A Few Questions?

 

Mr. Chiat says a feeling of particular anxiety has overtaken him and his family. Months in the planning, Mr. Chiat, his Italian-born wife and their two young children are scheduled to leave by next Saturday to live for a year in . No  denouement is in sight on his rocky transaction with City Hall for  his building. Any hour now, all of the belongings from the family home will show up on a truck in front of 8843. They are/were to be stored for the next 12 months in the building that Mr. Chiat has occupied since 1992. What will happen to the Chiat family belongings? Will the building still be there next July when the family plans to return? Will a Sheriff’s deputy show up at the front door in the meanwhile and padlock the building? Will City Hall employ a lengthy arm of the law to reach into the family setting in and force Mr. Chiat to return to Culver City and forge a closure? To each one of these inquiries, Mr. Chiat has a common answer. “I don’t know,” he says.  

Their Voices: Just Echoes

Standing around a table in the center of the very tall, high-ceilinged main room of Mr. Chiat’s warehouse, he and Mr. Vorgeack bit off their words as if they were stones merely masquerading as rock candy. Speaking with conviction about what they regard as heartless evictions, the words of the two owners echoed — as if for vengeful emphasis — before bouncing off of snow white cinderblock walls. Mr. Chiat’s subtly flavored paintings of urban landscapes leaned against various walls throughout the airy 2500-square foot facility. For religious believers, the spraying illumination in every room was courtesy of God, pure natural lighting. Almost in unison, Mr. Vorgeack and Mr. Chiat mourned the toll that their zig-zagging negotiations with City Hall have exacted in causing upheaval in their private lives. Pacing, twitching his body as he roamed his beloved building that he may have been seeing for one of the last times, Mr. Chiat puffed on a cigarette. When he exhaled, he insisted he was only blowing smoke in a physical sense. “This gets me so worked up,” he said. “So ticked off.” He said his existence has become Orwellian, nightmarish for him and his family. Negotiations the past 21 months have been so onesided, so impersonal, so vague that he felt helpless. He said he felt as if he and his family were living in in the days of brutal Communist domination. Alternately, Mr. Chiat’s voice raced up a winding stairway and slid back down the bannister again. “Do you know how much of my day is spent dealing with this crap?” Mr. Chiat asked.

Despair took a seat beside him. “When I have to do something, be with my kids or do my work, this affects us. We are human beings. We are trying to make a living and lead a good life. I mean, it’s as simple as that. We get paper from the city. We get phone calls. We were forced to hire counsel. And all we ever wanted to do was to sit down and talk with them. And they couldn’t do that. They had to drag us through their bureaucracy. You know why? ‘Cause we are paying for it. We get screwed on both ends. They know it. They know we don’t have the resources. They don’t care what  we think. Nothing we have said meant anything to them. When they don’t want to talk, they don’t. Very onesided.” 

Taking Divergent Directions

 

Both men acknowledged they clearly understood that the city’s intention, from the first day, was to buy them out, whether or not they wanted to surrender. But at that point their feelings diverged, probably because even though they are fairly close in age, the two of them are at different stages of their lives. Mr. Chiat, a 49-year-old artist who grew up in South Pasadena , has traveled the world. He met his wife in , and he has lived out of the country for a period. International exposure and years in the entertainment industry,  as a director, have helped him to become savvy — and wary of government-based promises. He said that for all of his frustration and exasperation with City Hall, for all of his steel-weighted determination, he realized that any display of resistance was useless. Mr. Vorgeack, a 56-year-old French-Canadian immigrant, believed in the historical promise and optimism of his adopted country. A welder by trade, he did not used to be cynical. He has been in his building on Exposition, just down the street from Mr. Chiat, for 20 years. Until City Hall knocked on his door a year ago last autumn, he was planning to retire from 8829. At first, he said, he believed the Community Development staffers. When they vowed to formulate a fair-market offer for his building and when they promised to provide expert assistance in relocating his business, he believed them. “It sounded reasonable,” he said. Now he wonders how he could have been so naieve. City Hall did not deliver on either pledge, he says. “Rigged.” That is what Mr. Vorgeack says City Hall’s “so-called” dickering process was, up and down Exposition.