Residents Accept Gas Leak With an Easy Air

Across 3rd Street from the ghostly Park La Brea Shopping Center, Ida Visotsky spent her day making the usual array of bulging corned beef, ham and roast beef sandwiches at her open-air stall in the Farmers Market. The nearby gas leak had frightened her a bit, but only a bit.

“The Farmers Market is here to stay. . . . It’s not going to blow up,” she said with the knowing assurance of someone who has “been here for going on 19 years.”

Spreading some mustard on rye, she offered a theory about why methane gas periodically creeps into Fairfax District buildings erected atop old oil fields. “It’s nature saying, get away and leave things alone,” she explained--Mother Nature’s protest, if you will, against the concrete and stucco that blankets an area once traversed by Indians and coyotes.

Only a cluster of parked fire trucks and the yellow police ribbons sealing off several blocks of 3rd Street in front of the market indicated that something was awry Tuesday. Otherwise it was business as usual at the market, a 55-year-old institution that caters to busloads of tourists as well as many of the elderly from neighborhoods nearby.

Grace Crandall, who lives on nearby Hauser Street, calmly ate her fish and chips during one of her thrice-weekly shopping trips to the market, a sprawling assemblage of food and gift stalls housed in steepled, wooden buildings.

“It hasn’t concerned me really. All I think about is the subway stuff,” she said, explaining that she was far more concerned about the dirt and inconvenience of planned Metro Rail construction than about methane gas shifting about beneath her neighborhood.

Bruce Teppo, manager of a Valu-Rite drug store evacuated because of the gas scare, was equally sanguine as he stood across the street from his closed store: “As long as I don’t see smoke and fire, I have no problem with it at all.” The morning’s evacuation, he added, “just means somebody’s detection devices are working all right and they’re on top of it.”

After briefly opening his shop, Eva’s Bakery, Walter Wright was told to leave. “All of my baked goods are a day old now,” noted an unhappy Wright, bemoaning the fact that he will have to sell his bread and cookies at half price when he reopened. “I’m going to lose a lot.”