Relishing Life

By Oliver Lukacs
Staff Writer

June 6 -- She goes by “Hotdog Mama,” and her sales pitch is: “Take a bite of my hotdog, you’ll want it to be bigger.”

She’s been using that line for years, and it seems to be working. Or maybe it’s her personality, or it could be the veggie or kosher Polish hotdogs you can only get from her vending cart at 5th and Arizona, right outside the Santa Monica Post Office, where she’s been virtually every day for the last nine years.

“You got to be funny for people to remember you, or you got to be notorious and pose nude for Playboy magazine, then marry some movie star who is old and rich. That’s how you get famous in America, babe. Or the good old way, you produce something.”

Wearing blue jeans and beat-up white sneakers, Maria Locsin, or “the hotdog lady” as she is known to some, has been trying to become a successful entrepreneur and produce the American Dream with every hotdog sold.

But it hasn’t been easy. Of the six locations open to vendors in the Downtown (there are nine vendors on the pier, and 24 on the Third Street Promenade), Locsin’s spot by the post office is the only one taken. The other vendors have packed up and left.

“Nobody knows my woes but you,” she said theatrically, violins playing in the background through her little portable radio. “I loved this business until 9/11. But I have to show up rain or shine, honey.”

Like so many others, Locsin’s business was hit hard by the dot.com bust in the late 1990s and the terrorist attacks on the East Coast nearly two years ago. Before the economy took a nosedive, the bustling foot traffic that is the lifeblood of street vendors put $300 in her pocket everyday.

“You see this wall,” Locsin said, pointing to the empty waist-high brown brick partition in front of the post office. “It was always full of people sitting down eating. Then the jobs fell off, the jobs closed up, now nobody sits here.”

Locsin reluctantly admits she now averages $100 a day, with half of that going to “product, product, product. I give you the best product for the least amount of money,” she said.

The exodus of vendors from Downtown coincided with the dot-com bust that preceded 9/11, said Mark Richter, the City’s economic development manager.

While street vending “is always a risky activity” because of its reliance on foot traffic, Richter said that the area spanning 4th, 5th, and 6th Streets has “more activity now, giving vendors an opportunity to be successful.”

In April, the City Council voted to re-implement a lottery system for the Downtown carts and set standards for applicants to ensure quality. It also added a new monthly fee to the two-year permitting system, bringing the total to $825 a year, or 10 percent of the amount paid by vendors on the pier, who do ten times the business.

Despite a slumping economy, Locsin -- who speaks three languages, has a degree in English literature and is studying between sales for a state exam to become a licensed acupuncturist -- isn’t giving up on her Downtown spot.

Rain or shine, she still wakes up every day at 5 a.m. in her rent-controlled apartment in the city, drives her black pick-up truck to the valley to get her three-wheeled-500-pound-metal-chrome-colored vending cart, drives back to Santa Monica, lugs it up the curb by herself and parks it in the shade between two towering ficus trees.

“Relish, onion, jalapeno, sauerkraut?” Locsin asks of one of her regulars, while smearing mustard on a kosher beef hotdog. Her customers, she said, don’t just come for the food. “They come here because they know they are going to get something more than a hotdog.”