A New York State of Mind

An unnaturally high number of Los Angeles businesses--more than 100, in fact--are named after New York City. There are the obvious suspects, the New York Bagel Exchanges and New York Pizza Expresses, where invoking the Apple is meant to ensure the authenticity of the food promised. But what could be “New York’ about L.A.’s New York Copies & Paper or New York Photo Studio or New York City Florist?

Explains Joe Huh, the New York Tailor: “Some people ask, ‘Why are you the New York Tailor?’ I don’t know. I like New York. I’ve got nothing better.’ New York Hair Conspiracy’s Penny Morse: “In ‘72, Watergate was going on and the guy who got me started went to New York, so it’s in honor of them.’ New York Hardware’s John Guerrant: “My father named it in 1910 because there was already a California Hardware. The name meant a lot at the time in downtown--there was a New York hat store, a New York tie shop. It probably doesn’t mean much anymore.’ And New York Wholesale Jewelry’s Abbas Ghorob: “It makes people more at ease to know they’re doing business with someone from the East Coast, especially when I change my accent to the New York one.’

We ask New York Key Service’s owner, Leroy--last name mysteriously withheld--about the store’s origin.

“Are you familiar with Czar Nicholas?’ he replies.

“Umm, yes.’

“The man who established New York Key Service was the son of a personal bodyguard of Czar Nicholas. His father was sent to guard the czar, and everybody was executed. His wife was pregnant with a second son at the time, who was born in New York. The son suffered from asthma and rheumatic fever. The weather was atrocious, so he came to California to work for Acme Hardware. He left in ’35 and opened this shop on Western Avenue, and because of where he was from, he called it New York Key Service. He died at 44 because rheumatic fever left calcium deposits on his heart.’

Big Apple business names in L.A. aren’t limited to “New York.’ Most “Manhattan’-based ones fall within the borders of, not surprisingly, Manhattan Beach, or, like Manhattan Weight Control (with 17 locations in L.A., and one, quite surprisingly, in Fresno), got a start there. But farther inland, there’s Hollywood’s Manhattan Fruitier (“high-end fruit baskets made to look like 16th century still-lifes’), Glendale’s Manhattan Motel (“I don’t know how we got this name’) and San Gabriel’s Manhattan Dry Cleaners (“A light on the building says Manhattan Dry Cleaners, so if we changed it, it would take time’).

Nor do New York’s other storied boroughs lack boosters. Brooklyn Avenue, renamed Cesar Chavez Avenue, was Main Street to thousands of transplanted Jews who called Boyle Heights home in the ‘20s and ‘30s, and no fewer than a dozen businesses in the area still sport Brooklyn prefixes, from the Brooklyn Thrift Store to Brooklyn Smog Center to Brooklyn Avenue Elementary School. Lakewood has a Brooklyn Trucking and Hollywood a Brooklyn Pants, and both Montana Avenue and Beverly Boulevard support Brooklyn Bagels. The biggest borough identity crisis is reserved for Brooklyn Brick Oven Pizza--in Manhattan Beach. Co-owner Diana Udovich says: “We get, ‘I’m from New York and I’m here to officially test your pizza.’ I could say, ‘You’re my hundredth tester.’ ‘

In New York City, we did track down one concern, the Los Angeles Top Co., a wholesale women’s clothier, with the guts to put our always-struggling-to-find-an-identity hometown on its shingle. We were immediately referred to its L.A. home office, where co-owner Helen Hollander sews her bias to the sleeve. “It’s nice here,’ says Hollander. “I wouldn’t want to live in New York. No way, no thank you. You can have it.’