View more photos in Ted Soqui's "Inside a Filthy, Hazardous Hollywood Slum" slideshow.
Ted Soqui
Ziggy Kruse and Cindy DuHaime clean up the town.
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It’s amazing what persistence, a YouTube video and some well-timed postings on a well-read blog can do these days for neighborhood activists tired of being ignored by City Hall and a very rich, very powerful North American real estate company. Meet Cindy DuHaime and Ziggy Kruse, two women who live in Hollywood, never give up and stick it to the man.
DuHaime and Kruse are tireless community activists — DuHaime as the block captain of the Garfield Neighborhood Watch on Garfield Avenue just north of Hollywood Boulevard, and Kruse as a member of the Hollywood Studio District Neighborhood Council board.
For more than a year, DuHaime has been locked in a battle with CIM group, a real estate investment firm worth more than $1 billion with headquarters in Los Angeles; it owns the Hollywood & Highland shopping center — but also owns derelict, Third World slum–style properties on the northwest corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue, including an empty motel known as the Bon-Air and a small apartment building, both of which look bombed-out.
DuHaime lives on a lot behind these filthy, hazardous, broken-down structures that appear to have been struck by a hurricane. She’s been trying to get CIM to board up and secure the properties, and then to finally demolish them.
CIM does not lack the money to handle such a small expenditure, with properties in several major cities. It was co-founded by Richard Ressler, a former cigarette-company executive, Ivy League–educated lawyer and investment banker, and two Israeli-Americans, Shaul Kuba and Avi Shemesh, who struck up a friendship with Ressler years ago when chatting with him about his lawn.
CIM developed much of the Third Street Promenade and is now a major landlord in Hollywood, owning more than 1.7 million square feet there. It now owns the long-disappointing Hollywood & Highland shopping center, which houses the Kodak Theatre. Despite endless assurances by City Councilman Eric Garcetti and his predecessor, Jackie Goldberg, the development has soaked up vast sums of public money and enjoys a key location at a crossroads for global tourism, yet has never delivered as promised to taxpayers.
At Hollywood and Western, by contrast, homeless kids and prostitutes regularly crawl into the abandoned motel slum to camp inside. But Hollywood’s politicians have repeatedly looked the other way, and recently rewarded CIM with key help in securing a public loan of $30 million to bring Cirque du Soleil to Hollywood & Highland, several blocks away. Pushed by Garcetti, the unanimous vote of the Los Angeles City Council to hand CIM such riches has enraged many.
Meanwhile, “We have to live with this,” says DuHaime, standing outside the Bon-Air Motel.
After pleading with CIM Vice President John Given, the Department of Building and Safety and Councilman Tom LaBonge (the slum buildings are in LaBonge’s half of Hollywood, while Garcetti’s district office is about 400 feet away), DuHaime called Ziggy Kruse, whom she met at a public meeting about Hollywood redevelopment.
“After I contacted her,” DuHaime says, “everything took off. She wouldn’t stop talking about it.”
Yet Kruse didn’t get much of a response from either the city or the landowner. “You’re going to hear from the city and CIM that they’ve been ‘working with the community,’ ” says Kruse, standing with DuHaime near the Bon-Air Motel, “but it’s just not the case.”
LaBonge, for example, tells L.A. Weekly he’s been “anxious to see those buildings demolished,” but then he claims the national “economic tsunami” somehow made it difficult for CIM to handle the tear-down — an extremely tough excuse for Hollywood residents to buy.
Then there’s City Council President Garcetti, whose desk in his Hollywood district office at Western Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard looks directly down on the ravaged Bon-Air Motel. But according to his spokeswoman, Julie Wong, Garcetti decided to stay out of the controversy since the buildings are actually in LaBonge’s district.
It is this very mindset — passing the buck — that Kruse and DuHaime are fighting. They dramatically ramped up their tactics against City Hall after August 4, when Garcetti and the City Council earned themselves less-than-glowing headlines by approving a federal Housing and Urban Development (HUD) loan application that, in the midst of desperate times for small businesses in Los Angeles, will hand the giant CIM about $30 million in public money to retrofit the Kodak Theatre at Hollywood & Highland — for a new Cirque du Soleil production.
The deal came under intense criticism from bloggers, city residents and the Los Angeles Times, which wrote in an editorial that “city leaders are unable to support their optimistic claims about the CIM loan with anything but the flimsiest of evidence.”
Kruse and DuHaime jumped in. “People heard that CIM got the loan for the theater,” says DuHaime, “but they don’t know that CIM is also a slumlord. This [repair of local slum buildings] is where HUD money should go.”
