Living in a Corner : Hollywood and Western, Where Only Crime Thrives

The Hollywood Walk of Fame, with its stars of the famous and the forgotten, stops half a mile to the west. So do the rows of lollipop-style ficus trees that aim to bring a touch of Rodeo Drive to Hollywood Boulevard.

This is eastern Hollywood, the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue.

At dusk, shopkeepers shutter their stores and get out. Too-young women in too-short skirts and unstable heels stand awkwardly about, making small talk. Mothers speaking Armenian and Spanish scurry home with toddlers to the dubitable security of buildings that only the landlords hesitate to call slums.

In the last two years, the Los Angeles Police Department has logged more than 780 crime reports at this intersection. Narcotics sales, assaults, shootings, thefts and a handful of plain old traffic accidents. Most go unnoticed. But, every few years a crime happens here that is too violent or too ugly to escape wider notice, and yet another cleanup campaign begins.

Two such crimes brought the corner to public notice again last week. First, two motorists were shot March 29 by purported gang members firing from the roof of a dilapidated apartment building. Three days later, a young woman was abducted from the corner, raped and set afire.

“Something happens, and we get a group of people together and try to clean it up,” said florist Arthur Ito, who built his Flower View Gardens just north of the intersection 30 years ago. “Then it comes back. We get a new group of people coming in, and we start all over again.”

After the most recent incidents, the Police Department and Councilmen Michael Woo announced that a new task force of police, community organizations and city agencies would crack down on crime in the area. Again.

By coincidence, a new citizens group calling itself the Hollywood Beautification Team had already scheduled a major cleanup for this weekend. On Saturday, scores of volunteer teams armed with paint cans and brooms fanned out to at least make the community look better. Down the line, the group also hopes to help Spanish-speaking renters form Neighborhood Watch groups.

Sharon Romanos, co-director of the beautification team, said the group has raised enough funds to become a nonprofit corporation with a full-time supervisor.

“What is new is that we hope this will be permanent,” said Romanos, who was born in Hollywood. “The problem is that Hollywood and Western has no real core to build change on. What we’re telling people to do is to exercise a presence on their own streets.”

But these streets do not seem to belong to anyone.

At Hollywood and Western, people of different ethnic groups seem to pass one another with more suspicion than curiosity. On the northwest corner, a 24-hour burger takeout joint is a notorious magnet for drug dealers. Across Hollywood to the south, Los Angeles’ oldest billiard parlor prospers, a cool basement refuge where managers say that their armed guards keep crime down.

On the east side of Western are the two corners upon which politicians have pinned the area’s future. The southeast corner is to become a Metro Rail station. The northeast corner is to be transformed into a shiny new redevelopment project mixing senior citizen housing, a supermarket and stores.

Today’s reality is mightily different than tomorrow’s visions.

On the northeast corner, the Rector Hotel is boarded up, deemed unsafe by earthquake specialists even for the homeless that wander these streets. Yet, historic preservationists are reluctant to tear it down. So it stands, biding its time.

On the southeast corner stands a new, drought-tolerant urban oasis for the eyes called the “Metro Gardens.” But in this community crammed with too many children and too few playgrounds, the landscaped lot is off limits, surrounded by a high metal fence.

“Can you believe the city paid $50,000 for that?” said Carmelo Alvarez, 35, as he supervised a group of Le Conte Junior High School students painting out graffiti at the corner Saturday. “They could have put a community garden there, brought neighbors out of their apartments to plant things.”

Alvarez, an impolitic activist who grew up nearby, is regional coordinator of the Los Angeles Conservation Corps’ Clean and Green Program, which hires teen-agers to help paint out graffiti and clean up neighborhoods.

Why did they gut the building around the corner where Errol Flynn learned to fence, Alvarez asks, instead of using it for a cultural center? And, he asks, why can’t bureaucrats hire thousands of youths to eradicate graffiti, rather than pay city sanitation and transit employees?

None of the youths he supervises expect their walls to stay clean. Instead, they go about doing their job with the same expectations as other children who mow suburban lawns. Here, graffiti bloom anew overnight, crowning every rooftop, crawling up inside every elevator shaft.

This is the turf of White Fence, one of Los Angeles’ oldest gangs. But a newer gang of war-hardened Salvadorans, called the Mara Salva-Trucha, has been moving into this area from a few blocks south. That, at least, is the police perspective. The perspective of Salvadoran residents is different. Although gang members may be El Salvador-born, parents said, the gang they belong to is all-American.

“At home, there were no gangs,” said one Salvadoran father who pulls his wife and children into the bathroom almost nightly when gunfire erupts. “At home, there was war, but children do not go bad. It is only here that they go bad.”

Indeed, one could argue that something about this intersection perpetuates, even promotes, crime. This is not a community problem; it is the lack of a community that is the problem.

In Hollywood, where renters make up about 80% of all residents, this corner redefines transience. Apartments are let without question by landlords happy to settle for cash. Here, even merchants are transients. One longtime homeowner has so girded his house with gates and growths of cactus as to virtually secede.

Neighbors seem to mix only at the local swap meet--a modern multicultural version of a five-and-dime store. Secretaries from nearby sound studios and Armenian and Salvadoran housewives look through bins of $3.99 bras and $4.99 dubbed videos. Turkish tapestries show Mack trucks against florid sunsets or, in one transoceanic translation, the Virgin of Guadalupe clad in scarlet rather than the requisite blue.

Police say this corner is just one of 130 “hot spots” throughout Los Angeles. Clearly, there are not enough police, prosecutors and activists to cool them down.

Here, people pay back in fear what sweatshop owners refuse to pay neighborhood tenants in living wages. Children from families already fragmented by distance attend overcrowded schools with ever-dwindling after-school programs. Not surprisingly, some kids find it safer inside gangs than out.

“When I came here, I got beat up by Mexicans because I was Salvadoran,” Alberto Quintanilla, 19, said Saturday. “So I joined a gang. I got shot four times before I got out.” Now he sports a Builders Emporium uniform.

As he spoke, a Police Department community relations officer, Carlos Lopez, who helped him get his job, was watching a group of Le Conte Junior High students in Clean and Green shirts painting out graffiti.

“A lot of times, a neighborhood feels there’s no hope,” Lopez said. “But look at this house. Two years ago, even the roof was covered with graffiti. Every time I went in, I found guns hidden there. Now, the apathy’s gone.”

So are the graffiti. The bungalow is white and tidy, the consequence of a single neighbor filing a police complaint and police and prosecutors using a city gang-abatement statute to force out the tenant who sheltered gang members.

There is a sense here that the battle boils down to a test of wills.

“Whoever doesn’t get tired first will win,” said Abner Balsells, 13, as he rolled yet more gray paint over a graffiti-marred wall. “I know for sure that we’re not going to get tired.”