Images Aside, Enclave Lives in Harmony : Lake View Terrace: Area made headlines as site of the Rodney G. King beating, but residents say their diverse, cohesive community is taking a bad rap.

By JAMES QUINN

Sept. 8, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

It’s the place where black motorist Rodney G. King was savagely beaten by police. It’s the site of the city’s biggest dump, and residents complain bitterly about the landfill’s dust and noise.

Neighborhood groups are struggling to stop a drug rehabilitation center from opening there.

These and other difficulties have given tiny Lake View Terrace a lot of attention recently, making it seem like a community that is at ground zero in the urban struggle.

But it’s a bad rap, say residents of Lake View Terrace, a tiny enclave squeezed onto a narrow shelf of land, one mile wide and two miles long, between Foothill Boulevard and the base of the San Gabriel Mountains.

Most of Lake View Terrace’s 12,000 inhabitants seem to view their community in a completely different light. They see a place with more than its share of civic pride, neighborliness and solid accomplishments.

All concede problems--burglaries, graffiti, unruly youths, drug dealing and a few neglected houses. But they also insist that much more has been done to combat such ills than elsewhere.

And most are proud that the community’s Anglos, Latinos, African-Americans and Asians have a decades-long record of living and working together harmoniously.

“You read about this place and you think you better watch out,” said Ingrid Seals, who with her sister and 6-year-old son lives in a well-kept Lake View Terrace house.

“But it’s really not bad at all. It’s friendly, it’s clean, it’s not dangerous.”

Santiago Valdez, a nine-year resident, is more restrained, terming his neighborhood “a little below average” in crime but adding that “one thing you have to say is that there are a lot of nice people around here.”

Jerry Zimmer, who moved to Lake View Terrace from the Westside in 1987, said that the community’s proximity to Pacoima, with its reputation for urban ills, initially put him and his wife off.

“But after we spent a day walking the streets of Lake View Terrace, it felt like home to us,” Zimmer said, adding that they considered it a “plus that the community was racially and ethnically diverse. We wanted our daughter to grow up with people of different backgrounds.”

By all accounts, geography has been the dominant factor in Lake View Terrace’s development. Mountains border it on the north and west, and the mile-wide Tujunga Wash separates it from Sunland on the east.

On the south, the Foothill Freeway and Foothill Boulevard--which are roughly parallel--provide an urban firebreak of sorts. And for the eastern half of Lake View Terrace, Hansen Dam Recreation Area provides an additional buffer.

Except for those headed into the mountains, no through streets lure motorists into the community.

To a visitor, Lake View Terrace feels like a place apart. And residents, who say they feel it too, are convinced that the community’s separateness fosters the widespread camaraderie and trust.

Even though high-crime Pacoima lies immediately south of the Foothill Boulevard-Foothill Freeway border, some longtime Lake View Terrace inhabitants “still don’t bother to lock their doors,” said Lewis Snow, a homeowner activist who moved to the community 10 years ago.

“They figure neighbors will look out for them.”

Residents “stay here a long time and get to know one another even if they are not particularly outgoing,” said Melanie Bernard, co-president of the Lake View Terrace Home Improvement Assn., one of the community’s two homeowner groups.

Even without the freeway-boulevard border, it would not be hard to tell when entering Lake View Terrace from Pacoima. The houses become larger and newer, fewer have window bars and the incidence of unkept lawns and graffiti drops dramatically. Omnipresent Neighborhood Watch window decals testify to the vigorous local anti-crime efforts.

Community leaders say that most graffiti found in Lake View Terrace is painted over promptly and almost every block has a retaining wall or garage wall with telltale sprayed-over patches.

Peer pressure has always held down the number of grassless yards and abandoned cars, said Bernard, a 20-year resident.

Until the 1950s, Lake View Terrace was mostly small horse ranches and agriculture, say longtime residents.

But then tract-home builders swept through, leaving behind thousands of two- and three-bedroom houses that were snapped up by young couples.

The new, tonier tracts, most of which were within the boundaries of predominantly black Pacoima, siphoned off many of that community’s upwardly mobile blacks.

But Lake View Terrace did not want to be associated with high-crime Pacoima and the clamor for recognition as a separate community began immediately.

In the early 1960s, Lake View Terrace and Arleta succeeded in breaking off from Pacoima, recalled Jose De Sosa, a 32-year resident of Pacoima and president of the Valley and statewide chapters of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

De Sosa said he has no quarrel with blacks moving to more prosperous neighborhoods because “that’s what integration is all about, being able to move where you want.”

But De Sosa said he resents those in Lake View Terrace and Arleta who “boost their own community by showing how much better than Pacoima they are.”

According to U.S. Bureau of the Census, the “white flight” that many San Fernando Valley communities experienced in the 1980s largely bypassed Lake View Terrace.

In 1980, it was 50% Anglo, 29% black and 17% Latino.

During the 1980s, the community’s population of Anglos, or non-Latino whites, jumped 9%, to 5,526, according to the 1990 Census.

But that increase was overwhelmed by the jump in the number of Latinos, who grew to 30% of the community’s population. Anglos, though still the largest group, had dropped to 46% of the population by 1990.

Homeowner leaders say that many of the new Spanish-speaking residents keep to themselves and play little role in community affairs.

To bridge the gap, the Lake View Terrace Homeowners Assn. has been sponsoring a weekly English as a second language class in a local church.

The course, which costs the group $110 a week, “is working, though slowly, to bridge the gap with some of the new Hispanic residents,” said Snow, the association president.

The 1990 census also reported that the community’s proportion of blacks declined dramatically, from 29% to 17%.

Seals, who is black and has several relatives also living in the community, said many blacks have “moved to Palmdale, where you get more house for the money.”

Other blacks suggested that black parents fled to outlying areas such as the Antelope Valley and Riverside and San Bernardino counties to distance their children from the lure of Los Angeles gangs.

Lake View Terrace leaders say they look forward to the day when the controversies that cloud their community’s reputation drift away.

But no one is expecting that to happen soon.

Despite strong opposition from Lake View Terrace residents, the Los Angeles City Council appears determined to continue using Lopez Canyon Landfill, already groaning under two-thirds of the trash collected daily by city workers, for at least five more years.

Phoenix House, a nationwide drug rehabilitation chain, recently resumed its effort, begun in 1989, to convert the vacant Lake View Terrace Medical Center into a drug treatment center.

Community leaders say that recovering addicts walking though the neighborhood will be a threat to the residents of single-family houses surrounding the site.

The issue has split the community’s two homeowner groups, with one pushing for a compromise that will allow the treatment center in return for enhanced security at the site and the other group adamantly opposed to any drug treatment center.

A third group recently formed to beef up the opposition.

And the upcoming federal trial of four Los Angeles police officers accused of brutality in the videotaped King beating will again turn the public’s gaze on Lake View Terrace.

Homeowner activists complain that the community’s association with the March 3, 1991, beating is unfair because it took place along the south side of Foothill Boulevard, just inside their border, and had nothing to do with Lake View Terrace.

Homeowner leader Snow notes that if King, an Altadena resident who was being pursued by police on the Foothill Freeway, had turned right instead of left when he exited at Paxton Street, “it would have been Sylmar’s problem, not ours.”

Snapshot of Lake View Terrace

Population

1980: 10,118

1990: 12,014

Change: Up 18.7%

Race and Ethnicity

ANGLO LATINO BLACK ASIAN 1980 50% 17% 29% N/A* 1990 46% 30% 18% 5%

Labor Force

Technical and clerical: 2,011

Managerial and professional: 1,346

Laborers: 959

Crafts and repairs: 705