Cone-crazy valet commandeers Abbot Kinney Boulevard

It’s Sunday evening in Venice and, as usual, there’s no place to park on Abbot Kinney Boulevard — though there’s lots of empty curb space. Sorry, that’s private parking for Hal’s Bar & Grill. Huh?

United Valet Parking has coned off nearly a block’s worth of parking spots on the east side of Abbot Kinney between California and Andalusia Avenues on behalf of Hal’s, seizing — then selling — un-metered Los Angeles city street. I paced off fifty-five yards in United’s boulevard blockade, enough space to park 11 average American cars.

It’s completely illegal of course, but United has been commandeering the boulevard outside Hal’s for months. When caught in the act of coning the street in December, United’s valet threw karate kicks at me and my camera as I tried to catch him in the act.

Welcome to Hal’s. No photo or I kick you! Hiyyyyyyh-ya! Oh — and try the steak.

The whole story, as heard on TalkRadio 790 KABC…

Playback The Peter Tilden Morning Show: Venice Valet Steals Street
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“…and we should have three or four valets on duty on weekends,” Hal’s Don Novack told me Monday morning between profuse apologies, pinning the blame on United’s under-staffing.

“We told them to stop,” Novack says of the street-hogging, “but they won’t.” Why not change valets? “We’re under contract,” he shrugs.

So one lonely recessionista valet is left standing at Hal’s podium. Unable to abandon his post to hunt for car stashes in parking-poor Venice, he executes his street-stealing scheme just before dusk, waiting — cone in hand— to claim another spot soon as he eyeballs someone heading for their parked car. A cone here, another there. In an hour or two much of Abbot Kinney Boulevard has been captured. Hal’s personal parking lot. You wanna piece?

What a sweet racket! Hal’s customers park their own vehicles then pay for the privilege of doing so on a slice of free city street. Valet boy simply stands on the sidewalk laying cones and pocketing cash — no longer required to slip behind the wheel of a strange-smelling car and actually park it. Is he really a valet? Or simply a grifter selling the street in a snappy red vest? Literally, a street dealer.

10am Monday morning. I’m in the Culver City offices of United Valet, glancing uneasily at a vested mannequin making odd gestures next to a giant company logo in the firm’s uncomfortably stark reception area. United Valet’s president Kenny Mohammadi Sabet is nowhere to be found. I’m told he’s opening a new location out of town. Where? United refuses to say. Available to speak when? April.

City officials say United is one of several parking operators that owe millions in back taxes to cash-strapped Los Angeles. Maybe that’s why Kenny won’t return my calls.

But Don Novack did.

“United just phoned and told me they’re firing the valet,” Don tells me minutes after I’d left United’s office. Oh, great. To appease a mild case of media outrage, the little guy at the end of the food chain, who probably had nothing to do with his company’s under-staffing, takes the fall. Bad valet!

And what about guys like this Hal’s customer who paid United to park on a street the City of Los Angeles has decreed as free? Has he purchased stolen property? You reading this, Carmen Trutanich? Are we talking possible criminal charges?

The problem is rogue valets who are equally cool with mounting counterfeit valet zone signage on city power poles. This, when they’re not looting your meter change, stuffing your car into a tow-away zone or ripping up a parking ticket you won’t see ’till it’s overripe and bursting with late penalties. FYI, “valet zones” are illegal in Los Angeles. The only city-authorized valet areas lay between those waist-high white passenger loading zone signs poled into the sidewalk. All else is fraud, folks.

Now that rogue tow trucks have been leashed, LA eagerly awaits a new valet parking ordinance commissioned by City Council in December and currently under draft in the City Attorney’s office.

Like Pasadena, Santa Monica and Beverly Hills, LA will soon license valets who must pass criminal background checks and post proof of insurance. They must also prove they have available parking spaces if they want to play valet.

Now for those counterfeit valet zone signs at the restaurant down the street.

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“Best fledgling democracy this side of Baghdad” quipped a resident after his first voting encounter with the 5 year-old Venice Neighborhood Council. “We’ve got long lines, confusing ballots, screaming matches. Now, someone’s taking the uncounted ballots home for the night. We’ve got everything but purple ink on our fingers.”

No sectarian violence either as stakeholders turned out in record numbers Saturday, approving initiatives that would expel the motorized homeless from their ‘hood. Voters refused to overturn an earlier neighborhood council endorsement of overnight permit parking districts.

Some Venetians said they were driven solely by parking frustrations and reluctant to impact the already hard-hit homeless. Still, the measures they approved would drive homeless vehicle-dwellers from Venice streets under threat of heavy fines — without offering parking alternatives. Voters also affirmed the rights of residents to set parking restrictions for individual blocks.

Lines of voters stretched for blocks on three sides of the Los Angeles Public Library’s Venice branch for much of the afternoon, some waiting 90 minutes or longer to weigh in on the issue.

Council president Mike Newhouse defended the narrow three-hour voting window that began at 12:30 p.m. saying it created a low-impact day that encouraged volunteer participation. Volunteers we spoke with, however, said they were fully prepared to stay as long as necessary. Some said they had earlier urged the council to lengthen the voting. Critics dismissed the vote as flawed, failing to accommodate absentees and working Venetians.

Many voters said they were flummoxed by the wording of the initiatives. “Nearly half looked at the ballot and wanted to know what the referendums meant,” said one volunteer. “The way the issues were written was really hard to figure. I had no choice but to tell voters that we were not permitted by law to explain anything. I’m not sure how many knew what they were voting for.”

Then came a ballot shortage followed by an emergency Xerox run to print more. At 3:30 p.m., voters were no longer allowed to join the still blocks-long line. But as voting dragged on, prospects for a same-day tally looked doubtful. The council descended into hysterics as it debated its options. President Mike Newhouse was nowhere to be found.

“They were screaming at each other!” said an eyewitness. “They were saying, ‘Take the ballots home uncounted? You can’t do that!’ It got very angry. There were threats — people wanting to throw others out, people threatening to call the police. It was bad.”

More on all this at Tibby Rothman’s Venice Paper.

Ultimately, the council acquiesced to member Ian Spiegel’s suggestion that completed ballots spend the night in signed, sealed boxes at a council member’s home. Blank ballots would be sent home with a second member. Sunday morning, three boxes each containing some 500 completed ballots arrived at council headquarters still wrapped in tape with signatures intact. Results were tallied, certified and released late Sunday afternoon.

So who will control parking on Venice’s parking-poor streets? If these referendums stick, it’s folks able to pay for permits for themselves, visitors and guests. Apart from the homeless, the overnight parking district issue has also pitted block against block, neighbor against neighbor, in a battle over preferential parking. Those living on Venice’s walk streets and Boardwalk will not be able to vote on OPD designation in their neighborhoods. Like Saturday’s election, democracy is selective — some may vote, others may not.

For City Councilman Bill Rosendahl, the sale of permits and visitor passes along with fines generated by the new parking rules mean a new source of revenue for City Hall, fees that “may soon go up” according to L.A.’s Department of Engineering which says the yearly tab will more than double:

Bottom line: A residence with three permitted vehicles and two visitor passes buys 50 one-time guest permits over the course of 12 months. That’s $338 for on-street parking the year. Rosendahl, who has spent his first term monetizing virtually every available parking spot in Venice, successfully urged L.A.’s Bureau of Engineering to dismiss more than 100 appeals filed by Venice residents challenging OPD approval.

And the homeless? Rosendahl talks vaguely of parking zones in industrial and sparsely populated areas, though no such facilities exist now or are planned for the foreseeable future. Currently up for reelection, Rosendahl seems unlikely to side with homeless over homeowners on this emotional issue, especially residents claiming syringes, urine and feces are routinely dumped in their yards by the vehicular homeless. (None have yet offered proof of the alleged points and poo.)

In-vehicle living is illegal in L.A., though difficult to to enforce effectively despite accounts of cops rousting the sleeping homeless. Overnight parking zones would require homeless RVs, vans and cars to leave Venice streets — by 2am each morning or face stiff fines — an anywhere-but-here solution.

Regardless of voters’ individual motives, Saturday’s vote was a wake-up call for a neighborhood council ill-prepared to handle large scale elections and community involvement. Some Venetians are calling for a new vote, though Saturday’s balloting is largely symbolic.

The final decision will be made by the California Coastal Commission following hearings in Marina Del Rey in March. CCC has for decades rejected permit parking in Venice, fearful of limiting beach access by the general public. Inside observers feel that position is unlikely to change.

All of this has had me looking into L.A.’s past for historical perspective.

What do you suppose Ma Joad might think of the campaign to boot homeless car and RV-dwellers out of Los Angeles neighborhoods?

After all, the matriarch of John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath knew a thing or two about hard times, and how foreclosure — then and now — can force a family into a life on the streets in a rolling, run-down wreck like the Joads’ old Hudson truck.

Ma might say not much has changed in 70 years for folks struggling to find a home and steady job. In 1936, 136 LAPD officers were dispatched to sixteen locations along California’s borders where they erected legally-questionable “bum blockades” and shooed away homeless dustbowl Okies — anywhere but here.

What’s so different today? Chasing away the homeless is no longer a pricey law enforcement budget item. Now, the City of Los Angeles has figured out how to turn homeless-rousting into a municipal profit center. That’s progress for ya.

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Iggy Pop, so the story goes, coined the classic quip that cheekily sums up Venice Beach, California. “Where The Debris Meets the Sea” still works if you include the medical marijuana shills hawking kush, the near-naked snake charmer and those massive hip-hop thugs poking a finger in your chest and strongly suggesting you buy their CDs, bro.

But Venice is so ho-hum compared to the good old days when death strolled the Boardwalk, bodies were frequently separated from their parts, and the heady scent of elephant poo hung heavy in the ocean air.

From Ted Shaffrey by way of Anna Sigueiros’s blog…
After a beautiful lion tamer was mauled, a fat lady married a local boy and a Filipino headhunter applied as Venice dogcatcher — offering to do the job for free if he was allowed to keep the dogs — city fathers had enough. Wintering circuses were tossed out of Venice for “spreading disease and low moral character.”

So where’s today’s tabloid tragedy? What happened to the carnival grief Venice once slathered on visitors like so much suntan oil? Hometown historian Jeffrey Stanton has accumulated dozens of Horrendous Amusement Park Accidents from Venice and vicinity, each a gruesome tale of fun gone horribly wrong.

November 20, 1915
Woman Severely Bitten by Reptile! Cleo Frasee, alligator farm handler, is severely bitten by an enraged 6–foot reptile when she steps on its tail in the night. Beast chomps down on Frasee’s right thigh.

November 4, 1918
 Captive Bear on Windward Pier Mangles Girl to Death! Kiddie is grabbed by one of two cinnamon bears as she passes their cage near the end of the pier. Hungry bear rips off two-year old Titania Corrine Willard’s leg as 100 helpless passers-by gasp in horror. Tot’s last words: “Kiss me, Daddy.”

July 2, 1927
 Diving Horse Dead, Show Canceled!
Prize horse “Lightning” making practice jumps from a 40-foot tower on Lick Pier gets disoriented, starts paddling for China. Lifeguards swim out 500 yards with flotation cans, eventually pull the tuckered-out horse to shore but cannot resuscitate it. Owner’s daughter is distraught, Lightning’s worth placed at $20,000. Act is pulled from pier.

July 18, 1929
 Ocean Gives Up Body of Ride Victim! Teenage corpse floats ashore at Raymond Avenue. Toby Etersic, 14, dropped to his death on the night of July 8th when he stood up on the High Boy roller coaster.

July 27, 1935
 Human Cannon-Ball Death Probed! W.C. Miller, 24, dies in his first boy-bullet attempt at Ocean Park Pier. Hurled in a graceful arc 150 feet into the Pacific, W.C.’s rigid body smacks against a wave, pops to the surface, disappears into the deep.

Yup, all gone. The chicken wire and plaster attractions, the clattering deathtrap rollercoasters — never to return in this era of OSHA and pricey liability. The old piers burned to salty ash in spectacular sacrificial flames. Gone, too, are the gambling dens in sketchy Bridgo parlors while our local snake charmer now fakes it with rubber pythons.

Hasn’t something been lost? Don’t we now play it a just little too safe? Give me the days when bible-thumping evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson faked drowning in the Venice Beach surf, when theme park thrills were drop-dead serious and death-defying stunts weren’t always a sure thing. Seriously, doesn’t anyone sing duck duets anymore?

Gus Visser and His Singing Duck (1925) featured in the video above, is from the delightful DVD “Discovering Cinema” from Flicker Alley.

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