When Worlds Collide

When my kids were babies I used to read them a Dr. Seuss book called “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.”

The story had to do with a little boy walking home from school and all the wonderful things he saw or thought he saw through the eyes of imagination.

Each narrative ended with him saying, “and to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street.”

There was alliteration to his wonder and grandeur to his fantasies. Miracles occurred on Mulberry Street.

I remember it today because there’s a kind of miracle occurring in Burbank, not on Mulberry Street but on Elmwood Avenue where, for a time, two worlds were about to collide.

Children are involved here, too.

The point of collision would have been a 40-foot bridge over a flood control channel that linked not only two parts of the same street but two cultures.

In its best sense, the bridge was a metaphor for all that unites Anglos and Latinos in Los Angeles. In its worse sense, it was a pathway that allowed trouble to cross.

The west side of Elmwood is composed of mostly white, middle-class people. On the east side of the bridge are mostly low-income Latino families.

Old ladies tended well-kept gardens on the west side. Gangs members tossed empty beer bottles in the street on the east side and scrawled their monogram--BER-13--on walls.

They were the Elmwood Locals, swaggering young toughs whose presence often spilled over onto the western side of the bridge.

“There were gunshots all the time and police helicopters overhead almost every night by 11,” Patty Bush says. “Gang members would bang on our windows and harass us. We were afraid.”

Bush, 32, manages an apartment on the west side of Elmwood. She and her husband, Skip, have two small children. They and others on their side of the bridge decided enough was enough.

They saw the bridge as the problem. They wanted it torn down.

The westsiders petitioned the Burbank City Council to that effect. The city listened and, without advance notice to residents on the east side, erected a nine-foot gate across the bridge’s entryway.

“It was outrageous,” Miguel Perez says. “Little kids use that bridge to go back and forth to school. The city put the gate up in the middle of the day without telling us. The kids didn’t even know how to get home.”

Perez, 21, the father of four children, lives on the east side. He saw the gate as a racial issue. The whites wanted the Mexicans to stay off their street. “They cut us off,” he says, “the way you’d cut down a tree.”

The eastside children--about 180 of them--were being hurt the most. A five-minute, relatively safe walk to school had tripled in time and was forcing them to use a busier, more dangerous route.

To Perez, that was intolerable.

The history of cultural dispute overflows with violence. Blood runs when colors clash.

But Perez, a mail room worker at the Walt Disney Studios, decided there was a better way.

He gathered names on petitions demanding that the bridge be reopened. He led 60 pickets to City Council meetings. He got 100 eastsiders to protest before the school board.

And he went to the gangs and asked for their help.

“They realized they were messing up the futures of their little cousins,” Perez says. “So they went to the council and to the school board with us. They even furnished cars to take whole families to the meetings.”

Burbank Mayor Michael Hastings visited the east side. “I knew the reputation of the neighborhood as gang-ridden,” he says, “and I was afraid at first. Then I realized they were people wanting to improve. Miguel made that clear. And we wanted to help.”

Because of Hasting’s intervention, the bridge has been reopened during school hours. And the eastsiders have taken a good look at the appearance of their own neighborhood.

Gang members are planting lawns and flowers, cleaning up the street and wiping out their own graffiti.

Patty Bush says the gunfire has stopped and police helicopters rarely appear at night. The police themselves say things are better.

Mayor Hastings suggested that members of the two neighborhoods sit down at the same table. That hasn’t happened yet, but both Bush and Perez are now saying it’s possible.

Whatever occurs, the first step has been taken. It isn’t a perfect solution--the bridge remains closed some of the time--but the children at least can go to school without barriers in their way.

Kids were the key elements and compromise the chief result of what could have been a deadly confrontation. That it wasn’t proves wonders are still possible on Mulberry Street. Or even on Elmwood Avenue.