Romero was treated like anything but a hero. In 1996, his landlord sold the cluster of bungalows on Las Palmas Avenue, and the new owner doubled Romero's rent from $600 a month to $1,200. Romero was forced to abandon his dramatic but unsung quest to create a livable community. He and his family moved to then-affordable North Hollywood.
Five years later, in 2001, Garcetti took over from Goldberg on the City Council. He was 30, fresh-faced and eager to move forward with a new kind of politics that would put residents, not big-moneyed special interests, first.
Ted Soqui
Ted Soqui
Leon Gubler, Hollywood Chamber of Commerce president
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Community activist Ferris Wehbe, who spearheaded the unsuccessful Hollywood secession movement in the early 2000s, supported Garcetti then and backs him today. "Eric played a big role" in turning around Hollywood, Wehbe says. "He saw that good changes took place. You need good leaders to make decisions and not try to please everyone."
By the mid-2000s, land speculation in Hollywood turned into a frenzy. In 2003, Ralph Horowitz and developer Larry Worchell bought historic Columbia Square on Sunset Boulevard, the West Coast home of CBS, for a reported $15 million. Three years later, Horowitz and his partner sold the property to Las Vegas–based developer Molasky Pacific for $66 million. That land flipping, and the breathtaking $51 million profit for Horowitz and Worchell, were fed by the widely held belief that Garcetti, now the powerful arbiter of what could and couldn't be built, would let developers ignore the neighborhood's longtime height limit of a few stories to build a skyscraper.
About the same time, Mercedes Cortes' landlord sold her building to Prime West Management chief executive officer Mercedes Anaya. In 2004, when the eviction notice arrived, Cortes was paying $450 a month. Although she had divorced, her three adult sons still lived with her and she enjoyed a vibrant social life as an active member of Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church.
She drove each day to clean houses in West Hollywood or Beverly Hills. At 61, she fought eviction. She eventually won a settlement that paid her some "relocation" expenses, and she and two of her sons found a place far from home, in North Hollywood.
About 20 of her Latino friends and acquaintances were similarly pushed out of Hollywood, she says. A neighbor still living in the flatlands recently told Cortes that her old $450 rental now goes for $1,200.
In the legal battle that ensued, Anaya claimed in 2004 that Cortes' sons were heavy-drinking gang members and nuisances. When that didn't work, says Cortes' lawyer Marty O'Toole, Anaya's lawyers claimed that Cortes didn't respond to a three-day notice that demanded she pay her rent or vacate. The landlord did not respond to emails requesting comment.
During the six-month legal battle to keep her apartment, Cortes formed a prayer group with her friends at Blessed Sacrament. "I was asking for justice," she recalls. "Because if I lost the case, I would've been in the streets."
Her prayers were partly answered. Just before the trial, Anaya's lawyers offered Cortes five months of free rent and several thousand dollars if she moved out. Emotionally drained, she took the deal.
Not long after her battle, several blocks away, Roy Maule and his Latino neighbors faced their own war against eviction on tree-lined Camerford Avenue in a quaint bungalow complex built in 1912 for actors working at Paramount Pictures.
Many of Maule's neighbors — mostly Latino families — had lived on the quiet block, near tony Larchmont Village, for decades. "It was great," says Maule. "Everyone knew each other."
They traditionally closed the street to celebrate Fourth of July, with adults lighting fireworks and kids running around. One day, a young man walked up to Maule's mailbox and snatched a package sticking out of it. Maule's neighbors, he recalls, "gave chase, got the package and beat up the guy. ... The poor guy didn't know he was in a neighborhood like that."
But the property was sold, and around 2006, the landlord made clear he wanted the families gone. Neighbors from Mexico and Central America told Maule that the landlord had threatened to make calls to federal immigration officials. Other tenants were offered money to leave.
But Maule hired a lawyer to fight his eviction and wrote to Garcetti's office for help. He did his own homework, finding in a title search that Santa Monica-based developer Watt Genton Associates owned the property.
Maule says Garcetti "did nothing," and at least 150 people were displaced from the bungalows and adjacent apartment units. In 2007, Maule was paid relocation money to leave, and the city put its political weight behind the developer, with the City Planning Commission and Garcetti backing his demolition of the historic bungalows and newer apartment buildings to create luxury condos for affluent professionals.
Today, the corner property stands barren, a victim of the economic disaster that struck the nation, and the historic bungalows are long destroyed. A new plan calls for a luxury apartment complex with ground-floor retail. Developer Jonathan Genton and Watt Commercial Properties executives declined to take questions from the Weekly.
"Here it is five years later," Maule says. "There's nothing."
Manny Romero says it's a maddening scenario he has seen over and over in Hollywood: "There are many, many people like us."
