolled 200-pound warming ovens out of the kitchen, down a ramp to the parking lot, served students and then pushed them back up the ramp to the kitchen.