In the 9th, Recalling Lindsay’s Long Reign

Cornelius Green was sitting in a barber’s chair the morning he heard of his benefactor’s death. As the scissors snipped his snowy hair, Green remembered the day he met Gilbert Lindsay. Had it really been 35 years?

Green had been laid off at the old General Motors plant in South Gate. He needed a job, so his wife suggested he talk to Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, who was known for helping people down on their luck.

Green went to Hahn’s office and met with one of his aides, Gil Lindsay. Next thing he knew, Green had a job as a gardener at a county hospital.

Had he worked on Hahn’s campaign? Did they owe him?

“Nope. They owed me nothing,” said Green, now 72. “I can’t say he did this for other people--but he helped me.”

People who lived and worked in downtown Los Angeles and the neighborhoods that Gil Lindsay considered his empire remembered the late councilman in ways good, bad and indifferent. The first black to serve on the Los Angeles City Council, the short, blustery, cantankerous “Emperor of the 9th District” had been a political fixture for generations before his death Friday at the age of 90 after a crippling stroke Sept. 2.

He was the janitor who rose to become one of Los Angeles’ premier power brokers; the orator who seemed to appear at a different church each Sunday; the name the guys at Eddie’s Barber Shop invoked when they needed a pothole fixed; the patron of a shoeshine parlor who had a thick roll of cash but didn’t bother to tip.

“This Sunday a lot of preachers will be talking about him,” said the Rev. William Herron of the Third Baptist Church, waiting his turn at Eddie’s. Herron is 73. “I’m sorry he passed, but that’s a vacation we’ll all have to take.”

Even though some of Lindsay’s constituents were unhappy with their deteriorating neighborhoods, most still voted for him. They spoke affectionately of him.

When Greta Bell heard the news, she was hurt, she recalled. “I liked him because he was feisty.” The proprietor of Greta’s Place, a restaurant on Central Avenue, said even people who often disagreed with Lindsay “liked him because he spoke his mind.”

“He did a lot of good things. I mean, I want to balance out the negative and the positive,” said a shoeshine man who requested anonymity. “But he was cheap! “

Central Avenue offers a stark viewpoint of the contrasting Lindsay legacy. To the north rises the downtown skyline that Lindsay’s allies call a monument to the councilman’s vision of economic growth and critics suggest is a reflection of his cozy dealings with big developers. But Central itself, once the vibrant, stylish main boulevard of Los Angeles’ black community, has deteriorated into a graffiti-scarred stretch where small businesses like Greta’s struggle alongside vacant storefronts.

No one disputes that Central has gone downhill. How much Lindsay was to blame was a matter of some debate.

“They’re spending money downtown refurbishing everything,” another shoeshine man complained. “They need to spend $7 million or $8 million on Central Avenue.”

He was among a few people who suggested that Lindsay lost sight of his duties after Theresa, his wife of 48 years, died in 1984. “He was good when his wife was living,” the shoeshine man said.

Andre Williams, a 37-year-old auto mechanic for the Southern California Gas Co., said critics were too hard on Lindsay. Over lunch at Greta’s, he remembered how his congregation at McCoy Memorial Baptist Church always looked forward to a visit from Lindsay.

“He’d say he was just an extension of the people, a voice for them,” Williams recalled. “People who never really knew him, never heard him speak, they might have negative things to say.”

Sitting in the lobby of Mt. Zion Towers, a seniors’ housing complex, Azlee Ross, 66, sought a middle ground.

“When he was young he did a beautiful job,” said Ross. “He did. But he has let this area go down.”

But, Ross said, it wasn’t just Lindsay’s fault. A lot of people are to blame.

If people didn’t always agree with his policies, they mostly liked his style.

“I liked his style in council meetings,” said William Patton, a barber at Eddie’s on Jefferson Boulevard. “If he heard something he didn’t like, he’d just jump up and speak out-- ‘Hey, hey, hey!’ “

Patton laughed with the memory. “Sometimes he was wrong, sometimes he was right. But he spoke out.”

Eddie’s Barber Shop isn’t even in Lindsay’s district, but just across the district boundary. Yet barber C.M. McNeal remembered that when the shop had a problem getting public works to fix a pothole outside, the barbers mentioned Lindsay’s name. Soon, the pothole was fixed.

The last few years were sad ones for Lindsay, the Rev. Herron suggested. He remembered working on Lindsay’s campaigns early in his council career. Lindsay was a positive force who lost something as the years marched on, Herron said.

“As he got older, like all of us, well, you lose sight of a lot of things,” the preacher said. The controversy over Lindsay’s property, some of which he had deeded to a 39-year-old girlfriend, was a symptom, the preacher said. “An old man like that wanting a young woman like that,” Herron muttered in disapproval.

“He did a pretty good job. . . . A lot of people thought he didn’t do a good job for the neighborhoods. But remember, he wasn’t a young man when he got on the council. He started out as a janitor and worked himself up to the City Council--that’s something.

“I’m sorry he died,” the preacher repeated. “But we all must travel. There’s no getting around it.”