"This is my neighborhood. That's
why I'm here!" Michael Martin speaks emphatically, his eyes flashing in the night. Behind him, hundreds of magazines reflect the glow of a half-dozen different kinds of light, from the twin banks of fluorescents over the newsracks to the sweep of headlights passing
on Wilshire Boulevard two steps away. The blue glare of the Blockbuster Video sign across Detroit Street flows past the
coffee cart parked on the sidewalk in front of the Miracle Mile Newsstand Cafe, casting the shadows of a bank of gleaming espresso
machines onto the chess players crouched over a round metal table next to Sunday's L. A. Times. "When Luis and I first started
pushing the idea of a newsstand here, there was nothing on this corner but an asphalt lot with bushes growing up through the
pavement. Right here, where the stand is now, there was just a couple of poles with a rusty chain hanging between them. People
used to drive up and throw their garbage here. That doesn't happen any more."
Martin and his partner, Luis Buenaventura, have known each other since they were toddlers, and Martin still lives in the neighborhood of Wilshire and La Brea. A few years back, they heard about redevelopment plans being coordinated by the Wilshire Civic Coalition and came up with an only-in-LA idea: a combination newsstand and outdoor café on the formerly forgettable corner of Wilshire and Detroit, in the heart of the Miracle Mile. A few months of skin-of-their-teeth negtiotiations later, they gained the confidence of the three agencies involved--the WCC, the Metropolitan Transit Authority, and the Department of Traffic--and they set up the Miracle Mile Newsstand Cafe, complete with coffee cart and chess sets. And a year and a half later, they're not only surviving but beginning to thrive.
"It took a while for people to get used to us, I
guess," says Buenaventura. "But we stock the magazines the neighborhood wants, and they've started to come around." And once
they do come around, they keep coming back. During the interview, a regular customer came in for cigarettes and a magazine. "The
usual?" Luis asked her, and she nodded her blonde head. A brief conversation sweetened the transaction, and a few smiles later she
ambled off into the night, her cigarette smoke mixing with the moody perfumes of the incense sellers who have set up under the
Blockbuster sign. A light breeze springs up, riffling the pages of Motorbike, In Style, and the other glossies arrayed on the rows of
shelves. Luis turns up the sound system a notch and then parks himself by the chess tables to watch the outcome of a close match
between two elderly black men. He smiles abstractly at the night. And the night smiles back.
In the morning Luis looks tired as he pulls on his gloves and hauls the coffee cart from the lot behind the newsstand. Then it's time to
haul in stacks of newspapers, unstrap them, set up the cash register, and get ready for the first customer of the day, who may be
looking for anything from Variety to a decaf macchiatto. The morning sun leans round the corner of the Asahi building on La Brea,
gleaming on the stainless steel back of the newsstand, 
but it's not yet time to unfurl the big umbrellas that shade the two small round
tables. There are no chess players at this time of the day, just the glare of a late-summer sunrise and the roar of one of the MTA's
new Rapids heralding the start of another day's commute. Soon enough a silhouetted figure follows its shadow along the sidewalk and
detours into the newsstand to trade a quarter for the Times.
The first puff of fragrant steam issues from the espresso maker, and Buenaventura stares back at the face of a fourteen-hour day. His childhood buddy Martin will be along later on to spell him, but there's a lot of work to be done before then…and he's glad to be doing it. Here, just inches from the busiest boulevard of a city that lives on and for its wheels, Buenaventura and his crew make a living from people who live or work in the neighborhood and walk in for a cup of brew, a game, a magazine, a quick hello. You can buy a newspaper anywhere, even in the faceless chainstore that was originally intended for the corner of Detroit and Wilshire. But you can't buy home, and here, in their neighborhood, Martin and Buenaventura have changed that corner into a place you can come home to, when you need a friendly minute as much as you need the business section or the front page news.
Miracle Mile Newsstand Cafe: 5325 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles
Closed in 2008
Text by Richard Risemberg
Photographs ©2000 G. S. Morey
