HOLLYWOOD — The letter arrived on the seventeenth and Marisol Quintero read it twice at her own counter before she understood that it was about her.
Under the sidewalk vending overhaul that took effect on the fifteenth, with Hollywood as the city’s test district, the permit category that has governed her newsstand near Hollywood and Cherokee for twenty-two years no longer exists. Newsstands, shoe-shine stands, flower stalls and a small number of other fixed sidewalk businesses — a category the code used to handle separately and, in places, by inheritance — have been folded into the general sidewalk vending framework.
For most of the trade this is straightforwardly good news, and Ms. Quintero says so before she says anything else. The annual fee falls to $291 from a combined figure she had been paying, with insurance riders, closer to $900. It can be paid in three installments. The application is one visit to a counter on Wilcox instead of three appointments across two agencies.
Then there is section 4, which concerns dimensions.
The new code sets a maximum footprint for a sidewalk vending unit and requires that the unit be removable at the close of business each day. Her stand is a wood-and-steel structure with a hinged awning, bolted through the sidewalk into a footing her uncle poured in 1981. It is 14 feet across. The code allows 8. It has not moved in forty-five years and could not be moved without a truck and a permit of a different kind entirely.
“I am not a cart,” she said, folding papers square for the afternoon. “I have never been a cart. The city knows I have never been a cart, because the city bolted me down.”
City staff, to their credit, agree with her and have said so. The provision that saves her is a legacy clause the ordinance’s authors wrote in for exactly this handful of businesses: a fixed sidewalk installation lawfully permitted before 2010 may continue at its existing dimensions, subject to a structural and access inspection, provided the operation is continuous. The clause runs to four sentences. It is also, according to two people who worked on the draft, the section that received the least attention, because at the time it was understood to affect perhaps six businesses citywide.
The inspection is the part that has her worried, and it is not the structure she is worried about.
“Access” here means the clear path the sidewalk must leave for a wheelchair — a federal standard, not a city preference, and one Ms. Quintero supports without qualification. The trouble is that the standard is measured from the face of the stand to the nearest fixed obstruction, and the nearest fixed obstruction on her corner is a bus bench installed in 2011, nine years after her stand was last measured. Between the two of them, by her own tape, there are 44 inches. The requirement is 48.
Neither the bench nor the stand can move. One of them is going to be found to be the problem, and it will not be the bench, because the bench arrived legally.
“That is the whole thing in one sentence,” said Councilmember Alicia Rendón’s office, when asked. A staffer said the councilmember has asked the transportation department whether the bench can be relocated 20 feet east, and that the department has said it will look at it. The bench is under the same advertising contract that supplies the city’s bus shelters, which means moving it requires the agreement of a company that is not a party to any of this.
The letter gives her until the thirtieth of September.
The Boulevard has taken an interest. Cornell Biggs, the retired stagehand who buys a paper from her most mornings and stays to argue about the ballgame, has appointed himself the archivist of the matter and has photographs of the stand going back to 1997. The merchants’ association has written a letter. Two nearby restaurants have offered to write letters, and she has asked them not to yet, on the theory that a fight you win quietly is cheaper.
Asked whether she thinks the overhaul is a good law, she gave the answer of someone who has read all of it.
“It is a good law,” she said. “The people who wrote it were trying to help the man with the fruit cart on Selma, and they did help him, and he needed it more than I do. They just forgot there were four of us left who are nailed to the ground.”