L.A. opens resource centers for people who lost work in the fires
The centers, which were opened in partnership with L.A. County, offer a one-stop location where people affected by the fires can access relief funds, get help with job placement and training, look for temporary employment and apply for small business loans. They can also access emergency shelter and rental assistance and get help filing taxes at the centers, among other services.
Read more: These gardeners, housekeepers, nannies kept Pacific Palisades going. Fire took their jobs
"The other benefit of this center is that the individuals can work with staff, one on one," Bass said. "Sometimes what discourages people from getting their benefits is the application process. It's confusing, complicated, but here you can actually work with individual staff who will take you step by step through the process."
Individuals will be able to access services regardless of their immigration status.
"The fires were devastating for so many people, many who've lost their homes and family members. But there were also secondary effects — gardeners, house cleaners, healthcare workers, restaurant workers, all who have lost their jobs, live-in childcare workers who have lost both their homes and their jobs, all at once," said Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez, whose district includes Hollywood, Westlake and Echo Park.
Soto-Martínez said his office was receiving calls every day from constituents who, despite living well outside the bounds of either the Eaton or Palisades fires, still had their lives upended by the flames.
Read more: If you lost your job because of the Los Angeles fires, here are a few options
"They're now backed up on rent. They've lost income, and they need the city support," Soto-Martínez said.
The centers will be open Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at these locations:
West Los Angeles: 5446 Sepulveda Blvd., Culver City, 90230
Northeast San Fernando Valley: 13356 Eldridge Ave., Sylmar, 91342
West Adams/Leimert Park: 4305 Degnan Blvd., Los Angeles, 90008
Boyle Heights: 2130 1st St., Los Angeles, 90033
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At Glendale's renowned Casa Verdugo, the food was straight-up Mexican — tamales, enchiladas, burritos — but advertised as 'Spanish' cuisine. El Cholo, on Western Avenue, just celebrated its 100th birthday as a 'Spanish' café. There are tales of Angelenos who traveled to Spain and were astonished to find that Spanish food was not, in fact, tamales and enchiladas. Cafeterias have gone retro chic now, but L.A.'s early cafeteria craze wasn't ironic or hip. They served what working Angelenos needed: standard, middle-American comfort food at plausible prices — and, for non-working Angelenos, sometimes no price at all. Clifton's, founded in the Depression year of 1931, once ran a chain of cafeterias arguably less notable for the food — beef dishes, fried chicken, Jell-o salads — than for the elaborate décor of religious dioramas, exotic South Seas vistas, and redwood faux forests. 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The Source, on Sunset Boulevard, was launched in 1969 by a Cincinnati-born guru who called himself Father Yod. Woody Allen made fun of the place and its vibe in 'Annie Hall.' His character met Diane Keaton there and snottily ordered 'alfalfa sprouts and mashed yeast.' The food reform movement was a hit with Angelenos. The Vegetarian Café, in downtown Los Angeles, hosted a July 1901 lunch meeting of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. The menu: corn soup, beet salad, baked beans, unfermented grape juice, and sliced 'protose' with lemon. Protose was a meat substitute of wheat gluten and peanuts, cooked up by the food reformer Dr. John Kellogg, the fellow whose name you know better from a line of sometimes quite sugary cereals. In Hollywood, studios tended to lay claim to nearby restaurants almost as extensions of their own commissaries, with cocktail privileges. Paramount people adopted restaurants on Melrose: first Lucey's, and later Lucy's El Adobe, which together lasted a hundred years. Lucey's opened in 1922, and silent stars like Clara Bow showed up in limos and ordered fistfuls of caviar. Paramount artists painted the murals in the restaurant's VIP room. Lucey's headwaiter Don Avalier was reportedly 'discovered' there, and screen-tested for a bio-pic of Rudolph Valentino. He didn't get the starring role but he did get other movie parts, often playing … a headwaiter. This Lucey's closed some time in the 1950s. In 1964, the other Lucy's, the fabled Mexican restaurant, opened a little way away. It too was an actors' hangout, but celebrated as the place where governor Jerry Brown and singer Linda Ronstadt met and launched their headliner romance. That Lucy's closed in 2019, the year before Covid. More than Sunset Blvd. or Hollywood Blvd., Melrose Ave. was where the stars came out, and dined in. One of two Nickodell restaurants was nudged alongside Paramount. In 1928, it began selling affordable food to starving actors, and did so even after they were no longer starving. In 1982, Nickodell's steak sandwich with grilled onion and potatoes cost $6.95, a price you could hardly afford to duplicate at home, wrote Times food columnist Rose Dosti. Each day of the week offered a special: chicken cacciatore on Mondays, frankfurters and sauerkraut on Wednesdays, and so on. When it closed, in 1993, veteran TV actress Peggy Rea mourned its special dishes. 'From here you go into the world of alfalfa sprouts.' Our big, warm climate and our wide-open spaces made possible something that earned its own genre: mimetic architecture, whimsical buildings that look like something else, often the thing that they sell. The Brown Derby restaurant didn't sell derbies, but The Tamale, on Whittier Blvd. in East L.A., sold tamales, and the trade of Randy's Donuts in Inglewood is unmistakably doughnuts. In 1927, the 'Buffalo Times' gave us an eyeroll in print over an igloo-shaped restaurant with papier-mache icicles, a merry-go-round restaurant with revolving tables, a 'bullpen' restaurant with a live bull and waiters dressed as matadors. And it singled out the Jail Café on Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood, where the El Cid restaurant now stands. The Jail Café set tables and chairs in 'cells' for patrons served by waiters wearing trustee uniforms, presided over by a cashier dressed as a warden. When two masked men showed up there in March 1926, customers thought it was just part of the show — until the robbers fired their guns and relieved diners of about $500. The café ship 'Cabrillo' was a gigantic mimetic. Beginning in 1903, it was berthed in Venice, if you can say 'berthed' about a vessel that wasn't a real ship. Early on, and briefly, waiters were unfortunately tricked out in white wigs and satin knee breeches, a la Versailles-on-the-Venice-canals. The dishes and the prices invited a well-heeled clientele — Charlie Chaplin, Jack Dempsey, Sarah Bernhardt. Sand dabs and halibut, still edible and plentiful there, were held in a net slung under the hull and served moments later. If you preferred food with legs, there was roast pheasant and, of course, steak. The place was auctioned off down to its timbers in October 1946. Germans once had a large presence in Los Angeles, with beer gardens, restaurants, churches, and a downtown club and sports center. But as happened elsewhere in the country, much of L.A.'s public German community went to ground after May 1915, when a German U-boat sank the British ocean liner Lusitania. So it was surprising to see that when the Second World War came around, a Manhattan Beach restaurant named Little Bavaria kept its doors open. On June 8, 1942, the restaurant ran an ad in The Times touting its 80-cent home-cooked dinners. That same night, the feds raided the place, and subpoenaed its owner, a German-born naturalized citizen, and three employees. The feds said the place was possibly an 'important listening post' for German-friendly ears, considering that it was a popular lunchtime destination for dozens of workers at nearby defense plants. If by now you're still hung up on first/oldest, I direct you to the oldest surviving restaurant in L.A. County: the Saugus Café. Best birth date estimate for this railroad cafe: 1886 or 1887, and its address is now in Santa Clarita, a town that didn't even exist then, but which rallied to save the café during Covid. Why the longevity? Because fusion, flank steak, fusilli, futomaki — tastes come and tastes go. But diners are forever.