Street Barriers Define an Isle of Peace in L.A.

As a boy, Kwasi Geiggar sometimes hiked through Athens Heights, daydreaming that he lived in one of the neighborhood’s big houses, with a sprawling yard and a stable out back.

Then white kids who did live there would gallop up on horseback. Shouting taunts and waving whips, they would chase Geiggar back over the railroad tracks to his own poorer and blacker neighborhood.

Five years ago, Geiggar was driving through the area again, coming up Hoover Street, when he spotted a “For Sale” sign. He walked in, looked the house over and said, “I’ll take it.”

Now he’s president of the local homeowners group, the Athens Heights Community Assn.

By some definitions, his new ‘hood is near the heart of South-Central Los Angeles. Bordered by Vermont Avenue, Figueroa Street, El Segundo Boulevard and 120th Street, it shares a page in the Thomas Bros. map guide with Watts.

But by no stretch of the imagination does it fit the stereotype.

At first glance, it seems that the biggest concern of the working- and middle-class residents in the predominantly black but ethnically diverse enclave is keeping crab grass from invading the dichondra.

But residents say that the luxury of fighting those little battles in this inner-city island of tranquillity results from an ongoing war.

Some people have criticized as elitist the barricades the neighborhood installed a year ago to keep down traffic and keep out crime.

But Geiggar and his neighbors figure they are simply grappling with the basic survival question of the ‘90s: fight or flight.

They’ve made their choice.

“Everyone’s talking about moving out of L.A.,” said Geiggar. “Where you gonna run to?”

Any approach to Athens Heights leads through the standard L.A. neighborhood patchwork, where entropy and improvement are in constant tension--leaf blowers and cans of spray paint working in close proximity, but to opposite purposes.

On Figueroa, near the intersection of the emerging Century Freeway and the 110, some areas have clearly been decomposing for decades.

Even the preferred Vermont Avenue approach does little to belie the less-than-pleasant inner-city image.

Near 115th Street, a police cruiser and an old Cadillac suddenly screech to a halt in the middle of the street. A young black man comes out with his hands on his head as two white cops edge forward behind extended 9-millimeter pistols.

But a few minutes later and a few blocks away, three whites and five African-Americans square off in a scene less familiar to folks who have “Grand Canyon” notions of the turf southeast of the Forum.

Wayne Taylor, a black man with a gray beard, sets things in motion:

“Allemande left now and promenade your partner . . . “ he calls out.

At that cue, a scratchy country-Western tune blares from an old stereo, and the Wayne Taylor Square Dancers, an institution here for years, sashay across the floor of Taylor’s converted garage.

“You can’t find a neighborhood this racially mixed in the inner city,” Geiggar said a moment later, stepping outside, where Taylor’s tomato and watermelon vines spill onto a patio shaded by persimmon trees.

To Geiggar’s way of thinking, a place is what you make it, and he and his neighbors in Athens Heights have made their neighborhood “the best place to live in the whole city.”

His assessment gets unanimous agreement as Geiggar moves through the neighborhood on an impromptu hit-and-run tour, pointing out elegant Craftsman homes, new mock Tudors and the sort of two-story-with-cathedral-ceiling stucco places that sprout up on the receding urban fringe from Temecula to Simi Valley.

At Geiggar’s knock, Eleanor Chin comes to the door wearing her Postal Service name tag and a pin reading, “I love my job.”

Chin and her husband have lived in their single-story, rock-facade house for 30 years. They raised five children there.

“I wouldn’t live anywhere else,” Chin said. “I work with people who drive to work from Riverside and San Bernardino.”

During the riots, in many parts of the city, interracial loathing flared.

Fires nearby knocked the lights out in Athens Heights. But Chin stood in her yard until dark, unconcerned, quietly watering her lawn and watching the smoke rise far up Vermont, and as close as 120th and Figueroa, where a liquor store burned.

“Everyone here watches out for each other,” she said, explaining her nonchalance.

Chin now in tow, the group continues on. Mockingbirds yodel in flowering jacarandas. Pool leaf skimmers poke up behind block walls draped with bright purple bougainvillea.

“Remember Doc Adams, in ‘Gunsmoke’ ”? Geiggar said, pointing out an elegant, Spanish-style home. “He used to live there.”

Seeing the gathering, Derry Motrin, a retired steamfitter, strolls over to put in his two cents: “I’ve visited 36 countries and every state in the union, and this is the greatest place I’ve ever lived,” he said.

“You could find a more affluent community, but you’ll never find better people. . . . My next door neighbor is Japanese. Armenians live over there.” He points to his own modest, well-tended home.

“I intend to leave this to my grandchildren.”

Not that everything in Athens Heights is dandy.

Chin elicits knowing nods when she recalls a common dilemma. She phoned a roofer recently to get a leak fixed. “He didn’t want to come out. You tell people the address, and they’re scared.” For a while, the neighborhood was moving toward that image.

Ray and Ola Mae Johnson, who live across the street from the Chins, bought their two-story house on 124th Street 15 years ago and worked hard to turn it into a park-like refuge where their daughter could play safely.

But a few years ago, when Caltrans began widening the Harbor Freeway, newly diverted traffic began spilling into the neighborhood.

Police pursuits became routine. One night, 10 squad cars with sirens wailing chased a stolen vehicle back and forth through the neighborhood. Then there were the semitrailer trucks that rumbled down the once-quiet streets at 3 am.

And that was the tolerable part.

Athens Heights is like a no-man’s land between Crips and Bloods turf, and gangsters came with the flow of traffic. Burglaries and armed robberies went up. Graffiti increased. A neighborhood house got firebombed.

One afternoon, two years ago, Ola Johnson watched from her window as a Cadillac brimming with gangsters pulled up beside a 14-year-old boy on a bicycle. A revolver poked out the window. The bicyclist caught a bullet, point-blank.

Johnson, now 47, ran across the street and lifted the boy’s head. The slug had lodged in his skull. For the 45 minutes it took the paramedics to arrive, the boy bled, and stared at Johnson, repeating: “Am I gonna die?”

He didn’t. But the neighborhood’s patience had worn thin.

Hookers now wandered in from Figueroa. Thieves stripped and abandoned stolen cars on the streets.

When the association first discussed the possibility of putting up barricades, nearby residents bristled.

“They told us, ‘There’s crime everywhere, you can’t stop it,”’ said Ray Johnson.

But after prolonged negotiations with the city, the group installed a gate across Athens Boulevard, where the neatly groomed lawns butt up against a dilapidated motel.

They also barricaded other streets. Crime and traffic plummeted.

But not everyone is happy with such solutions.

City Councilwoman Rita Walters and urban theorist Mike Davis are among the critics who say the growing number of gates and barricades in the city has led to Balkanization or “Brazilization.” They and others see the city fragmenting by race and class.

From some Athens Heights homes, you can hear the children screaming and splashing in the pool at Helen Keller Park across Vermont Avenue, which Geiggar and others consider their neighborhood’s western boundary. It’s as nice a park as the city has to offer, with manicured grass, an array of playground equipment and a ball field with a groomed red infield.

The Raymond Crips claim the area, but few of the families enjoying the park seem to worry much.

Beyond the eastern edge of Athens Heights, across Figueroa, the graffiti suggests that the Athens Park Bloods are more aggressive in staking out turf.

On a warm afternoon, with the sea breeze that Athens Heights residents love to brag about pushing out the smog and easing the heat, a cluster of young men gathers, as usual, outside the Athens Park pool.

Some claim gang membership. Others don’t. All say that the gang issue would be less relevant on this turf if jobs weren’t so painfully scarce.

Ask them about their neighborhood--just across Figueroa and the railroad tracks from Athens Heights--and you’ll get a derisive snort: “This is the ghetto.”

Although few know it by its lofty name, everyone is familiar with the other neighborhood, now off-limits, but visible in the distance.

A young man in a red-and-black Chicago Bulls T-shirt says he used to walk through the area often.

“Now they got them barricades up,” he said. “Gotta jump over if you want to go through by the motel.”

“Why’d they do that?” asked a friend, who recently returned to the area from out of state.

“Why you think?” the boy said, actually sounding hurt. “To keep us out.”

His friend shook his head. “That’s cold, man.”

As coordinator of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s camp returnee program, Geiggar, 44, spends his working life salvaging the lives of young men and women whom others in the system are eager to abandon--drug abusers, criminals, gangsters. Call Geiggar’s home and his answering machine preaches: “Did you know there are 800 million Africans in Africa and over 100 million in South America? You are not a minority. Always strive for unity among the masses, for it is from this source we derive all strength. Derive wisdom from the wisdom of the elders, and remember to be kind and speak well of one another, for our children are watching.”

Geiggar’s 8-year-old daughter lives with him in the large, split-level home he has decorated with art gathered on frequent trips to Africa, and paintings of tribal Africans painted by an artist who lived across the street.

He wants her to grow up in a community that lives in peace. If that means fighting the system, and maybe even some neighbors, that’s what the association will do, he said.

Among other battles, Geiggar’s group is now fighting the influx of large apartment buildings in the surrounding area, the construction of a toxic waste dump nearby and the rebuilding of the liquor store on Figueroa.

Geiggar also hopes to erect more barricades soon.

The idea that this is elitist strikes him as “ridiculous.”

“People here have been through a lot,” he said. “But they don’t give up. They stay and work things out. This is just a regular neighborhood that’s trying to survive.”

An Island in the City

The residents of Athens Heights, an architecturally and ethnically diverse neighborhood, are struggling to preserve their tranquil lifestyle in the face of urban decline.