In Search of an Identity : Area Lacks a Sense of Community

Dick Haddon’s church has an identity problem.

“I tell people that the First United Methodist Church of Gardena is not in Gardena,” the pastor said, “and people just kind of stare in disbelief. This is Gardena, but it’s not. Even the post office says ‘Gardena,’ but the reality is, we do not live in Gardena. . . . If we had a fire and we called 911, the response would come from the city of Los Angeles.”

These are the complications of life in Harbor Gateway, the 8-mile-long, 4-block-wide umbilical cord that was acquired at the turn of the century to link the belly of Los Angeles to its port. In a city where community names conjure up images--Venice, Silver Lake, Boyle Heights--Harbor Gateway draws a blank. Bounded on the west by Gardena and Torrance and on the east by Carson and unincorporated county land, the gateway was for decades known as the “city strip,” the “shoestring strip” or simply “the strip.”

Four years ago, the Los Angeles City Council rechristened the area as Harbor Gateway, in an effort to bring a sense of identity and community pride to its citizens--some of whom don’t even know they live in Los Angeles.

But with its long, narrow shape, Harbor Gateway lacks much of what makes a community a community. There is no central business district, no civic center or gathering place, no library branch, no police station and, as Haddon notes, no post office. So, despite the new name, the mailing addresses of gateway residents remain unchanged. They still say Torrance or Gardena, not Los Angeles.

Address Confusion

Not surprisingly, this leaves some people confused.

“They say, ‘Look, my mailing address is Gardena,’ ” said Gene Painter, Gardena city superintendent of human services, who said he does not turn away Gateway residents who ask for help. “Strange as it may seem, they don’t know where they live.”

Optician Chris Toughill, for instance, joined the Torrance Chamber of Commerce when he opened his shop in a Harbor Gateway strip mall, and his neighbors did the same. It wasn’t until the Torrance mayor declined to attend the center’s grand opening, Toughill said, that the merchants discovered they were in Los Angeles.

Even the young toughs of the Gardena 13 gang, interviewed recently while hanging out on a Harbor Gateway corner, insisted they were standing in Gardena.

In population, Harbor Gateway is tied with Westwood as the Los Angeles’ second-fastest growing area (Sylmar is first). Between 1980 and 1986, according to Los Angeles Planning Department estimates, the gateway’s population increased 15.6%, from 30,238 to 34,951.

But Harbor Gateway cannot really be taken as a whole--it is actually five separate neighborhoods lumped together artificially.

City to Suburbs

A drive through Harbor Gateway is like a trip from the city to the suburbs; on the north end, which begins at El Segundo Boulevard, there are apartments needing repair, gang graffiti and single-family homes with barred windows. The gateway’s southern end--which stops at Sepulveda Boulevard where Harbor City begins--is punctuated by newly built strip malls, condominiums and well-manicured lawns.

Property values follow a similar pattern, with the lowest prices in the northern end. Home prices in nearby Torrance or Gardena, however, are considerably higher than they are in the gateway. Real estate agents say a house in the gateway might sell for as much as $50,000 less than one across the street in another community. Agents attribute the difference to better city services, particularly in Torrance, which has its own school district. (Gardena schools are part of the Los Angeles Unified School District.)

“The minute you mention Los Angeles,” said Gardena real estate agent John Warner, “it frightens . . . people away. It’s just one of those things. Homes have always been cheaper over there.”

Said gateway resident Betty Roy: “I hate to be known to live in the strip. When my friends ask where I live, I tell them Torrance.”

Indeed, four years after the name change--in spite of spiffy blue-and-white signs that declare “Harbor Gateway” below the Los Angeles city seal--those who live and work there say they still feel betwixt and between, not fully a part of Los Angeles, the gateway or the cities they border.

‘We’re Forgotten’

Moreover, they complain that their new moniker has not brought with it what they really want: more attention from city officials, better services, such as street cleaning and tree trimming, and, above all, increased police protection. They are tired of looking across their borders to cities--or other parts of Los Angeles--that are far better cared for. Even city officials admit that.

“We’re forgotten,” said community activist Louise Dobbs, who lives in the northernmost Harbor Gateway neighborhood, just south of South-Central Los Angeles.

“We’re like in limbo,” said Roy, a longtime resident of the gateway’s southern end. “We’re not really Torrance, and we’re not really Carson. . . . We’re only here because Los Angeles needs this little piece of land to attach to the harbor. Nobody cares about us. We cannot get any funds for libraries. Our parks are the worst. We’re like the forgotten people.”

For Sylvia Figueroa, life on the border means a daily struggle at the Mexican pizza parlor she opened a year ago. Figueroa’s restaurant, called “It’s a Miracle,” is at Gardena Boulevard and Vermont Avenue in Los Angeles. Gardena is across the street.

The differences are stark.

On the Gardena side, Gardena Boulevard--that city’s main business thoroughfare--is getting a face-lift. The street is clean and the trees are precisely trimmed. City officials are offering grants to business owners for storefront renovations.

Contrast Across Street

Across the street in Los Angeles, the trees are scraggly and overgrown, vagrants sleep in a littered vacant lot, liquor stores abound, and the young punks from the Gardena 13 gang seem to own the corner.

“The other side there’s no drunk people, no people looking for drugs,” said Figueroa, who sweeps her sidewalk regularly.

“The other side is so clean. Even the sidewalk is clean. You see the street?” she asked, pointing to a pile of litter in front of the shop next to hers. “That’s terrible.”

Los Angeles Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores, who represents the area, concedes that the gateway is not getting its share of services.

“There’s no question that . . . there are problems,” Flores said. “It’s narrow and it’s long and we’re surrounded by other jurisdictions, so we’re constantly being compared with the county, with Torrance and Gardena and Carson.

“It’s difficult to get a library in there because no matter where you put a library in the gateway, you only serve a limited number of city residents. It’s difficult to get a street-cleaning service on a regular basis because they have to come from somewhere else to get there. . . . It’s not like having a nice round community where you have something in the middle and it serves everybody around it.”

The United Way apparently agrees. In March, the agency’s Harbor/Southeast division declared Harbor Gateway an “under-served geographic area,” citing “real gaps in law enforcement” and social services.

The declaration is part of a long-term plan by the United Way to upgrade Harbor Gateway by organizing neighborhood leaders to form nonprofit programs for residents. The gateway was selected for the program over other communities, including Carson and Wilmington.

A citizens group, chaired by the Rev. Haddon, is setting goals for the project, apparently marking the first time that leaders from throughout the gateway have come together to talk about the area’s problems. Haddon and some others agree that the first goal should be improving community pride and cohesiveness so the gateway can have political clout.

Reverse History

To do that, residents must reverse 82 years of history. The gateway is part of Los Angeles for just one reason: City officials had to annex it to get what they really wanted--the port at Wilmington and San Pedro. The so-called Shoestring Strip Annexation took place Dec. 26, 1906.

Over the years, gateway residents have somehow coalesced into five distinct neighborhoods. From north to south, their rough boundaries are: El Segundo Boulevard to Rosecrans Avenue; Rosecrans to Redondo Beach Boulevard; Redondo Beach to Artesia Boulevard; Artesia to 190th Street; and 190th Street to Sepulveda Boulevard. The east-west boundaries of the three northern neighborhoods are Vermont Avenue and Figueroa Street, while Western and Normandie avenues bound the two in the south.

Overall, Harbor Gateway is a racially mixed, middle-income area with an estimated median household income of $30,431 and a population that is 48.4% white, 13.2% black, 16.5% Asian and 21.8% other, according to the 1980 census, the most recent statistics available. (Hispanics are Harbor Gateway’s largest minority group, accounting for 32.9% of the overall population in 1980, but they were not tallied as part of the racial breakdown.)

The picture changes when the neighborhoods are more closely examined. Demographic statistics show that the various gateway segments often resemble neighboring communities more closely than they do one another.

For example, the two gateway neighborhoods near South-Central Los Angeles and Compton have the heaviest concentration of blacks, 44.7%. Whites make up 23.6% of the residents of those two neighborhoods, which extend north from Redondo Beach Boulevard, and Asians make up 6.9%. The estimated median household income there is $27,453.

Changing Population

But in the gateway’s midsection, from Artesia Boulevard to 190th Street, the population reflects that of the southern end of Gardena, which is heavily Asian. There, the black population is minuscule--just 0.4% --with most of the population split between whites, 48.1%, and Asians, 44.8%. Estimated household income in this section jumps dramatically, to $44,498.

And south of 190th Street, approaching predominantly white Torrance, the white population jumps even higher, to 66.3%, while the Asian population dips to 8.6% and the number of blacks rises slightly to 2%. Median household income is $27,607.

Although it is primarily residential, the gateway also includes a burgeoning business district at the San Diego and Harbor freeways, where, according to Caltrans, 500,000 cars drive by each day, making it the second busiest intersection in Southern California.

The so-called 190th Street Corridor is a major drawing card for commercial developers, who have built about 5 million square feet of office space there in the last eight years, 3 million of it on speculation. Gleaming high-rises with pleasant landscaping have replaced a Shell oil refinery and manufacturing plants.

“We sort of had a shift from the industrial age to the information age,” said Howard Mann, president of Andrex Development Co., one of the major developers in the corridor.

Some heavy industry remains, including a McDonnell Douglas aircraft parts plant and a company that manufactures aluminum and titanium products, co-owned by Martin Marietta and a Japanese firm.

And the legacy of past industry is evident as well: The gateway contains two major toxic waste sites in the vicinity of the 190th Street Corridor. One of them, the 13-acre former home of the Montrose Chemical Corp., is a candidate for money from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund. Studies have found extensive DDT contamination of soil and ground water near the site.

Mann predicts that the move away from industrial and to commercial uses will help upgrade nearby areas by attracting home buyers who hold high-paying jobs in what he calls the gateway’s “urban cluster.” Already, he said, he is planning a restaurant to meet that market, based on an analysis that “found that the average income per household within a 5-mile radius of this intersection is $50,000.”

Dining in elegance, however, is certainly not a priority farther north in the gateway, where large concentrations of undocumented Latino residents are simply struggling to get by.

A study by the United Way found that illegal Latino immigrants are the “most under-served” group in the gateway. Haddon and other local leaders say it is difficult to form neighborhood coalitions because illegal aliens fear they will attract unwanted attention from immigration authorities if they participate in community affairs.

“Their need is to be invisible,” he said, “and that does not make for a good community.”

Undocumented Residents

Haddon is particularly attuned to the problems of undocumented residents because his church houses and runs the 3-year-old Harbor Gateway Center, one of only two social service agencies the United Way found serving the area. The center--which offers a variety of nutritional, health and educational programs to an estimated 1,500 people--needs more money and staff. The director left more than a year ago when the money to pay her ran out. Haddon, who took the pastor’s job in July, has been doing her job and his since then.

United Way officials say they would like to strengthen the Harbor Gateway Center, and also persuade social service agencies in neighboring communities to expand operations into the gateway. Their study showed that the area lacks adequate shelters for battered women, delinquency prevention programs, drug and alcohol abuse programs, and crisis intervention centers.

In addition, Joan Hanley, the United Way volunteer coordinating the agency’s efforts in the gateway, said she would like the project to be a catalyst to improve police services.

Indeed, if there is one common thread that runs throughout the complaints of gateway residents, it is the increasing gang activity and the lack of police. Many say they go for days without seeing a patrol car, and that officers covering the area are often sent on calls elsewhere.

Los Angeles police officials say they have been trying to improve service in the gateway, especially during the last year, when citizens groups and Flores have pressed for additional patrols.

But they also acknowledge that cars are called out of the gateway more often than they would like. And they say its shape is a disadvantage to officers who must get from one end to the other quickly--and an advantage to crooks.

“It’s so obvious,” said Capt. Sandy Wasson of the Southeast Division, which covers the gateway north of the San Diego Freeway. Criminals know that “we can’t follow them into Gardena.”

Police Service

But Wasson takes issue with residents who say Harbor Gateway gets less than its fair share of coverage. He said a recent deployment study that he conducted for the Southeast Division shows that the gateway indeed has fewer patrol cars than other areas--just one car in the north and one in the south around the clock, with an additional car in the evening. But it also has less crime, he said.

In Wasson’s patrol area, the gateway does suffer from a longer-than-average response time, he said--8.3 minutes compared to 6.1 minutes for the rest of the Southeast Division. No statistics were available from the Harbor Division, which covers the southern neighborhoods.

Flores maintains that the city has improved police and other services in the gateway in recent years. She noted that a Harbor Gateway paramedic unit was established in June and that this year, the city Library Department finally included a proposal for a Harbor Gateway branch in its long-term plan, although she acknowledged that funding will take at least 5 to 10 years.

And though postal officials have rebuffed her requests thus far, Flores said she still hopes Harbor Gateway can someday have its own post office and ZIP code so residents can write Los Angeles on their return addresses.

“I think it’s important,” she said, “to have an actual tag and title on who you are and where you are.”