Oct 14, 2008

Monrovia’s ‘Main Street’ copes with tough timesBy Peter H. KingLATimes.com

Monrovia, CA — There are no palm trees on Myrtle Avenue. This pleases Hollywood location scouts, who frequently dispatch film crews here when they need a backdrop that suggests a town in the American heartland. Indeed, in look and feel, particularly the five blocks that run through Monrovia’s Old Town district, Myrtle seems more representative of rural Iowa than metropolitan Los Angeles.

The street constitutes the center of this San Gabriel Valley town of nearly 40,000. It was named for the daughter of William Monroe, a railroad construction superintendent who, in the 1880s, flush from a sale of mules, bought 210 acres of the old Rancho Santa Anita and, with partners, started laying out a town.

“In Southern California, we are an anomaly,” said Pam Fitzpatrick, an owner of the Dollmakers’ Kattywompus toy store. “But across the country, little old towns like this, they are the heart of America.”

Fitzpatrick was speaking last Tuesday, on yet another day of financial bulletins and incessant, worried talk everywhere, much of it centered on fears that the fiscal meltdown would spread, as the oft-repeated saying went, “from Wall Street to Main Street.” A front page headline in The Times captured the zeitgeist well: “Is now a good time to panic?”

Fitzpatrick’s answer was no.

“I think it is absolutely terrifying,” the 61-year-old former telecommunications consultant said. “But the fact of the matter is you can’t fix it. If I am going to get panicky and lose sleep, what good is it going to do? Things happen in life, scary things happen. But what can you do? The only thing I can do is what I always have done. And do it better.”

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