By Ben Joravsky
Vazquez, city officials counter, knows the answer quite well. “He was warned that he had to clean up his lot or face the consequences,” says Terry Levin, a spokesperson for the Department of Streets and Sanitation, which towed the cars. “He was basically running an illegal junkyard, storing cars to cannibalize the spare parts. It was a safety hazard.”
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“I buy old cars, keep them in the back, fix them up, and then move them up front where I sell them,” says Vazquez. “OK, it’s not Joe Rizza Ford, but it’s how my family and I make a living.”
They’ve operated out of that lot for almost ten years, a bother to no one, and until recently they’d had no run-ins with the law, Vazquez says. To demonstrate their civic worthiness, Vazquez’s father, Salvador senior, keeps a three-ring notebook filled with plastic-encased letters of reference (predating the family’s recent hassles) written by local business, community, and civic leaders.
Vazquez went to court and wound up paying $510 in driveway fees. Then on August 25 he was visited by a building inspector who ordered him to repair the rear fence and to clear the weeds and garbage that had accumulated in the back lot. “I can understand why the city would want him to clear up that rear lot,” says Lopez. “There had been fly dumping in there, and the city wanted him to take down the fence to have the garbage hauled away. He did what they wanted.”
One week later the cars were destroyed.
Levin says there was “no storage fee, no towing fee, just whatever it would have cost to take them. He was told, ‘You can have them back, just take them away.’”
