Another Viewpoint on Angels Gate

I really have to take exception to your “objective journalistic” viewpoint on Angels Gate Cultural Center (Times, Jan. 17). The biases your articles hold have created increasing criticism of this community center, focusing more on a disgruntled minority than on the support of people the center has served.

For years the city’s department of recreation has done everything it could to control this independent group of artists and creative community leaders by the imposition of its stupid, irrelevant bureaucracy.

Your article states that the City of Los Angeles supports the idea of a cultural center but does not have the money to run or fund one. I really have to wonder if your reporters are familiar with this community at all. In the beginning or your article, it talks about the commanding view Angels Gate Cultural Center has of the harbor (the Port of Los Angeles), the biggest money-generating industry the city owns, the biggest public utility in the county. Yet city officials are at a complete loss on how to even partially fund a cultural center in the south end of this city. Yet they seem to have plenty of money for Barnsdall. There seems to be money for raping the landscape at Point Fermin Park and in downtown Los Angeles. Every time they put up a giant high-rise, 1 1/2% goes to providing art in public places downtown, but will the city spend 1% of its port revenues on culture in the harbor area?

This community is sick and tired of being the poor stepchild to Los Angeles, and the kind of indifference we receive from the city bureaucracies on Angels Gate is just the tip of the iceberg. They take the port revenues and the citizens of our harbor community have to put up with the truck traffic, the pollution, the noise and inconvenience, and for what little we get back you would think they might find a few dollars to help fund culture in the district.

Yet your articles do not have the depth of investigation to go beyond the surface conflict. Why for instance should a cultural arts center even come under the jurisdiction of the Recreation and Parks Department instead of cultural affairs?

Does your article even question the ability of the Recreation and Parks Department to set the standards for any cultural center, when the only artistic standard they are capable of is mowing lawns or butchering trees?

Although you try to stress the point of the inability of Angels Gate Cultural Center to succeed, I suggest that the mere fact that it has survived under immense pressure from your publication is proof of its viability, not perhaps up to par with the city bureaucracies’ idea of culture, but then classes producing low-fire pinch pots for old ladies is not my idea of high cultural standards.

In conclusion, I suggest that the Los Angeles Times South Bay section is incapable of truly unbiased reporting on this issue and should refrain from its further involvement in stirring up news rather than reporting a full breadth of the facts. Either hire a reporter with the expertise to handle the complex sub-strata of politics in a city the size of Los Angeles or stick to reporting local city council meetings on zoning variances in areas more accustomed to being referred to as “the South Bay”!

JAMES P. ALLEN

San Pedro

Editor’s note: Allen is owner and publisher of Random Lengths, a community newspaper in San Pedro, and the owner of Graphic Touch, a printing firm that has done work for Angels Gate Cultural Center.

With regard to the funding issue, state law requires that revenues generated by the Port of Los Angeles--or any other port--be used “for the promotion and accommodation of commerce, navigation and fishery.”