(18 Jun 2025)
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Los Angeles – 17 June 2025
1. Wide BMO Bank boarded-up
2. Wide Japanese American National Museum boarded-up
3. Medium Wolf & Crane bar signage
4. SOUNDBITE (English) Matthew Glaser, business owner, Wolf & Crane:
"You know the thing that you don’t really know is there was this association for quite a few years of downtown is dangerous and then we got rid of that and then during COVID we kind of went back into, oh downtown is dangerous and I feel like as we’ve really started to come back and rebuilding downtown it’s hard to then shake that kind of reminding people, oh downtown is dangerous, and you know, for a short period of time, obviously, it was crazy. But I don’t think that, I think it’s gonna take a while to convince people that downtown’s okay again. And that’s, you know, is that a couple weeks? Is that a month? Is that months? Who knows?"
5. Wide Wolf & Crane bar
6. SOUNDBITE (English) Matthew Glaser, business owner, Wolf & Crane:- on city officials response.
"You know, I thought they actually did a pretty good job. I think during the [George} Floyd protest, there was this kind of like dismissal of the concern of like businesses and storefronts. This one they really, I think people cared a lot. I think, you know, from the mayor to the council person, I think they really kind of responded proactively, which is nice. Obviously it would be great to have the Marines and the National Guard and everyone go away and kind of things go back to normal. So I think whatever policy allows us to go back to normalcy, and I wish I knew what that was, but obviously I think financial support would be great for a lot of businesses. We’re lucky to not be on the edge, but especially in hospitality, so many businesses are, you know, they are week to week, and if you lose a week of business, that might not mean that you can open for the next week of business."
7. Medium Wolf & Crane signage
8. SOUNDBITE (English) Matthew Glaser, business owner, Wolf & Crane:
"Part of it’s going to be, like if you walk down the street right now, you’ll see just storefront after storefront boarded up. And I think as long as that is kind of where we are as a status quo, like people aren’t going to come back because they’re going to drive down and think, you know, either not open for business or not safe to, you know, patronize these places. So hopefully talk to people and get people to, assuming that the situation gets better, get people to kind of buy into taking the board ups down, cleaning up the graffiti, getting just kind of the physical environment back to where it needs to be. I think Little Tokyo is so special that if that happens, everyone’s gonna come back eventually. Maybe it’s weeks, maybe it’s months, I don’t really know, but I think until we do that, we aren’t gonna get people back. So that’s gonna take kind of a, it’s a collective action problem. Everybody’s gotta do it together It’s gonna be a little scary, I think, for the first couple people to do it before everyone else, so we’ll see how that goes."
9. Medium Little Tokyo Immigrant signage
STORYLINE:
Mayor Karen Bass announced Tuesday that the week-long curfew in downtown Los Angeles has been lifted, as demonstrations in the area have declined in the aftermath of a series of federal immigration raids.
Matthew Glaser, owner of Wolf & Crane, a popular Japanese Whiskey bar located in the heart of Little Tokyo, spoke with the Associated Press about how the past week has felt like a step backward for a neighborhood still trying to shake long-held perceptions.
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