Fighting Back : Blythe Street: About 100 people try to beautify the troubled Panorama City neighborhood scarred by gangs and years of neglect.

In the continuing battle to reclaim one of the San Fernando Valley’s most blighted stretches of road, dozens of Blythe Street residents--old and young alike--turned out with brooms, rakes and sweepers on Saturday to clean up a troubled neighborhood where a popular landlord recently was shot to death by would-be carjackers.

“We’re going to double the efforts that this street get developed the way we want it,” apartment owner Genny Alberts said emphatically over the growl and hiss of garbage trucks and street sweepers. “People are getting more aware that without participation we’ll go nowhere.”

On a crisp autumn morning warmed more by good cheer than sunshine, about 100 people--most of them tenants in Blythe Street’s post-World War II buildings--set to work to beautify an area scarred by years of neglect and the depredations of gangs.

Some volunteers yanked up stubborn weeds, erased unsightly graffiti and scraped loose dirt from the sidewalks. Others swabbed paint onto telephone poles and the trunks of trees. And everywhere, youngsters swarmed in the street, muddying their sneakers and hands in the runoff of street-cleaning water, letting off bursts of high-pitched giggles and “helping” their patient parents in the singularly unhelpful way only children know how.

Even the adults seemed to enjoy themselves.

“It’s not like work,” said Heriberto Guevara, 18, leaning for a moment against a sweeper he had been pushing about all morning. “It’s such a sport for our street. We’re living on this street, and it’s a way to clean the property.”

It was also a way to stand up to the gangbangers who have claimed the long stretch between Van Nuys Boulevard and Brimfield Avenue in Panorama City as their turf.

“At night, they’re the owners of the street,” said Guevara, a manager’s assistant in one of the apartment buildings. “We don’t want them here.”

“At night, like at 8 o’clock, sometimes they shoot over there, and I always get scared because I’m afraid innocent people might die,” said 10-year-old Maria Prudencio, as she took a break from sweeping to gulp a soda--one of dozens donated by a local liquor store. “This could be a lesson for them.”

Previous cleanup efforts, however, have been stymied by gang members who return to leave their spray-painted marks on walls and to deal drugs, police and residents say.

The violence-torn neighborhood--considered so dangerous that even the Guardian Angels have refused to patrol it--was further shaken three weeks ago by the slaying of Donald Aragon, a longtime landlord known for the diligence with which he tried to maintain his property. On Halloween night, police say, a group of gang members surrounded Aragon and demanded his truck, triggering a shootout that left Aragon and one of his attempted robbers dead.

The killing prompted residents to plead for a beefed-up presence by police, who have promised a “real aggressive” effort to crack down on crime in the area. On Saturday, officers assigned to monitor the volunteers kept a low profile by cruising along the street at discreet intervals.

Also Saturday, toward the end of the morning-long cleanup effort, a group of 17 women from the Immaculate Heart Community in Hollywood scouted the neighborhood, assessing the needs of residents and the possibilities of doing some work there soon.

“There are a lot of needs as far as education--tutoring, English as a second language, adult literacy, helping the kids with homework,” said Margaret-Rose Welch, who led the group. “Then there are needs of helping them make contact with . . . different civic and social agencies.

“A lot of people don’t know what they can do.”