Olympian Burgers is regularly bustling with customers devouring roast chicken, cheeseburgers, and carne asada fries. The eatery at the corner of West 27th Street and South Vermont Avenue, less than a mile north of USC, is a popular lunch spot for local police.
The activity marks a happy change for owner Pete Zinelis, who said the restaurant and the intersection wasn’t so busy for a long time after the 1992 L.A. riots that damaged or destroyed around 1,000 buildings and left dozens of people dead.
Zinelis said rioters burned the front of his restaurant and broke windows, seats, and tables, causing $16,000 in property damage. Looters stole meat and equipment including cash registers during the four days of violence that broke out on April 29 after four L.A. police officers were acquitted of assault charges for the beating of Rodney King earlier that day.
Zinelis’ other restaurant, Pete’s Burgers, located about a mile east of Olympian, was untouched during the unrest. But “business was down 40 to 50 percent in both places for approximately eight months to one year,” he said, adding that people avoided the area out of fear. “Money was not so good. I was starving for two, three years.”
It took five or six years for business to get back up to speed and the community to start to forget the trauma, he said. But business is better than ever now, he noted. South Los Angeles has evolved dramatically, with more businesses moving in and USC students living further out in the neighborhoods.
“Around USC, as you go up and down Figueroa (Street) and different locations, you see there’s a lot more business and retail in the area. That has probably been the most startling change,” said Capt. Edgar Palmer, operations commander for the university’s Department of Public Safety. Palmer grew up in South Los Angeles and was at the intersection of Florence and Normandie avenues, where the riots first broke out, as a member of the Los Angeles Police Department.
But it took a long time for that change to take place. Several shops around Olympian remained vacant for almost a decade after the riots, Zinelis said. That was until nightclub owner and entrepreneur Leonardo Lopez revitalized the intersection of 27th and Vermont, purchasing and drastically renovating the buildings from 2701 to 2719 S. Vermont, according to his tenants, including Olympian.
Lopez, who is listed in records as the principal of Leba Inc., registered at Leonardo’s restaurant at 28th Street and Vermont, did not respond to requests for comment.
Lopez reportedly began buying real estate after earning a fortune through a chain of nightclubs. The businessman from Mexico is a celebrity of sorts among the local Latino community for his nightclubs and helping revitalize the Vermont corridor, according to Nicolas Nelson, a tenant in one of Lopez’s buildings.
New tenants
Many of the businesses now on the block have been there for less than 10 years. They include restaurants, hair and nail salons, a skate shop, convenience store, tutoring service, MoneyGram location, and a MetroPCS outpost. Vermont Avenue Elementary School borders the intersection to the northwest.
Zinelis said the school has been around before Olympian opened in 1988 and was also destroyed during the riots.
Nelson has run Wordsmith Writing Coaches at 2716 S. Vermont for six years. A longtime resident of South Los Angeles, he recalls driving through the intersection where his business is now located before Lopez initiated renovations.
“The stores were a wreck,” he said. “I didn’t go in there. You take a peek and say, Yeah, I’m not going in there. Electrical wires hanging down. Things were dirty and broken. It needed a lot more than a coat of paint.”
For Nelson, the intersection of 27th and Vermont is a good place for business because of its convenient location near USC and the 10 freeway. He coaches students from the university as well as clients from as far away as Alhambra.
“Because I’m close to the 10, (a client) doesn’t mind hopping in his car and driving over to my office,” he said.
USC’s Palmer said all the businesses moving in have improved his quality of life. His neighborhood is much more walkable. At the time of the riots, he used to drive over four miles to get to a shopping center.
“There was nowhere for me to go,” he said. “If you wanted the nicer things, you wound up driving further out. Having grown up here and lived here most of my life, I’m really proud of the turn that Los Angeles has made. That was a dark time. To go from that to where we are now, I’m actually proud of that.”
