Paths to Park Vary, but Homeless Find a Community There : Alondra: Regulars worry, rage, grieve, and pool resources of food, booze and compassion.

The glistening lake and inviting lawns of Alondra Park lure visitors from all over the South Bay.

Some come for a stroll, some a bicycle ride, others spend an afternoon fishing or feeding the ducks and geese.

Some people, however, come to stay.

Nestled in a stretch of unincorporated county land surrounded by Torrance, Lawndale, Gardena and Hawthorne, Alondra Park has become an unofficial haven for the South Bay’s homeless population, a place where they gather to share what meager resources they can scrounge in their constant struggle to survive.

“You get people who are anywhere from their 20s to their 50s,” said Michele May, chairwoman of the South Bay Homeless Coalition. “The reasons (they are homeless) vary greatly. For one person, it’s a divorce. For another, they were laid off. Basically, it’s the cost of housing around here and . . . then just one little thing seems to set a whole wheel of things into motion that makes them end up here.”

May estimates that 50 people call Alondra Park home, but social workers say as many as 30 more people who live in corrugated cardboard huts on nearby freeway embankments can be counted as part of Alondra’s community.

During the hours when the park is open to the public, from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., Alondra’s regulars can be found in scattered groups throughout the park, sleeping on tattered blankets, sorting through soiled bags and boxes of belongings and, sometimes, sharing a bottle of cheap wine.

After 10 p.m., however, the homeless of Alondra melt into the darkness to stay clear of the county’s Safety Patrol officers, who enforce park hours, and to dodge police officers from the three city departments and the county Sheriff’s Department, who want them to stay out of their jurisdictions.

At times, the homeless spend their nights being bounced from one jurisdiction to another.

“I was at another park, and the police hassled me and said, ‘Go to Alondra Park,’ ” said Gary Ellison, 36, an out-of-work electrician. “You go across the street, they say, ‘Go back to Alondra Park.’ You go back in the park, they say, ‘Get out of the park. It’s after hours.’ That’s how I get my exercise, going back and forth.”

The more fortunate residents of Alondra own the battered cars and vans that dot the park’s long, narrow parking lot along Redondo Beach Boulevard. The cars must be moved every night, but in the eyes of those with nothing at all, even the most dilapidated car is a treasure--a private place to store belongings, to stretch out for an undisturbed nap or to escape the rain and winds of winter.

Alondra Park’s regulars are as attentive to their community as a first-class Neighborhood Watch group. They carefully check out newcomers, freezing out belligerent people who could pose a threat to the park’s harmony, but creating a network of emotional support for those who pass muster.

Barbara Chew, 47, joined the group in February when several Alondra Park regulars met her at the Inglewood armory, where the homeless are allowed to stay during the area’s coldest weather. Delighted by the fast-paced tales she told in her breathless New York accent, they took her back to Alondra with them after the armory closed in the morning.

Gnawing on a raw carrot, Chew rocks nervously from foot to foot as she explains how she hit the streets after her husband died in 1988, eventually wandering down to the South Bay from the San Fernando Valley.

“I just couldn’t take life anymore. I was very down and depressed,” she says.

Tears well up in her eyes and slide slowly down her face.

“I just know if my husband was here, I’d be OK,” she says.

One of her new Alondra friends looks up as he digs through a box of groceries.

“We’re here,” he tells her. “You’re OK.”

Over the years, residents of the park have broken into two factions of homeless. The gregarious old-timers, eager to show newcomers the ropes, tend to stay in the park’s southern half. Chronic alcoholics, drug addicts and the isolated troublemakers of the park, many incapable of coexisting peacefully with anyone, stick to the park’s north side.

Grocery distribution takes place in the uneasy neutral zone that Alondra’s residents call “middle park.”

Those who live this tenuous existence often make light of it to outsiders. All view it as a temporary condition. To do otherwise, even briefly, is to admit defeat.

But even approaching Alondra Park as a short-term home can be demoralizing.

“I’m going to get work again, and I’m going to get out of here, but, man, it seems like forever,” Ellison said, wiping his hand across his forehead. “You’re homeless, you’re depressed, and you’re going to be tempted. Yeah, I drink. . . . Otherwise, you’re going to go insane.”

On this day, Ellison and some buddies have gathered to get groceries from a group of church volunteers, who each Wednesday stage a morning worship service before distributing the overripe fruit and vegetables, day-old bread and other excess food they have collected from local markets and restaurants.

The grocery distribution creates a rare festive atmosphere at Alondra. Even homeless women and families, usually so careful to blend into the mainstream or hide elsewhere, come out openly for their share of the food.

Cynthia May, 30, (no relation to Michele May) used to walk her dog in Alondra when she lived with her boyfriend in a nearby house.

“He met somebody else, and he said, ‘Goodby,’ ” May said, shrugging as she talked about the loss of her home last June.

Now, she sleeps behind one of the park restrooms and sorts through the vegetables and instant noodle packets offered by the church workers each week.

“I’ve learned the ropes. I share with everybody,” she said.

Like many of Alondra’s regulars, May relishes good community gossip, eagerly whispering confidences about who’s going into a detoxification clinic and who might be pregnant.

“It’s just like a ‘Peyton Place’ around here. Everybody knows what everybody else is doing,” she says.

Many residents of Alondra Park are mentally unstable and unable to care for themselves. Those who are stable keep an eye on their incapacitated friends. If they sleep too late in the morning, they wake them to check that they’re all right. They bring them food and water when they are too lethargic to find it themselves or when hallucinations make them lose track of when they ate their last meal.

Alondra’s regulars have been especially worried these last few weeks about Ted, a bedraggled street person who has lived on the corner of Prairie Avenue and Manhattan Beach Boulevard for two years.

For months, Ted’s only delight was his dog, a black, hairy mass of an animal named Pal that slept peacefully by his side as Ted sat under the park’s bleachers, carrying on conversations with himself through an imaginary telephone receiver in his hand. Passers-by would stop to talk to Pal and Ted, occasionally drawing Ted out of his dementia for a few minutes.

But Pal didn’t have a license, or a leash. In January, animal control officers took her away. Ted’s tenuous grip on reality has faded dramatically since then.

“I hate to see people lose their self-respect,” Mike Smith, 27, resident philosopher of Alondra, said sighing. “They lose so much of their self-respect out here. It’s a hurt. It’s a hurt to see.”

That pain is shared by a growing group of local volunteers, who have begun a slow process they call “outreach,” a careful building of trust that they hope will let them match some of Alondra’s regulars with social programs that could bring them back into the mainstream of society.

“I used to go to Alondra to feed the ducks and then I found out that people were going there to feed people and I said, ‘This has got to stop,’ ” said volunteer May, 32, a Torrance administrative assistant who became an advocate for the homeless less than six months ago.

The coalition she chairs was created last year to bring attention to the problem.

“They’re just people like you and I, and it’s not right at all that they have to be reduced to this,” May said. “There has to be something more we can do for them.”

Social workers for Crossroads, a Redondo Beach program for mentally ill homeless people, began bringing sandwiches and clothing to the park a year ago in an effort to find out who was living there and what services they could use.

Since then, their outreach program has been turned over to the coalition, whose members take turns keeping tabs on residents of Alondra and several other South Bay parks. The problems they have found at Alondra are typical of homelessness everywhere.

“Approximately one-third are mentally ill,” said Caroline Hill, a Crossroads employee who helped create the outreach program. “At least 80% are (occasional) substance abusers and of those, about 20% are what you would call the real chronic alcoholics or drug addicts. The rest just use it to cope with their situation.”

Instead of helping them survive, however, the drugs and alcohol more often slowly destroy all hope for Alondra’s regulars.

“You have to drink. This park will drive you out of your gourd if you don’t,” explained Mitch Nicholson, a 28-year veteran of the Marines, one blustery day just before Thanksgiving. “I have to get out of this park. Somehow, someway, I have to get out of this park.”

A bandy-legged, tough-talking, hard-drinking little man, Nicholson won a soft spot in the hearts of his Alondra friends through his generosity with his pension checks and beer. Late last year, he announced that he had heard of a program in Santa Monica that might help him get back into an apartment.

“I’ll probably end up dying in this dump,” he groused, shortly before leaving Alondra. “You got to die someplace. Might as well be Alondra.”

Nicholson disappeared shortly after. Several weeks later, he was found dead, apparently of natural causes, in a Santa Monica alley.