07/17/2019
My heart is broken. The beautiful 1930s art deco building near the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax was torn down to make way for Metro expansion. The building was across the street from LACMA, and the old May Co. It was the first office for L.A. Youth, the newspaper by and about teens.
I launched a non-profit teen-written newspaper on January 13, 1988 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier that administrators had the right to censor articles intended for publication in school newspapers. I scrounged for money to pay a printer for 2,500 copies. For two years I trained teen reporters at my home using an old typewriter on my kitchen table to write about issues that impacted their lives – overcrowded schools, lack of health clinics, poor public transportation, police abuse and everything else they thought was important but neglected by mainstream press.
It was time to have our own space.
Our “angel” was the James Irvine Foundation in San Francisco, which wrote a check in late 1989 for $100,000, our first truly big grant. Right away, I rented space on the top floor of the building at 6030 Wilshire. It was a small office which we grandly called The Penthouse, despite the elevator that malfunctioned for months at a time and the ceiling that leaked whenever it rained. There was even a built-in shower, which we put into service as a storage closet. We preferred to bathe at home.
The building’s advantage was its proximity to those sections of Los Angeles where our writers tended to live, though some had long bus rides to reach us. The disadvantage was having to co-exist with the panhandlers, drug addicts and petty thieves who were neighborhood fixtures.
One morning, we found a business card under the door with a note from a police officer: “We have your computer, please call.” It turned out that our office had been burglarized the night before.
I was horrified, but I had to admit our burglar was gutsy. He had climbed the outside fire escape, broken through a door and carried the computer down a rickety flight of stairs to the street. There, he hid it in the bushes while he got stoned, which proved to be his undoing.
The building was our headquarters for ten years, during which we managed to escape The Penthouse and take a larger office on a lower floor. We shared the second floor with Medical Aid for El Salvador, an organization raising funds to assist Salvadorans in their twenty-year war against a repressive leader. They frequently parked old donated ambulances in back of the building loaded with supplies they drove from Los Angeles to El Salvador.
I was in my office with Prisco Serrano, a teen journalist at L.A. Youth, when the Rodney King verdict was announced in 1992. Four L.A. police officers were acquitted by an all-white jury in Simi Valley for beating King, a black man, they claimed was resisting arrest. It didn’t take long on that warm May afternoon for violence to make its way from South Central L.A. to our mid-city office. Looting, fires, gunshots, the city was in a rebellious rage. How would we safely get out the back door as we watched marauding gangs of young people from our second story window on Wilshire Blvd. With one camera and a few film roles Prisco managed to capture a day in our city that no one would forget. He worried that the wild, Molotov-cocktail throwing gangs would see us and break down the door. “Keep shooting, it’s history and the police will be here soon,” I urged.
We soon left, tired and frightened. I dropped the film at a nearby photo lab. When I picked up the film there were compelling shots of young people smashing the May Co. windows and photos of their license plates on cars vandalizing stores. The photos were on our June cover.
We moved to a new, larger office one mile north on Third Street. Some things never change. At the new office the elevator didn’t always work, the air conditioning repeatedly blew fuses and there was mold and mildew from the rain. Browbeating landlords should not be part of a publisher’s job, I grumbled to myself.
Another ten years passed. L.A. Youth offered journalism training to more than 400 teens a year. The L.A. Times donated printing every month so our pass-on readership in schools, libraries and community agencies grew to 400,000 along with stories online. We were successful and so was the neighborhood with a new shopping center. Gentrification had arrived.
We had to move again, this time at the landlord’s request. The neighborhood claimed a trendy name, Beverly Grove. Rents soared, the recession hit us hard with smaller foundation grants and newer buildings were beyond our budget.
We closed the door in February 2013, our 25th anniversary. When I drive by the neighborhood there’s little left of the charming architecture. Instead, there’s high rise glass and cement buildings with condos, expensive shops and overpriced eateries. Social service agencies, modest businesses, middle class families are pushed to the outer city limits. Los Angeles is losing its history and warm familiarity. I miss it.
Donna Myrow, Founder and Former Publisher, L.A. Youth
