Wilmington Wonderland : Banning Park Takes Pride in Growing Community Spirit, Decline in Graffiti, Crime

Hortense Wright told her husband they were getting out of Wilmington.

She was fed up with the drug dealing, with not being able to sleep at night for fear someone would break into their tiny apartment. And so she had made up her mind: They would not buy a home in this gritty industrial community next to the Port of Los Angeles.

Marc Wright responded by taking his wife to see a neighborhood called Banning Park--a four-block pocket of wide streets shaded by camphor trees and lined with clean, well-preserved older homes, all within the shadow of the Greek Revival mansion that Phineas Banning, founder of Wilmington and the port, built in 1864. Last year, the couple paid $178,500 for a modest bungalow, and Hortense Wright ate her words.

‘Neighborhood Gold-Plated’

“There are a lot of nicer houses, but this neighborhood is gold-plated,” said Marc Wright.

What attracted the Wrights to Banning Park is its neighborhood association--a tightly knit group that formed nearly three years ago to combat an increase in gangs, drug dealing, litter and abandoned cars that they feared would ruin their picturesque corner of Wilmington.

Today, the Banning Park Neighborhood Assn. has virtually eliminated graffiti from its area. The alleys in Banning Park are clean and well-lit. Property values are up--the Wrights’ house was recently appraised at $217,000--and crime is way down, due to a neighborhood crime watch that is so vigilant the Los Angeles Police Department’s Harbor Division holds it up as an example for other community groups to follow.

Even the association’s detractors--who complain that the group is elitist and insensitive to far more serious problems in poorer parts of Wilmington--concede that the neighborhood association has fulfilled its motto of “protect and preserve.”

Supporters, meanwhile, gush about how the association has injected community spirit into Banning Park by sponsoring beautification awards, picnics, Halloween pumpkin carving contests, community caroling at Christmas and, this Sunday, the first “Storybook Neighborhood Homes Tour,” in which the public will be able to view seven distinctive homes as well as the 125-year-old Banning Mansion, now a city-run museum.

For locals who think that home tours belong in places like Hancock Park and Pasadena, association president Simie Seaman has a quick response:

“We had one person roll over in laughter and say, ‘What do we have that anyone would want to see?’ That’s one of our reasons for doing it, to get people to understand that there are nice places in Wilmington, that there is pride here. It’s showing that the neighborhood is alive, that people care and they want the outside world to see Wilmington from a different light.”

There was a time, years ago, when Banning Park residents did not have to fret over whether their streets were clean and their alleys free of graffiti.

“That’s always been the place to live in Wilmington,” said Susan Pritchard, a Wilmington resident and aide to Los Angeles Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores, who represents the community. “The doctors all used to live there. Don Kott (a well-known Carson auto dealer) used to live there. All the people in town with the big names used to live there.”

It is a tiny neighborhood, with only 89 homes in the 1200 blocks of Broad Avenue, Lakme Avenue, Banning Boulevard and Cary Avenue. Many of the houses date from the 1920s and are said to have been built by executives of the Wilmington Transportation Co., a tugboat business once owned by Banning.

Despite a white-collar exodus in the 1960s and ‘70s, the Banning Park neighborhood remained, for the most part, a tranquil and safe place to live. But by the mid-1980s, residents began to notice change creeping into their shady refuge.

“We were having a lot of robberies,” recalls resident Efren Quintana, who has lived in Banning Park since 1961. “Our alleys were just filthy dirty. We had graffiti. On the corner, there was drug dealing.”

In 1987, Seaman--a Torrance native who had moved to the neighborhood a few years earlier because she found it both architecturally pleasing and affordable--started a community campaign to persuade the Exxon oil company to clean up its property just outside Banning Park. That effort evolved into the formation of the neighborhood association.

Since that time, Seaman and her sister, Lana Hollis, have worked nearly full-time on the organization’s projects. They meet regularly with city officials, including police officers from the Harbor Division, one of whom recently called Banning Park “the Ritz of Wilmington.”

Police statistics show that in August, there were no burglaries, robberies, auto thefts or thefts of property from motor vehicles in Banning Park, while more than 175 such crimes occurred elsewhere in Wilmington. Crime prevention officers say this is in part because the group has a highly structured block-captain system, and because residents are not afraid to confront strangers.

“A lot of people think we live over here in a little paradise and that’s not true,” Hollis said. “There’s a reason it’s this way, and that’s because the people who live here are fighters. If you don’t fight for it, you know who gets to live here? The gangs and the drug dealers--they take over and you have to leave.”