SPOTLIGHT /27″/LK1st/mike2nd

By CHRISTOPHER WOODARD

Staff Reporter

Driving down Sepulveda Boulevard used to be an adventure and not a very pleasant one.

Most any time of the day or night, it meant running into a gantlet of drug dealers, vagrants and street walkers. The boulevard was so infamous for prostitutes that vice officers were arresting men from all over the world who had heard about the area and who traveled to Van Nuys specifically to check it out.

“There was a visible prostitution problem,” said Flip Smith, a tire retailer on the boulevard. “Quite a bit of graffiti, and a lot of businesses tending not to take good care of themselves.”

Smith, the owner of Flip’s Tire Center, went door to door to businesses on the boulevard with a simple plea: Let’s get together and clean up the mess.

The owners of motels, auto-parts stores, service stations and other merchants along the boulevard did just that joining forces to create the Sepulveda Business Watch, which is getting kudos from community groups all over the city. And while the neighborhood is not crime free, it is a dramatic contrast to what it had been.

Assisted by the Los Angeles Police Department, City Council and Van Nuys Homeowners Association, the group has helped drive away the prostitutes and drug dealers. Weeds and litter have been replaced by flowers, and graffiti by freshly painted walls.

“It looks 10 times cleaner. Sepulveda Boulevard is one of the cleanest, safest streets in the Valley,” said Smith.

The clean-up effort, which has grown from a dozen participants in the beginning to some 300 today, has been such a success that the Economic Alliance of the San Fernando Valley and the LAPD are looking to expand it throughout the Valley.

“Flip put this together so effectively that they really, for all intents and purposes, wiped out crime in that neighborhood,” said Bill Allen, president of the Economic Alliance, which is in the process of preparing a brochure that explains the program and a handbook that provides merchants with do-it-yourself guidance.

Don Schultz, president of the Van Nuys Homeowners Association, said that while Sepulveda Boulevard never enjoyed the same success as nearby Van Nuys Boulevard, it had a solid business district before falling on hard times in the ’80s and early ’90s.

“Van Nuys Boulevard was a mecca for a lot of businesses before the advent of the indoor shopping malls,” said Schultz. “Sepulveda Boulevard also had businesses, but mostly it was how you got across the Valley.”

Sepulveda actually stretches from Mission Hills on the Valley’s northern edge, over the Sepulveda Pass, to Hermosa Beach on the south. For years, it was equal parts thoroughfare and business district. But as shopping malls grew in popularity, commerce along Sepulveda declined, and prostitution and crime became rampant.

Harold Peskin, who had been manager of the Carriage Inn, a hotel on Sepulveda, said that in cleaning up the boulevard, small changes made a big difference. For example, the merchants convinced the L.A. City Council to create no-parking zones in front of the many hotels that dot the boulevard making it difficult for prostitutes to solicit business.

The group also worked with the phone company to reprogram the boulevard’s pay phones so they could only make outgoing calls. As a result, drug dealers could no longer use them to take phone orders.

Meanwhile, several of the motel managers have formed a separate group to police their own operations.

“We said, ‘Listen, you can make a quick $50 (renting rooms hourly to prostitutes), but in the big picture you’re going to be out of business (due to increased police enforcement),’ ” Peskin said. “A lot of it was just educational.”

Peskin, who recently transferred to the hotel company’s corporate offices in San Diego, pointed out that the neighborhood’s hotels and motels could be marketed as affordable alternatives to $150-a-night hotels in the area and that more money can be made catering to tourists visiting Universal Studios and Magic Mountain.

Peskin’s efforts came at a time when the motel owners were also under heavy pressure from the Van Nuys Homeowners Association, which was working with the city to revoke the permits of operators who condoned prostitution.

“I’d say 80 percent of them have made a (full) turnaround,” said Smith. “We still have a couple (of motel operators) who aren’t paying attention, but we’re going to keep after them.”

Smith said one of the most effective ways he has found to encourage business owners to clean up their acts has been to simply take a snapshot of any blight, such as weeds or litter, and send the picture and a letter to the owner, pointing out the problem.

“Most people just fix it,” he said. “They don’t want to be a bad neighbor.”