A Cozier Vision of Cityhood

Right next to the bakery where they make Wonder Bread, in a quiet business park on the site of San Pedro’s old drive-in movie theater, a group of church volunteers, retired teachers and union members are plotting revolution.

Andrew Mardesich, an earnest nonstop talker who sometimes garbles quotes from the Founding Fathers, lays out for the gathering his vision of a community so small, so intimate that the mayor is your brother-in-law and your city councilman is the local dentist.

On this cool spring evening, Mardesich has called together the faithful, hoping to persuade 100 harbor area residents to run for office in a city that does not yet exist. Never mind that the proposed city council would have only five seats.

Together, he promises, they will help break San Pedro, Wilmington and Harbor City away from Los Angeles and make the dense, blue-collar communities into a classic American town: population, 141,000.

Such dreams are finding unprecedented sympathy throughout Los Angeles, and fueling secession movements in the harbor area, Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley that, if successful, could cut the city’s population in half.

Earlier this month a Los Angeles Times poll found that 46% of the city’s population favored letting the San Fernando Valley form its own city, and breakaway proposals for all three areas appear to be making their way toward the November ballot.

In San Pedro, in the metal and glass building near where Home Depot displaced the beloved Big C hardware store, Mardesich hopes that his recruits--who at this point number about 40--will run for the five-member city council that would be created if the region’s drive to secede is successful.

Mardesich plans to run, as does Emil Erdelez, a respiratory therapist who grew up here, and so does union electrician and environmental activist Jesse N. Marquez Jr., who hails from Wilmington.

Joe Mendez wouldn’t run because he recently moved to Torrance. But his ex-wife, Delia, plans to. She couldn’t attend the meeting, so he’s here making sure her name is on the list.

“This is all community people coming up to the table,” said Marquez, who hopes a new city will support redevelopment projects in Wilmington. “There are no political dynasties controlling this.”

The candidates are moved by a long list of grievances about life in the nation’s second-largest city: Los Angeles does little to control blight and graffiti in Wilmington. It is difficult to get the city’s attention for services such as tree trimming and paving roads. The expansionist Port of Los Angeles is strangling San Pedro and polluting the air and water. Local officials are unresponsive and hard to reach.

They are concerns echoed throughout Los Angeles. And here in the harbor area, as in Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley, supporters of secession believe that local control will provide the means to solve them.

The recent meeting was the first of several aimed at potential candidates for the proposed harbor area city council. The idea is part Jeffersonian democracy and part election strategy. It will take a majority vote in the harbor area, plus a majority citywide, for the region to secede from Los Angeles. Voters will decide on a city council and mayor for the proposed city on the same ballot.

So if 100 people run for those offices, Mardesich figures, their friends and neighbors will turn out to vote, so there will be more people to cast ballots in favor of secession.

And that, he hopes, will make it easier to defeat another San Pedro resident, Mayor James K. Hahn, and his high-powered anti-secession crusaders, who say they will raise $5 million to squash breakaway efforts in the harbor area, Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley.

The harbor area joined Los Angeles in 1909, lured by promises of better services from a big city hungry for the region’s port.

But it has always maintained its own identity. Generations of Italian, Slavic and Latino immigrants settled here, working as fishermen or at the port. Their descendants remain here, some becoming affluent and moving to the increasingly expensive hillside neighborhoods, joined over the years by members of other ethnic groups and social classes.

The area is unabashedly pro-union, with residents who go back generations in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Warehousemen and Helpers of America, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and other collective bargaining groups.

In a way, it is much like the rest of Los Angeles: this is a city of neighborhoods, after all. Angelenos say they are from Mar Vista, Studio City or some other urban pocket. Even the mail gets delivered that way.

People throughout Los Angeles frequently settle near where they grew up. The rabbi and cantor of the San Fernando Valley’s oldest synagogue, Temple Beth Hillel of Valley Village, were both confirmed there. The photos in the temple’s hallways show Rabbi James Kaufman there as a preschooler.

This sense of identity is powerful and, in an ironic twist, it defines Los Angeles as a city and provides much of the fuel behind the various secession movements.

Hahn, who argues that small-town government will not solve the city’s problems, said the very fact that Los Angeles is a string of separate, cohesive communities guarantees the access to local officials sought by Mardesich and other secession supporters.

San Pedro is the best example, Hahn said.

“They already have the mayor and the City Council member as neighbors,” said Hahn, who lives around the corner from Mardesich in north San Pedro. Hahn’s sister, Councilwoman Janice Hahn, lives a few blocks away.

“We shop in the stores and eat in the restaurants,” he said. “They have access to us.”

L.A. Viewed as a Huge and Distant Bureaucracy

The current mayor may live nearby, but Los Angeles always seemed like a huge and distant city to Roxanne Lawrence, a San Pedro resident whose planned bid for the proposed new city council would mark her first run for office.

“L.A. is just too big,” said Lawrence, a retired teacher who moved to San Pedro, as she says, “from Los Angeles” when she was 2 years old. “It’s like the federal government,” she said of the city’s bureaucracy. “You just can’t get a good response from it.”

At the meeting, several of the candidates already looked like politicians, with fresh haircuts and dark suits and red ties.

But most in attendance wore their work clothes, and looked as if they were tired after a long day. In their laps were reports detailing the latest rulings on harbor area secession by the Local Agency Formation Commission, which is overseeing the process.

The room itself was pure low-level politics: drab, with folding chairs and little decoration. Mardesich sat at the front in a checkered shirt and squarish wire-rimmed glasses next to Andrew Rafkin, also in shirt sleeves and glasses, who co-chaired the meeting and helps run the harbor secession effort.

The discussion ranged from union loyalties to pollution by the massive Port of Los Angeles, which is run by Los Angeles under a contract with the state Lands Commission.

One woman wanted to know what to tell potential constituents if they asked whether the new city would keep revenue from the port, the nation’s second busiest. The question has not yet been answered by the commission.

Mardesich suggested telling voters that the new city would get money from the port because it is likely to pick up at least some business tax revenue, if not the whole pot.

Another asked how, in a union town like San Pedro, people felt about Los Angeles’ large municipal unions opposing secession.

This caused some stir, and prompted Mardesich to disparage the Service Employees International Union, which represents 8,500 city employees, as a “pink-collar” union, representing secretaries and clerks rather than industrial workers.

“They don’t even talk union,” he said. “They don’t say ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ like we do down here.”

“Ohhhh,” several in the audience responded.

Not, somebody said, like the Teamsters or the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, to which Marquez belongs.

The Wilmington electrician and production manager seemed to be trying out his stump speech.

“I grew up poor,” he said. “There were seven of us in a one-bedroom house.... “

“He’s campaigning already!” cried Rafkin, who co-chaired the meeting with Mardesich.”

“Ya-a-ay!” the audience yelled.

Xavier Hermosillo, a former chief of staff to two harbor area assemblymen and himself an intended candidate, said the group’s vision of grass-roots democracy for the area is not so far-fetched.

“You gotta understand,” he said. “We’re different down here.”

Many in the room, he said, had known each other all their lives. So had many of the town’s business leaders. “My lawyer, my banker and my doctor are all people I went to high school with,” he said.

Last New Year’s Eve, Hermosillo said, he and his wife were driving home about 10 p.m. when they decided they wanted some old-fashioned cooking. So they called the owner of Ante’s, the venerable Serb-Croatian place in town, even though they knew he was closing up for the night.

“C’mon down,” the owner told them. “We’ll celebrate together.”

So the Hermosillos went down to Ante’s. Tony, the proprietor (the original Ante’s son) opened up for them, and by the end of the night the place was packed.

“When Andy [Mardesich] talks about a small town,” Hermosillo said, “it is possible--because we already are that way.”