Last Rites : City of Lost Souls Can’t Escape Judgment Day

By Friday, the City of Lost Souls was a lost cause. The well-organized homeless encampment, which was run for five years with a frontier village spirit, had become a ghost town.

One week ago, the California Department of Transportation posted a “Notice of Encroachment,” ordering the eviction of a dozen or more drifters and homeless people who lived in the thick brush along the Golden State Freeway near Griffith Park. In a cluster of shacks built of castoff wood, the Lost Souls had set up their own government.

But on Thursday and Friday, county social service workers moved Lost Souls sheriff Carlos Arevalo, treasurer Mary Waterman and longtime resident Walt Cloetta to more traditional housing.

Gilbert Nelles, who acted as the town judge, was jailed briefly this week after a scuffle with Caltrans workers and a California Highway Patrol officer. On Friday, Nelles, a Canadian citizen, was taken to the Greyhound station for a one-way bus trip to Vancouver.

Other residents of the encampment had already moved on.

Caltrans officials said they will hack away the heavy brush and tear down the wooden huts on Sunday.

Only Hal Smith, 63, the mayor and bearded founder of the community, has refused the county’s offer of short-term shelter.

“I’m just going to start looking for another location to build another City of Lost Souls,” he said wearily, “because there are a lot of homeless people, and they need some place to live.”

In the weeks since its discovery, the City of Los Souls has become a highly visible symbol of homelessness. The Lost Souls waged a public campaign to keep their community intact.

Their plight, publicized in newspapers and on television, has triggered expressions of outrage and sympathy throughout the Los Angeles area.

But citing health, safety and liability concerns, Caltrans has vowed to clear the encampment, next to the Los Feliz Boulevard off-ramp.

“They’re trespassing. They’re on state property,” said Le S. Morgan, the Caltrans regional manager who posted the eviction notice. “Any illegal encroachment on state property, it’s my job to remove it once it’s discovered. It’s my job, and I have to do it without any compassion.”

The state agency did provide orange plastic bags and boxes for the Lost Souls’ possessions and promised to store them for 30 days. According to the encroachment notice, the state can also charge the Lost Souls for the cost of clearing the village.

But Morgan said that is unlikely. “Not from these folks,” he said. “How can you get something from folks that don’t have anything?”

For longtime Lost Souls, the greatest loss will be the sense of community.

“It was a family,” Cloetta, 41, said Friday morning. “We’ve helped each other, and now we’re being split up. The politicians wanted to scatter us because we’ve gotten so much publicity.”

Cloetta, a former truck driver and freight handler, moved into the City of Lost Souls about five years ago. “All I wanted was somewhere to live and to try to put my life together,” he said. “Why the hell do they want to hurt us? We had a safe place. In a nutshell, they killed our life.”

Because of their varied housing needs, it was impossible to keep the core Lost Souls together, said Larry L. Johnson, assistant director of the Los Angeles County Department of Community and Senior Citizen Services.

Waterman, 60, the town’s treasurer, refused to part with her two dogs, and county officials had to find a group home that would accept them. She was moved to a house in Pasadena on Thursday, but she took a bus back to the encampment Friday morning to pack some belongings she had left behind.

Waterman said the group home’s rules rubbed her the wrong way. “I’m going to save my money up and get my own place,” she said. “I don’t like having someone tell me what to do. I don’t want to live like that.”

As the last residents moved out, the once tidy village had become cluttered with trash bags, old blankets and shopping carts filled with rags.

A bitter Smith picked up a flattened packing box, scrawled a message on it and nailed it to a tree for the wrecking crew to read: “Anyone and everyone who directly or indirectly contributed to the destruction of the City of Lost Souls will have a ‘date’ with the devil himself. . . .”