Las Urbanistas

Station Announcement Hints: Tourists, Stand to the Right

By Lena H. Sun Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, August 11, 2007; A01

Stand to the RIGHT, already.

That has been the eternal plea — grumbled, spoken, yelled and otherwise communicated — of impatient Metro commuters stuck on escalators because tourists don’t realize that in big, important Washington, you stand to the right so all the Type A people can hurry past on the left.

For the first time in its history, Metro has started telling them.

“Hi. Welcome to Metro,” the station announcement begins. “We have a lot of escalators in our system. You’ll notice that most people stand on the right side. And while you’re riding, hold the handrail for your safety. Enjoy your trip, and thank you for riding Metro.”

The announcement is one of a series that the agency has recently recorded to ever-so-gently remind riders of the system’s rules, customs and quirks, including escalator etiquette and train-door operation.

Some announcements are new, such as the one that tells people that train doors are not like elevator doors: They will not automatically open again “if they close on your arm, leg or purse.” Others reinforce the basic bans: No eating, drinking or smoking anywhere in the system, including on outdoor station platforms.

But few are likely to be as welcome as the one laying out escalator protocol.

“We hear from our average customers and from people on the online chats asking us — pleading with us — can you please, please tell people to stand to the right?” Metro spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein said. “People who stand to the left instead of standing to the right are like speed bumps, and they slow down the pedestrian flow through the stations. They’re known as ‘escalumps’ and ‘escaleftors.’ “

More colloquially, they’re known as annoying.

“The visitors are always getting on the left, and the locals are trying to rush like hell to get their train and get to work,” said Calvin Lewis, 61, who commutes from Landover to Van Ness, where he is a staff member of the University of the District of Columbia’s cooperative extension service. Lewis hasn’t heard the new announcements but said they are an “excellent” idea.

The messages, which began running a week ago, are typically short — 10 to 15 seconds — and take a conversational tone. They were recorded by Metro employee Ron Holzer, who also voices the system’s podcasts.

The subway system, which was built deep beneath swampy Washington, has 572 escalators — more than any other transit system in the world except Tokyo’s. A typical Metro passenger must ride at least two escalators to reach a train. The steps are 40 inches wide, enough to accommodate two adults. Many escalators stretch deep into the ground, including the 230-foot-long set of moving stairs at Wheaton, the longest escalator in the Western Hemisphere, according to Metro.

Nonetheless, the agency has resisted promoting the “walk left, stand right” standard because escalators — unlike their cousins, moving walkways — are not designed for walkers. The agency also wants to cut down on riders who race through stations. Thus, the announcement does not encourage people to walk on the left, although that’s common practice at Metro and just about every other transit system in the world.

Metro also does not post signs advising riders where to stand. Agency officials said they are prohibited from putting up “Stand to the Right” signs because the national safety code for elevators and escalators does not allow non-cautionary signs to be posted within 10 feet of an escalator.

The battle over escalator etiquette tends to escalate in the summer, when tourists descend on the nation’s capital and clash with impatient Washingtonians rushing to catch their trains.

Many first-time visitors are often preoccupied while on long escalator rides. Jenny and John Maurer of Pittsburgh, who were visiting Washington this week with their two children, were trying to figure out which monuments to see as they stood on the long escalator heading into the Van Ness Station just after the morning rush yesterday.

“A couple people said, ‘Pardon me,’ ” said Jenny Maurer, 40. That’s when she realized she wasn’t supposed to be standing on the left. “This was our first time,” she said, somewhat apologetically.

“Everyone’s in a hurry,” said her husband, John, 39, with a touch of disbelief.

As a couple from Mumbai rode the escalator down to the Orange and Blue Line platform at Metro Center Station yesterday, the woman, wearing a yellow and orange sari, stood on the right, while her husband stood next to her, on the forbidden left.

Before they reached the bottom, she chided him in Hindi. “I told him, ‘You should stay on the right side; we shouldn’t block the escalator,’ ” said Kiran Anam, 55, who was visiting Washington for the first time but noticed that others were walking on the left.

“I’m a bit dumb,” Harish Anam, 57, said with a smile.

None of the visitors or regular riders interviewed at Metro Center said they had heard the new station announcements. Agency officials said they don’t want to overwhelm riders. “We don’t want people to tune them out,” Farbstein said.

Even as riders welcomed the new announcements, many said they’re skeptical that they’ll be heard. The messages are being broadcast, after all, on Metro’s infamously poor public address system.

The green, oval, vaguely Art Deco pod arrived in Pershing Square six months ago — billed as the answer to one of downtown’s most human of needs.

It’s a luxury automated toilet, the kind seen on the streets of world-class cities such as Paris and New York and a prototype for as many as 150 that officials plan to roll out across Los Angeles in the next few years.

Costing as much as a small downtown condo, it offers instructions in Vietnamese, French, Italian, Spanish, English and Braille, advising passersby to drop a quarter in the slot and step inside.

Unfortunately, the bathroom doesn’t work.

Though the luxury public toilet has become a status symbol in cities around the world, in L.A. it’s a slightly complicated tale — one of the city’s efforts to create a more pedestrian-oriented life, but also a story about its bureaucratic struggles to achieve that goal.

The city plans to install the APTs, as they are known, around the Westside, the Miracle Mile, the San Fernando Valley and Hollywood, and by doing so, it joins more than 600 cities around the globe that have installed the toilets.

In Los Angeles, the facilities are part of a 20-year contract between the city and a joint venture of two companies: CBS Outdoor and JCDecaux. The latter, a French firm, has installed thousands of the sleek units worldwide, mostly in exchange for the right to sell the ads that adorn them. It’s a common model that is used by the majority of American cities looking to install the loos. L.A. is guaranteed $150 million in revenue over the course of the contract.

Backers say the toilets are needed to instill a more pedestrian culture in places such as downtown, Hollywood, Westwood and Ventura Boulevard. They note that they are a big step up from the Porta Pottis used in some parts of downtown.

But skeptics wonder whether the toilets are needed, and whether they are less about serving a public need than selling ad space.

“There is a price for it,” said Kevin Fry of Scenic America, a nonprofit organization dedicated to scenic conservation. “The city streets become increasingly commercialized…. You are surrendering the visual quality of the public realm to marketers, and we don’t think that’s a way for cities to be built.”

Even some supporters are becoming frustrated with all the delays, which include getting the power turned on — and to stay on — at the toilets. One downtown blogger has posted regular “Toilet Watch” updates on his website in frustration.

“If we want to clean up the smells and sights of our streets, we have to be able to offer these facilities,” said Eric Richardson, the blogger, who is a member of the area’s neighborhood council.

CBS Outdoor and JCDecaux are installing transit shelters, public kiosks and toilets as part of a massive “coordinated street furniture” deal with the city. The companies foot the bill for installing all the structures, including the toilets, and for the maintenance on each.

Separate city departments have been responsible for overseeing installation of the APTs, the running of sewer, power, water and phone lines to the sites, and inspection and permitting of the toilets.

The departments blame each other for the delay. Various people interviewed attributed the delay to a lack of cooperation among the agencies responsible for getting the toilets operational.

François Nion, a co-managing director of the CBS-JCDecaux venture, blamed the slow installation process on a lack of power and water hookups.

“It’s a big city,” he said. “There are so many departments you have to go through.”

Lance Oishi of the city’s Bureau of Street Services was blunt: “The utilities are holding up the opening,” he said — a nod to the city’s Department of Water and Power.

Joe Ramallo, a spokesman for that agency, said officials were looking into the cause of the delay. He said work on the Pershing Square unit would be completed in a month.

The one downtown toilet that is operational sits just outside San Julian Park, at San Julian and 5th streets.

Its location — in the heart of skid row — and its price — free — guarantee that it gets a lot of use. Nion said estimates put daily usage at about 120 to 130 flushes.

A toilet at the Red Line station in North Hollywood gets a similar number of flushes. An APT in Northridge, near the Metrolink station, gets about 20 to 30 users a day.

As a group, the toilets are sleek, modular units with doors that whoosh open like an elevator’s, with plenty of space for ads on the outside.

JCDecaux offers three stand-alone models: the Hydra, a gray, boxy structure that resembles a plastic storage bin; the Cox, a more streamlined version with a levered awning over the entrance that makes it look more like a bus shelter; and the premium, $300,000 Pillar, the oval, green version chosen for Los Angeles that has much in common with phone booths of yore.

Still, L.A. is a little late in embracing luxury toilets.

Singapore, London and Athens have more than 500 of the APTs each — most installed in their city centers.

In some cities, the facilities have been tailored to the needs of the toilet-going public. Those that adorn Bukit Bintang, for example, a shopping district in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, give users the choice of using a squatting bowl or a sitting pan. A deputy prime minister attended the opening of one of the public toilets there.

But even with those features, some problems have plagued the APTs. In Seattle, which pays about $700,000 a year to maintain five downtown toilets, business leaders said the facilities had become a haven for drug dealers and prostitutes.

L.A. officials say that the risks of such use are far outstripped by the public benefits of self-cleaning, self-monitoring toilets — and that the time limit on each person’s use of the toilet, usually 15 to 20 minutes, also limits such behavior.

After Kevin Scott left the APT outside San Julian Park, it whirred a little as it cleaned. Scott, who is homeless, said he prefers the APT to a bank of nearby Porta Pottis and the missions, which make their toilets available to the public.

“These are a lot cleaner” than the Porta Pottis, he said. “They’re being used.”

JEREMY White was holding a sign advertising $5 pizza deals at Little Caesars in North Hollywood when two young men stopped their white pickup truck.

After noticing his strong arms and athletic frame, they made him an instant offer. “We can pay you $10 an hour. Give us a call,” White recalled the men saying.

A few days later, the 20-year-old met them at a North Hollywood park where coaches with clipboards barked at dozens of teenagers doing push-ups, part of a regimen preparing them to spin arrow-shaped signs for tanning salons and new homes. Four days later, White quit his Little Caesars gig to join the men’s company, Aarrow Advertising of San Diego.

The payoff was immediate: $10 an hour, almost double his previous wages. During his second day on the job, a passerby was so impressed with his spinning that she gave him a $250 Croton watch. Within a month, he got a raise to $15 an hour. “I don’t like to toot my own horn, but I’m one of the best out there,” White said.

White is part of the competitive world of “human directionals,” an industry term for people who twirl signs outside restaurants, barbershops and new real estate subdivisions.

Street corner advertising on human billboards has existed for centuries, but Southern California — where the weather allows sign spinners to work year-round — has endowed the job with style.

Local spinners have cooked up hundreds of moves. There’s the Helicopter, in which a spinner does a backbend on one hand while spinning a sign above his head. In the Blender, a spinner twirls the sign behind his back. Spanking the Horse gets the most attention. The spinner puts the sign between his legs, slaps his own behind and giddy-ups.

Thanks to growing demand, the business has turned cutthroat. There’s a frenzy of talent poaching. Spinners battle one another for plum assignments and the promise of wage hikes. Some of the more prominent compete for bragging rights by posting videos on YouTube and Google Video, complete with trash talking. One YouTube comment reads, “i don’t know if you stole my tricks or i just do them better.”

SPECIAL spinning moves are guarded fiercely.

Aarrow keeps dozens of moves in a “trick-tionary,” which only a handful of people have seen, said co-founder Mike Kenny. The company records spinners’ movements and sends them in batches to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. “We have to take our intellectual property pretty seriously,” he said.

Aarrow requires its 400 employees to attend monthly boot camps, where their skills are judged and physical fitness tested over three hours.

“It’s competitive,” said Randy Jenks, 20, an Aarrow “spin-structor.” Afterward, he ran up a tree and bounded off with a back flip to pump up his students.

Aarrow charges clients $60 an hour — double the industry standard — for the services of its most skillful employees.

But Jenks, a kingpin in the industry, commands up to $70 an hour. Rapper Snoop Dogg flew him to Atlanta to spin a sign advertising his new album at the American Music Awards. Two years ago, Jenks won Aarrow’s annual nationwide competition pitting the best spinners against one another. His protege, who happens to be his brother-in-law, won last year. Jenks was barred from entering because of his status as a spinning god.

The outdoor advertising industry still does not recognize sign spinning as a bona fide way of reaching consumers, much less an art form. It regards spinning as a form of guerrilla marketing that commercializes public space. Some municipalities are even beginning to make sign spinners into outlaws. Riverside, Poway and El Cajon are among the cities that recently banned the practice.

“They can distract people and cause accidents,” said Jim Griffin, director of community development in El Cajon. Some sidewalk sign holders try to spin when no one is looking, so Griffin hired weekend staff to catch and ticket them.

It takes a discerning eye to know when to lay down the law, he said. “If a sign is moving, they’re spinning. If their leg goes to sleep and they’re jumping up and down, they’re not.”

But one person’s crime is another’s livelihood. Almost anyone can qualify for the job with most of the firms. Although some bring along an iPod or a cooler with drinks, the basic requirement is patience, lots of it. “If you’re able to stand in a closet for six hours, you can do this job,” said Jeff Triesch, a supervisor with MJAD Directionals, a San Diego company.

IT’S not easy money. Sign holders sometimes swelter in 110-degree weather and must master the physical challenges of throwing and catching a 6-pound plastic arrow. Some recount being pelted with pennies, eggs and insults from car windows.

Standing at the corner of West Alameda and North Pass avenues in Burbank, MJAD spinner Elliott Forte waved a sign advertising new apartments in Burbank. He cringed as a Vons truck made a tight right turn, inching perilously close. “Someone could lose control and run right into me,” he said.

Forte, who sports square cubic zirconium earrings and a yellow MJAD cap and T-shirt, composes hip-hop lyrics in his head while he stands on the corner.

He says he recorded 136 songs last year under the stage name Razzaq.

Forte hopes this job down the street from movie studios and record labels leads to stardom. “You never know who’s in the car driving by,” he said, keeping his eye peeled for any erratic drivers. “Anything could happen.”

He boasts that Jay Leno once stopped to compliment him on his spinning.

“If I ever make it big in the music industry, just remember where I met you,” Forte recalled telling the late-night host.

Many companies say spinners make a difference in attracting customers.

Jody Piccinino, community manager for Lofts at NoHo Commons in North Hollywood, said that the day after she switched from a sign holding company to Aarrow’s spinners, the number of prospective buyers doubled to 18.

“We wanted something that was eye catching,” she said. “And we’ve seen direct results.”

DEMAND from people like Piccinino is forcing sign companies to recruit aggressively or steal workers from competitors to bolster their labor supply — often by just driving up and offering the spinners $5 or $10 more an hour.

“We’ve had workers that have dropped their arrows on site to go and work for another company,” said Mike McCullough, vice president of sales and marketing at Eventz Extraordinaire. The Lake Forest company says it invented sign spinning two decades ago, after noticing that cardboard arrows were effective in getting people to check out businesses.

L.A.-based Sign Sale Promotion Inc., which bills itself as the largest sign promotion company in the United States, says its subcontractors hire day laborers, high school cheerleader teams, inmates from women’s prisons and homeless people at shelters.

Pastor Jeff Mahle, of the Yucaipa-based Set Free ministry, said the sign company had hired countless people in his rehab program, from battered women to homeless people.

“It has given people an opportunity to support themselves as they go through rehab,” he said. “People see that they’re hard workers.”

Others are more cautious about who represents their clients.

Derek Masar, MJAD’s co-founder, said he started hiring his own spinners after he became frustrated with spinners who showed up late, smoked cigarettes and didn’t take the job seriously.

“They would send us someone who literally looked like they woke up from behind the building they were spinning in front of,” he said. “We need people that are image conscious, clean cut.”

At the Aarrow Advertising boot camp, young spinners dress in uniform, with red Aarrow shirts, and do push-ups and running exercises without complaint.

A pudgy boy in plastic glasses crab-walks backward in one drill while a thin teen wearing batting gloves grunts as he throws a sign into the air.

To the crowd that has gathered to watch, the practice seems thankless and grueling. But Bryan Penate, a 21-year-old rookie, said it beats his previous job as a fry cook at McDonald’s.

“There’s less pressure,” he said.

Was that a smile on his toothy snout, or was Reggie the reclusive reptile just humming “See You Later, Alligator,” as he floated Monday across a Harbor City pond?

Stunned visitors at Lake Machado near the Harbor Freeway watched as Reggie resurfaced after an 18-month absence to spend 90 minutes leisurely gliding near a park observation deck.

“He looked back at us with a bewildered look in his eye,” said eyewitness Mike Molina, an aide to Los Angeles City Councilwoman Janice Hahn.

The sighting caused a flurry of shoreline excitement as parks workers hurriedly began erecting safety fences and rangers were deployed to keep parkgoers safe from Reggie — and vice versa.

Hahn hurried to the lake at dusk as a crowd gathered. By then, the alligator had once more slipped beneath the 40-acre lake’s murky waters.

“He showed himself for a couple of hours. I don’t think any of us thought he was dead. I guess we’ll have to call the gator-wrangling teams back,” Hahn said as she inspected photos taken Monday of Reggie by park maintenance worker Todd Wales.

Professional alligator hunters, including a self-proclaimed gator expert uprooted from the swamps of Louisiana by Hurricane Katrina, and a team from Gatorland in Florida, spent months in 2005 unsuccessfully searching for Reggie after the creature was allegedly dumped in the lake by owners who considered him too big to keep.

The hurricane refugee, Thomas “T-Bone” Quinn, had angered the Floridians by calling their use of a pontoon boat in the lake “retarded.” Insulted, they piled ashore and headed for home, with Gatorland team leader Ted Williams sniffing: “I will not allow some swamp rat to walk into a situation and make comments…. I am not going to allow Gatorland to be referred to as ‘retarded.’ “

Less than a month later, Quinn proved that Reggie wasn’t the only one on the lam: Quinn was arrested on a Louisiana probation violation charge.

Hahn said she planned to call associates of the late “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin, whom she said volunteered his team to search for Reggie. Irwin was killed by a stingray off Australia’s Great Barrier Reef last September.

In the meantime, Hahn said, she is hoping to obtain restitution from two men who have been charged with dumping Reggie in the lake in mid-2005. Ex-Los Angeles police officer Todd Natow and a friend, Anthony Brewer, both from San Pedro, were arrested after an anonymous tip led investigators to the pair. Authorities said Reggie had grown too large for a backyard pool where he was being kept.

Brewer pleaded no contest to a state wildlife law violation and was sentenced to probation. Natow, with the LAPD from 1984 to 2001, has pleaded not guilty to misdemeanor charges tied to Reggie’s possession and lake release.

“We’ve spent $180,000 at last count on public safety here because of Reggie,” Hahn said.

Reggie’s fans, meanwhile, were hoping that the reptile — now grown to an estimated 7-foot length — stays visible for a while this time around. Some point out that city officials quickly relocated a smaller alligator caught in September 2005 in a Harbor City drainage ditch to the Los Angeles Zoo.

“I could grab his tail and catch him,” said 4-year-old Corien Yokley, visiting the lake late Monday with Harbor City family members.

Three-year-old Anthony David Reyes, also of Harbor City, was certain he’d spy Reggie. “I’ve seen him before. Right here,” the boy bragged.

His father, automotive worker Marco Reyes, was certain Monday’s gator was Reggie. “What are the chances of somebody dumping another alligator that size into this lake?” he asked.

Herman Wouters for The New York Times

Corey M. Reardon and Hudson Young live in an apartment along the Herengracht, or Gentlemen’s Canal.

Even though he lives in an Amsterdam canal house built before 1593, Corey M. Reardon expects 21st-century, American-style service. And he has learned to go out of his way to get it.

Every other week, Mr. Reardon stuffs a suitcase full of stained and soiled clothes and leaves his apartment along Amsterdam’s swankiest canal, bypassing boatloads of envious tourists too busy admiring his residence to suspect his dirty little secret.

Ten hours later, he and his grimy cargo land in northern Virginia. Awaiting him there, in the interest of love and clean laundry, are his partner and, almost equally important, his dry cleaner.

Hauling dirty clothes across the ocean to have them dry-cleaned is Mr. Reardon’s signal to the Dutch that some of their service industries are to him, like his home, a bit dated.

“Dry cleaners here are only open during working hours typically, and it takes three days to get dry cleaning done,” he said. “In the U.S., it’s half the price and you can drop it off in the morning and pick it up in the evening. That’s inconceivable here.”

Mr. Reardon, 45, who owns an international market research company, smiles when he tells this story, pleased by how he has outsmarted the system while, at the same time, aware of how silly his minor grievances may sound.

Buying and renovating his first home abroad — together with his partner, Hudson Young — proved almost easier than finding a place to get his shirts done. But Mr. Reardon still had to find innovative ways to mix and match Dutch tradition with American expediency.

The first challenge was finding a place.

The couple, self-employed Americans who married here four years ago, looked at more than 20 properties in just a couple of months. All the properties needed work.

“You really needed to look at properties with an imagination,” said Mr. Reardon, who moved to the Netherlands 13 years ago but waited 8 years before buying. “Everything you looked at needed to be renovated. So it was a bit daunting and frustrating.”

They eventually settled on a 100-square-meter, or 1,076-square-foot, apartment on the second floor of a brick-front town house along the Herengracht, or Gentlemen’s Canal. The building was once home to a coffee bean trading company. Mr. Young, 38, spends more of his time in Virginia, where he owns a scholastic-supply company.

The Amsterdam apartment, just a two-minute walk from the canal house in which Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis for more than two years until they were betrayed, cost 400,000 euros, or $525,000, when the couple bought it five years ago.

Apartments in Amsterdam last year sold for an average of 2,915 euros, or $3,831, per square meter, or about $356 a square foot. And property along Amsterdam’s canals, like Mr. Reardon’s home, can cost anywhere from 3,000 euros per square meter, or about $366 a square foot, to more than 6,000 euros per square meter, or about $733 a square foot, depending on the location, according to local real estate agent associations and tax authorities.

Mr. Reardon’s apartment was in better condition than most of those the couple had seen, but the 12-foot-high ceiling and the fireplace’s mahogany mantel were chipped or peeling and urgently in need of repair. Also, the parquet floor was stained and faded.

As usual, Mr. Reardon wanted the best of both worlds: a restoration that would honor his new home’s rich Dutch history, coupled with a renovation that would feature decidedly modern American amenities.

Some of his ideas — like an open kitchen — were immediately pooh-poohed. “Dutch friends told us that was a big mistake,” Mr. Reardon said, explaining that many here prefer a kitchen distinctly separate from the dining room. Anything else, he said, would be “very American.”

Undeterred, Mr. Reardon sketched his vision and, together with Mr. Young, found a Dutch interior architect flexible enough to help shape the design and carry it out.

“We did the smart thing of hiring him on top of that as a project manager, to deal with the contractors,” Mr. Reardon said. “I’m traveling 80 percent of the time. It was well worth hiring a project manager.”

Seeking to capitalize on his waterfront view, Mr. Reardon created a great room, an 80-square-meter, or slightly more than 860-square-foot, open space that stretches from the canal on one side to the building’s courtyard in back and contains his living room, dining area and kitchen.

It is a front-row seat onto Amsterdam’s canal scene, in which Dutch bicyclists rush past carefree tourists in boats and horse-drawn carriages. The canal and its ever-changing cast of characters keep Mr. Reardon company, in one form or another, in every part of the room.

From the living area, he can watch the show below or admire the architectural beauty of the nearby landmark church, Westerkerk. In the kitchen, he can hear its bells toll while he is cooking. And in between, in the dining area, he can savor the view of the canal houses that face his.

To wrap up the renovation, Mr. Reardon had the contractors tuck a 20-square-meter, or 215-square-foot, bedroom behind the apartment’s entryway, along with a small bathroom and walk-in closet.

All told, he and Mr. Young spent about 80,000 euros, or $105,000, on repairs and renovations. Mr. Reardon estimates that, today, the renovated apartment would sell for about 650,000 euros, or almost $855,000. When Mr. Reardon and Mr. Young set about furnishing the apartment, they stuck with a trans-Atlantic approach. For instance, in the living room, an American prairie desk, above which hangs a signed Miro print, has its back turned to Dutch black leather chairs and a gray plaid sofa.

In spite of the Netherlands’ mild but often dreary climate, Mr. Reardon made sure his apartment had one last American addition: air-conditioning.

“The Dutch thought we were crazy,” he said. But a heat wave last summer has Mr. Reardon convinced that he may once again prove his naysayers wrong.

“It’s getting warmer,” he said with a grin.

WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif.

J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times

Customers line up to top yogurt with fruit at the Pinkberry store in the Westwood section of Los Angeles.

J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times

The chain now has many rivals.

CONDEMNATIONS have been made. Mildly menacing Internet comments have been exchanged. A lawsuit and a police report have been filed. Multitudes of parking altercations have occurred, with government officials summoned.

Yes, frozen yogurt is back.

For the past year, congeries of women in Ugg boots have lined up outside a chain of shops called Pinkberry to get a taste of Los Angeles’s newest take on the airy, low-fat treat of yore. Otherwise reasonable people have hopped from illegally parked cars and waited as long as an hour to get a little cup of sour yogurt, in two flavors, plain and green tea, often topped with fresh fruit, or, inexplicably, Fruity Pebbles cereal.

Pinkberry’s original store has drawn the ire of its West Hollywood neighbors after nearly a year of parking dramas and lawns dotted with small paper cups bearing little pink swirls.

The company’s squabbles with the competitors that have sprouted around town have been the subject of fierce debate on Los Angeles food blogs and more than a dozen news articles in the local press. The rivals have plans to expand into Las Vegas and Florida. Meanwhile a company in Korea claims that it was the inspiration for Pinkberry.

Undeterred, Pinkberry has marched on with its own expansion, opening nine new stores in Los Angeles County over the last three months, and three in New York.

How has frozen yogurt, the leg warmer of food trends, managed to stage such a showy comeback?

When frozen yogurt was introduced in the 1970s, the American public was largely unwilling to countenance its tart taste. In the 1980s, the chains The Country’s Best Yogurt (now TCBY) and I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt added flavors and sugars, creating cloyingly sweet and chalky products.

Consumers were charmed by this low-fat, lower-calorie alternative to ice cream and its odious cousin, ice milk. Sales of frozen yogurt soared over 200 percent a year from the mid 1980s until the early 1990s.

But then a wave of new reduced-fat ice creams turned up and “frozen yogurt started to take a dive,” said Steven Young, a food technologist and an ice cream expert who runs a consulting firm in Houston.

In 2005, 65 million gallons of frozen yogurt were produced in the United States, a significant decline from 1990, when 117.6 million gallons of the stuff was made, according to the International Dairy Foods Association.

The frozen yogurt that has taken Los Angeles by storm resembles the early, sour frozen yogurt more than its artificially flavored progeny. And the current craze seems to spring from Korea, where a company called Red Mango started selling sour-style yogurt in 2004.

Its 150 stores offer frozen yogurt made from a powdered base imported from Italy. “We call it natural, authentic yogurt,” said Brandon Jo, chief executive officer of Red Mango Inc., the company’s North American unit, which is opening its first American store in Westwood this April.

Around the same time Red Mango got started, Shelly Hwang and her boyfriend, Young Lee, who are both from Korea, were attempting to open a tea parlor in West Hollywood. When the neighborhood rejected their application for a liquor license, the two switched gears. In early 2005, Pinkberry was born.

Mr. Lee said there is nothing Korean about the idea, but Pinkberry closely resembles Red Mango: two flavors only, plain and green tea, served with toppings such as strawberries, sweetened cereals, coconut and, if one knows to ask, mochi — Japanese sticky rice. (“We don’t put that out,” Mr. Lee said. “It is kind of like going to In-N-Out Burger and ordering ‘animal style.’ ”)

By spring of 2006, Pinkberry was so successful that neighbors of its original shop began to complain about parking and litter to the West Hollywood City Council. The store was ordered to shorten its evening hours and place guards in front to help control the crowds. Employees began to pick up litter.

Yet some neighbors want the store’s license revoked. The city is trying to facilitate a compromise, and officials believe the spread of Pinkberry locations across Los Angeles may ease the traffic at the original store, said Susan Healy Keene, the director of community development for West Hollywood.

In the meantime, Pinkberry competitors have opened all over town.

There is Kiwiberri, and Fiore, in the Japanese Village Plaza downtown. Seeking the entrance to a parking structure in Westwood recently, I was momentarily stymied by a tiny shop called Snowberry, which was selling, well, you know.

In November, a shop called Berri Good opened in Fairfax, with kosher certification and a chartreuse-and-pink logo that is barely distinguishable from Pinkberry’s.

“I don’t think we’re the same,” said Uzi Moses, the owner of Berri Good. “We use different fonts.” On top of that, he said, “You know we have celebrities here, right? Are you aware of that?”

Watching it all unfold, Red Mango executives are half frosted and half convinced that they are getting free market research, Mr. Jo said. “We are a little annoyed but at the same time they are introducing the product category to the marketplace.”

Mr. Lee takes competition very seriously. John Bae, the owner of Kiwiberri, said that Mr. Lee had visited one of his stores puffing on a cigar and appeared to be up to something other than research.

“He came over at 11 p.m. and told me, ‘I know where you live and I’m going to get you,’ ” Mr. Bae said. He filed a police report claiming he had been threatened with “great bodily harm,” and demanded a restraining order against Mr. Lee, he said. A Los Angeles Police Department spokeswoman said that no restraining order was issued and that no criminal charges were filed. Mr. Lee denies making any threats. There has been one hearing on the matter in the city attorney’s office with another scheduled for next month.

Mr. Lee, who in turn has filed a suit charging Mr. Bae with copying his logo and other trademark infringements, said that he did not like his competitor’s business practices and filed the lawsuit to “teach them a lesson.” Lawyers are engaged in settlement talks, with Pinkberry’s side suggesting, among other things, that Mr. Bae change his logo and put a sign in his store stating that it has no connection to Pinkberry, and that he confess to posing as a regular yogurt lover while posting comments on food blogs under the name “yogurtfanetik.” Mr. Bae called the settlement terms “ridiculous” and denied that he is yogurtfanetik.

Lawsuits, alleged threats and crowd control issues aside, how is Pinkberry’s yogurt? Smooth, with a tangy finish to the plain. Doused with some fresh berries, it is almost addictive, and the lines at many Pinkberry locations seem understandable, even if Cap’n Crunch toppings do not. The green tea flavor is a bit more grainy and overbearing, and makes up less than 40 percent of the sales, Mr. Lee said.

Frozen yogurt’s rebirth appears to be an outgrowth of the nation’s obsession with food that offers health benefits (TCBY, looking for a revival of its own, added more live active cultures to its yogurt’s base) and of its evolving palate.

David Kim, a yoga instructor who lives in Santa Monica, is not remotely concerned about Pinkberry’s competitive issues. He gets his yogurt fix (small plain with mochi) once a week. “O.K., twice,” Mr. Kim said. “If I could, I would get it three times. It doesn’t immediately grab you, but there is something about the flavor that draws you in, and each time you go back you taste something a little bit different. The next thing you know, it’s like crack.”