Neighborhoods --in L.A., It’s All in a Name

These days, the Westside of Los Angeles seems to be creeping east.

City planning maps reflect it. Real estate brokers capitalize on it.

“Certainly the downtown Hollywood area would be considered the Westside now, whereas years ago, probably not,” says real estate mogul Fred Sands. “The Westside is expanding. . . . It’s all perception, but it does make a difference in terms of status and property value.”

While the Westside moves east, the Eastside is moving west, judging by the protests by East Los Angeles community groups who say that construction of jails in industrial areas west of the Los Angeles River would encroach on their neighborhoods.

And South-Central Los Angeles? It seems to be moving all over the place--a regrettable sign, some community leaders say, of racial stereotyping.

“South-Central is almost becoming a code word for any black area--and an undesirable area,” says John W. Mack, president of the Los Angeles Urban League.

In a sprawling city in which the most famous community name--Hollywood--identifies an industry and life style as much as it does a place, it is perhaps no surprise that there is a nebulous nature to neighborhoods.

Various government agencies, commercial interests and homeowners’ associations each have their own methods of identifying communities, some of which overlap and none of which have anything more than quasi-official standing. Boundaries change as the city grows, and so do the neighborhood names.

“Los Angeles has always had an elastic, flexible definition of neighborhood identities and names,” says Edward W. Soja, a UCLA urban planning professor. “With tremendous growth and the fact that neighborhoods change so rapidly, the names are going to keep changing, too.”

Experts say that economic realities and the quest for identity play key roles in the naming and renaming of Los Angeles communities.

“You get the what-not hills and all this sort of things because it sounds good,” says G. David Lessley, head of neighborhood planning for the city Planning Department. “It’s important for people to have a name they can associate with locally, partly because of the spread-out nature and large size of the city. . . . It’s more than just for economic reasons, but that certainly has a strong influence on people.”

Canoga Park-West Hills

Real estate sales executive Mike Glickman agrees that appellations can have a significant impact. An excellent illustration, he says, was the successful 1986 effort by a group of San Fernando Valley residents to break away from blue-collar Canoga Park and identify their neighborhood as West Hills.

“When the name changed there was a frenzy of buying,” Glickman says. “Homes that were selling at the time in the $130,000-to-$150,000 range shot up to $170,000 and $180,000 overnight. But nearby homes in Canoga Park stayed the same. . . . It was really just because of the name.”

People can get touchy when it comes to what their neighborhood is called. “You tell Bob Hope he lives in North Hollywood rather than Toluca Lake, and he’ll hit you in the head,” says Judy Christy, manager of the Fred Sands Realtors office in Studio City. “But Toluca Lake is in North Hollywood.” (North Hollywood, of course, is within the Los Angeles city limits.)

There are other dynamics involved in the shifting boundaries besides real estate prices.

In the case of Koreatown, which existed mainly in the minds of Korean business leaders a decade ago, persuading the city to mark the district with signs--much like a gold miner might stake a claim--has proved to be a savvy move, at least in the view of retailers.

Good for Business

“There already was a Little Tokyo and a Chinatown, so now we have a Korean community,” says Michael Lee, executive director of the Korean Chamber of Commerce. “It is good for visibility of business.”

The chamber, which has led vigorous lobbying efforts to give Koreatown a high-profile status, eventually persuaded state transportation officials to place the name on freeway exit signs.

“Then Koreatown really expanded,” Lee says. “We grew faster than before.”

Sometimes, boundaries expand--or shrink--for political reasons.

Residents of Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles protest regularly against new prison facilities proposed for the primarily industrial areas just east and southeast of the Civic Center. The sites are west of the Los Angeles River and in neighborhoods traditionally viewed by government officials as East L.A.

“The Los Angeles River is not the boundary of East Los Angeles any more,” said Frank Villalobos, chairman of the Coalition Against the Prison in East Los Angeles. “The river doesn’t carry any water.”

Racial Stereotyping

Leaders of the black community regret the branding of a large, predominantly black sector of the city as South-Central, saying it amounts to a subtle form of racial stereotyping.

The term “South-Central Los Angeles” came into vogue, they say, after the Watts riots of 1965--in part, perhaps, as a means of easing inflamed emotions. But now, they say, such distinctive neighborhoods as Leimert Park, Lafayette Square and the Crenshaw District--by any objective standard well-removed from South-Central Los Angeles--are nonetheless frequently referred to by outsiders as within South-Central’s confines.

“The tendency is for (black Los Angeles) to be called one massive block, but there are distinct parts,” Mack says. “I don’t think it’s a conscious malicious manifestation of racism but it is, on a subconscious level, a milder form of racial stereotyping.”

Both Mack and City Councilman Nate Holden believe the news media is largely responsible for the lumping of several distinctive places under the heading of South-Central.

“They think it’s where a majority of the minority people live,” says Holden. “You separate Sherman Oaks from North Hollywood or Encino. . . . Whereas here, in this situation, your ethnic background plays a part.”

Indeed, a look through back issues of The Times shows that neighborhoods and streets as far west as Leimert Park or Crenshaw Boulevard occasionally are identified in news columns as South-Central Los Angeles.

Los Angeles Police Cmdr. William Booth acknowledges that police officers also “get in a habit sometimes of referring to South-Central Los Angeles (as) almost anything south of 1st Street.”

Black leaders contend that the misnaming can create the impression that the entire black community is crime-ridden, with dire implications for insurance rates and commercial opportunities.

Contradicting Definitions

Confusion is rampant because no one entity has supreme responsibility for naming Los Angeles neighborhoods and setting boundaries. Authorities ranging from police, to planners, to postmasters each have their own definitions of community borders, and they frequently overlap or contradict.

Take the intersection of Wilshire Boulevard and Rossmore Avenue.

The Los Angeles Police Department refers to it as the Wilshire Area.

The city Department of Transportation calls it Park Mile.

The Thomas Guide identifies it as Hancock Park.

The Korean Chamber of Commerce claims it lies within Greater Koreatown.

And the Los Angeles Times delivers its Westside edition there.

As for the man in the street, it depends:

“This is Hancock Park, and on the other side of the street is Fremont Place,” declared city sanitation worker Tony Shorts one recent afternoon, as he loaded a bundle of branches onto a garbage truck.

“I’d call it mid-Wilshire,” said Hollywood grip Lloyd Reed, seated at the bus stop on the northeast corner of the intersection.

“I think Hancock Park is around here somewhere,” said writer Steve Maganini, who stood nearby. “But if you’re on Wilshire,” Maganini added, “it’s the Smog Pit.”

Planning and Police Areas

The city Planning Department breaks the city into 35 community planning districts and the Police Department divides it into 18 patrol areas. The neighborhood that city planners call Boyle Heights is referred to as Hollenbeck by police. Also overlapping are such generic geographical headings as the Westside, and within them distinct neighborhoods such as Mar Vista, Palms, Bel-Air and Rancho Park.

Adding to the confusion is the unusual nature of the city limits. Communities that were once independent, such as San Pedro, Hollywood and Venice, now fall within the borders of Los Angeles; East Los Angeles, on the other hand, is officially an unincorporated area outside the city.

“It’s somewhat of an awkward situation because there are no established boundaries throughout the city,” said David Royer, who supervises the placement of community identification signs for the city Department of Transportation. “And seldom do you have a real natural boundary.”

In some cases, shifting boundaries and confusing names are the result of changes in government terminology. For example, when the city Planning Department consolidated its 70 plan review districts into 35 a decade ago, the border of its West Los Angeles district was expanded from Century City east toward Robertson Boulevard. And the planning district east of the Central City was renamed Central City North.

“We went through agony in giving that a name,” Lessley says. “On the old maps it was called the Wholesale Industry district, which is probably more descriptive. . . . At one point, we decided to call it Central City North and East; but then we thought people would get it mixed up with Northeast Los Angeles or Central City or Century City.”

Homeowners Get Involved

During the last five years, several homeowners’ groups throughout the city have led successful campaigns to alter the names of their own neighborhoods. Perhaps the most controversial was that of the San Fernando Valley residents who in 1986 literally carved out a new community, West Hills, from portions of Canoga Park.

“Some wanted to be in West Hills, some didn’t and it became a big fight,” Royer recalled. “Some were claiming that, because they were two houses on one side of the sign, their property value was less.”

The Harbor Gateway, once informally known as the City Strip or the Shoestring Strip, is also a recent invention. For decades, strip dwellers, whose neighborhood is the 8-mile-long, 4-block-wide umbilical cord that links Los Angeles to its port, had felt neglected because of a lack of police stations, libraries and post offices.

With the new name, selected through a community contest, residents say they now inhabit an entity with an identity. But letters still occasionally get lost because the neighborhood continues to be served by post offices in nearby Gardena and Torrance.

Finally, there is the Crenshaw District, a neighborhood nicknamed “The Jungle” several decades ago because of its tropical vegetation. Residents felt the name had a bad connotation, and last year they had changed its name to Baldwin Village.

City Commitment

The new name “is a step to show city commitment toward helping the community back on its feet,” Councilwoman Ruth Galanter said.

Over the years, many neighborhood names have come and gone.

Reseda was once called Marion. Canoga Park was Owensmouth. Portions of West Hollywood were Sherman. But there has always been a West Los Angeles. References to it can be found in the city’s first telephone directory, published 107 years ago. Among the West L.A. listings is one for the University of Southern California.