The smell hits before the lights come on.
At Cole’s French Dip, a 117-year-old landmark on Sixth Street, employees start each morning not by slicing roast beef but by scrubbing the sidewalk. Shoveling debris. Power washing waste they pray isn’t human steps away from the doorway. Checking the stoop for needles before unlocking the door. Downtown L.A.’s oldest restaurant has survived Prohibition, recessions, and a pandemic—but it can’t survive this. The owner said it plainly: the neighborhood died around us.
A few miles west, at Langer’s Deli near MacArthur Park, the famous No. 19 pastrami sandwich still draws lunchtime pilgrims. But the owner, Norm Langer, admits he’s no longer sure how long he can keep going. “We’re doing what the city should be doing,” he told reporters earlier this year, describing the daily ritual of cleaning drug paraphernalia from the curb before customers arrive. “You just hope nobody gets hurt.”
These aren’t newcomers complaining about downtown grit; they’re institutions that fed this city for generations. Their exits and doubts aren’t about fickle customers, they’re about survival in a civic environment that’s turned toxic.
According to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, homelessness within the city rose about 10 percent in 2023, reaching roughly 46,000 people. In the downtown core, encampments grew another 15 percent in the same period, overwhelming sanitation and safety resources. Illegal-dumping complaints citywide rose 5 percent in 2024. Street sweeping that once happened weekly now occurs every other week, and to business owners, that’s an eternity.
The city insists it’s responding. Mayor Karen Bass’s Inside Safe program has moved thousands from encampments into temporary housing, while the Bureau of Street Services and L.A. Sanitation tout expanded cleanup teams and 311 pickup requests. Yet downtown still depends heavily on its Business Improvement Districts, which now spend more than $20 million a year on private cleanup and security. The message to small businesses is clear: survival is a DIY project.
Downtown’s legacy restaurants were never hardened gems; they’ve always been more like the delicate loaves of sourdough every Instagrammer embraced during lockdown, delicious acts of labor that need warmth, timing, and care. They’ve fed office workers and night-shift cops, tourists and tenants.. But bread goes stale and molds when left out too long, and downtown has been left out for too many years.
Since 2023, at least five downtown mainstays, Cole’s French Dip, Nickel Diner, Yxta Cocina Mexicana, Guerrilla Tacos, and the Original Pantry Café, have shuttered or announced closures, citing crime, encampments, and relentless upkeep costs. The survivors are exhausted, fighting to keep their doors open in a city that’s given up on keeping its sidewalks clean.
At closing time, when the last of the staff leaves Cole’s, the lights go out, and the smell of roasted beef disappears from Sixth Street. What lingers is the bleach, the dust, and the question hanging over every block of downtown Los Angeles:
Scroll to continue reading
How do you bake anything fresh in a city so rotten?