“Unfortunately,” he said, exhausted from years of fighting city government, “my new property still is in Culver City. I am not happy about that. It means the revenue will be staying in Culver City.”

With a warning tone in his voice, Mr. Surfas said of the nearby resettlement: “This will enable us to move the store for the time being — until I can make more permanent arrangements.”

Acerbity Is Dominant

For close to 3 years, the owner and City Hall have engaged in one of the bitterest taffy-pulls in recent history. Their acerbic fight appears to have been adversarial and confrontational from the beginning. At issue was whether the city could acquire — through legal channels or more muscular routes — a sizable portion of Mr. Surfas’ land that lies just east of Downtown. The city said it needed the land to accommodate a still unsketched but much ballyhooed terminal complex for the Culver City station along the planned light rail line from downtown Los Angeles.

From the first moment the city knocked, ominously, on his door, Mr. Surfas has declared he would not sell. And, he added, City Hall could not seize it from him. In court dealings since, the city has attempted to prove otherwise. More recently, the city said that even before completing the purchase, it would find a suitable new location for the warehouse wing of his restaurant supply enterprise. Mr. Surfas insisted that it should be hard by his retail store, mainly for the convenience of his customers. While it was scouting replacement locations, the city said Mr. Surfas should, too. The city came up empty.

Less Than a Month

Mr. Surfas identified the new land last month, and negotiations spanned 3 weeks. Whenever the city and the entrepreneur meet — and in between, which pretty much covers all of the time — the air is stained by unrelieved acridity.

Postscript

He signed a lease last Thursday for the new property, on Landmark, which is within 2 blocks of Mr. Surfas’ restaurant supply and gourmet food headquarters, at the intersection of Washington and National boulevards. The business, opened 70 years ago by Mr. Surfas’ father, occupies the northeast and northwest corners of the intersection. Ironically, Mr. Surfas appended his name to his newest lease on the day he and City Hall were ordered to make their latest adversarial appearance in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom. The hearing — ostensibly to determine a more or less drop-dead date by which Mr. Surfas must vacate the warehouse property targeted by the city — was rescheduled for tomorrow.