LA County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky: Eating it up on the Expo Line
Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky’s news blog has an interesting new story about the potential impact on businesses along the new Expo Line, slated to open in April-May of this year. The story includes a comparison to the impact the Red Line opening in 1994 had on Langer’s Delicatessen-Restaurant:
They dubbed it the Pastrami Express. When the Red Line subway came to Langer’s MacArthur Park neighborhood in 1994, offering a convenient way for downtown workers to get their pastrami-on-rye fix, it touched off a transit-driven boom for the legendary delicatessen, family-owned since 1947.
After an inaugural weekend of free rides on the new subway, deli owner Norm Langer showed up Monday and was met with a miraculous sight: customers, by the hundreds.
“I had 500 people on a waiting list,” he recalled. It was a welcome turnaround for a business suffering at the time from demographic shifts and high crime in the neighborhood. “My light at the end of the tunnel was the Red Line,” he said. “If it didn’t open, we would have closed.”
Today, business is better than ever in a revitalized neighborhood, Langer said, continuing to marvel at the Red Line effect. “It’s phenomenal. And it gets better over the years because there are more lines that tie into it. We’ve had a great resurgence of our customer base because of it.”
