Glendale, Where Image and Fact Sometimes Clash

Pick just about any town in these parts and there’s a good chance you can sum up its reputation, rightly or wrongly, in a few words. Pasadena, for instance, conjures up old money and white men in white suits on New Year’s Day. Long Beach, to some, will always be Iowa-by-the-sea. West Hollywood, of course, prides itself as the gayest place around, and Santa Monica, famously, is the People’s Republic of.

And then there’s Glendale, a prototype of the sleepy, conservative bedroom community.

Or as the New Republic puts it: “Glendale, vicious Glendale.”

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The magazine uses the phrase, tongue partly in cheek, in its “special Golden State issue” of Sept. 5 to introduce an article by Alex Gibney titled “Suburban Blight.” It is, essentially, one man’s impressions of “the strange psychic fissures” he’s encountered since his move from Koreatown to Glendale four years ago “after a wayward .38 slug from a nearby gang party ricocheted into our children’s bedroom.”

Gibney, a documentary producer, is honest enough about his biases to note that, despite said gunfire, “it wasn’t an easy decision. We liked the cultural vitality of the city and had viewed suburban living with all the fear and suspicion of Kevin McCarthy encountering gurgling pods just beyond the barbecue pit in ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers.’ ”

For Gibney, the dark “harbingers” of Glendale life include a kindergarten teacher’s decision to silence a noisy 5-year-old by taping his mouth shut, the City Council’s feckless (and since abandoned) decision to order the mass execution of the pigeons divebombing the business district, Republican Assemblyman James Rogan’s support of a bill that calls for the public paddling of graffiti vandals, and rumors of adults betting $1,500 on Little League games.

Only in passing does Gibney touch upon what observers know to be the true source of Glendale’s reputation for viciousness: “In the past Glendale also has been a magnet for white supremacists, who have been known to spray swastikas in public places and, in a peculiar nod to suburban convention, to apply for barbecue permits in order to burn crosses on neighborhood lawns.”

Oh, that Glendale. That reputation, Mayor Eileen Givens says, has always been “a bum rap.” Don’t blame Glendale, she says, for the fact that many, many years ago some American Nazis had an office in town and the Ku Klux Klan staged a rally here. Many bigots were out-of-towners. Still, it’s easy to understand why non-Christian, non-whites didn’t consider Glendale to be a particularly friendly place.

And as Givens knows all too well, Gibney is unfortunately incorrect in suggesting that swastikas are things of the past. Earlier this year, an Armenian youth center was thusly vandalized, as was the home of an Armenian family. In another incident, a 70-year-old Armenian man was beaten by a 45-year-old Anglo transient who later told police that he blamed Armenians for taking his job. He was ultimately sentenced to four years in prison, which included a two-year enhancement for the commission of a hate crime.

Chahe Keuroghelian, a community relations coordinator in the Glendale Police Department, keeps a thick file that includes crime reports and racist and anti-Semitic flyers circulated around town in recent years. His files suggest that, in the mid 1980s, blacks and Jews tended to be the target of hate crimes. In more recent years, Armenians, who now constitute about 20% of the city’s population, have become the favorite targets.

Curiously, people unfamiliar with Los Angeles who read Gibney’s article would never know that Glendale may well have the largest concentration of Armenians outside Yerevan. If he wanted to write about moving from Koreatown to the ‘burbs, he should have bought a house in Santa Clarita.

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County hate crime statistics tend to validate city officials’ claim that bigotry isn’t more of a problem in Glendale than in other communities that have a heady mix of cultures. Yet the image lingers--and Glendale is trying to do something about it.

In response to recent hate crimes, Mayor Givens appointed a task force to address racial tension in Glendale. Keuroghelian, a member, is optimistic that the city, schools and churches will work together to nurture harmony.

“You can’t legislate attitudes saying, ‘Thou shall not hate,’ ” Givens says. “But you can lead by example. You can show that Glendale, as a city, does not tolerate hate crimes.”

Confronting the problem openly is being billed here as something new and meaningful. It’s a contrast, it seems, from the old days, when Glendale officialdom seemed to regard the city’s reputation as a dirty little secret that everyone knew.