When he was a boy of 12 or so, and his parents were busy running the family restaurant, Norm Langer spent hours across the street in MacArthur Park. It was, at the time, an elegant urban oasis, with lollipop palms standing over a lake fed by natural springs. “I grew up in the park,” Langer said, seated in a booth at the famous deli he now owns at 7th and Alvarado streets. “I’d play in the park, go for boat rides, take naps. There was this whole area on the 7th Street side where older people played shuffleboard, backgammon, gin, all kinds of card games.” Today, that carefree boy of yesteryear is 79.
…
And the park of Langer’s childhood, which dates to the 1880s, no longer exists. It hasn’t for decades, and residents and police told me the long-festering urban nightmares — crime, extortion of local merchants by gangs, encampments, sales of stolen goods by street vendors, and rampant, out-in-the-open drug activity — have reached new levels in the impoverished neighborhood of mostly Latino immigrants.
Not long ago I came upon a zombie-like scene of contorted people gathered in the northwest corner of the park, their bodies rigid from overdoses of fentanyl or other killer drugs. That’s two blocks away from Langer’s Deli, and I thought about him, and how disorienting it can be to grow old in a world unlike the one we remember or the one we imagined.
“I’m considering closing,” Langer told me, even though he considers his customers and employees “100% safe,” perhaps in part because uniformed cops frequent his deli and the southeast corner of the park is relatively calm.