Hirsh honored at the corner of success and service

The crowd that gathered on May 13 at the corner of Los Angeles and Ninth streets to dedicate the intersection as “Stanley Hirsh Square” was as wide-ranging as the legacy of the man himself.

Local politicians, Jewish community leaders and business associates of the late tycoon, who made a fortune renting space to fashion companies, joined members of his family at the curbside ceremony.

“My dad would be somewhere between pleased and wondering why everyone’s not at work already,” Jennifer Hirsh, one of his four children, told the small crowd that Friday morning outside the landmark Cooper Building, one of six commercial buildings bought by the elder Hirsh.

Stanley Hirsh, who died in 2003 at the age of 76, owned several buildings downtown, which he helped fill with fashion businesses. 

In addition, he contributed to Jewish causes and put his name and his mark on a number of community institutions, such as the Hirsh Family Kosher Kitchen on Fairfax Avenue. He served as the president of The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles from 1987 to 1988 and as the publisher of the Jewish Journal, starting in the late 1990s.

“With everything I heard about him, you would think it was an army of Stanleys doing it,” Los Angeles City Councilman José Huizar said in an interview.

Huizar, who represents downtown and proposed the city council motion to rename the intersection, said Hirsh “put the Fashion District on the map.”

The founder of the Fashion District Business Improvement District (BID) — the first BID in L.A. — Hirsh conceived of the neighborhood association in 1996 that now represents 100 blocks with a budget of $1.6 million, according to the current director, Kent Smith.

Huizar said the real estate investor’s activism paved the way for the neighborhood’s ongoing revitalization: the once-gritty and industrial district is being rapidly populated with luxury lofts and artisanal coffee shops.

“He put more shoe leather in this intersection than any of us ever will,” Steve Hirsh, Stanley’s son, said at the dedication. “It was really his neighborhood.”

Born in the Bronx, Stanley Hirsh moved at the age of 14 to Southern California with his family, getting a job lugging bricks and mortar at a shipyard in Long Beach. After serving in the Navy, he found a job as an assistant manager at a women’s apparel store. Eight years later, he started an apparel business that eventually evolved into one of the garment district’s pre-eminent fashion concerns. He married his wife, Anita, a clothing designer, in 1961.

The younger Hirsh, who now runs the family business, recalled that in his youth, the “S. Howard Hirsh on Rye” — a sandwich named after the businessman at a local deli — brought the adolescent more pride than any of his father’s other accomplishments.

He also remembered his father’s gruff and businesslike manner, which, he said, didn’t detract from his kind nature. He recalled his father telling him, “I’m going to pass onto you the one thing my family passed to me — and that’s the right to work.”

Robert Wexler, the president of American Jewish University, who described himself as a close friend of Hirsh’s, said the same blunt-spoken manner prevailed in his dealings with the Jewish community.

“When he walked into a room, if he had an opinion, you heard it, unvarnished and with the appropriate expletives,” Wexler said at the ceremony.

He added, though, that Hirsh was a “gentle giant” who had a “heart full of compassion.”

Whether it was his candor or his kindness that endeared his associates to him, Hirsch’s friends recalled that he commanded respect and admiration in the Fashion District.

“He was the only man I knew who was as powerful as he was who could walk down the alleys and nobody would bother him,” said Charlie Abram, who worked with Hirsh renovating buildings for 43 years.

Wearing a charcoal-colored suit and leaning on a cane outside the Cooper Building, Abram recalled that Hirsh’s contemporaries balked every time he purchased a run-down property in the neglected district.

“When he purchased them, they were practically empty, and each building Stanley entered filled up just like that,” he said.

Among his other salvage projects was the Jewish Journal. Taking over as publisher in 1997 during troubled financial times for the paper, he helped stabilize it and stayed on at the helm until he was diagnosed with brain cancer, two years before his death.

“He kind of rode in on a white horse and saved the Jewish Journal,” L.A. City Councilman Bob Blumenfield, who worked for U.S. Rep. Howard Berman when Hirsh was an adviser to the congressman, said at the dedication.

He added, “I think he had a history of riding in on a white horse and saving the day.”