Both Sides of the Fence : Issue of Gated Public Streets Echoes Through Hollywood After Ruling

In the latest battleground over the walling-off of Los Angeles neighborhoods, the worlds of the haves and have-nots are only a gate apart in the Hollywood Hills.

Whitley Heights is a lush, sunny mound of the best of the old glamour and charm of Hollywood in the 1920s, rising above the worst of the trash and transience of Hollywood in the 1990s.

Below the open gate on Whitley Avenue that marks entry into the neighborhood, a voice behind an apartment intercom box Sunday did not want to give his name. But he was glad that a judge ruled last week that the city of Los Angeles could not allow the neighborhood up the hill to close its gates to the rest of the world.

He needs their streets to park on, he argued. “Their gate isn’t going to help me, so the hell with them,” the voice said. Not that he was lacking in sympathy for Whitley Heights homeowners, who say they want the gates to keep out crime: “They’re just protecting their interests, and I’d probably do the same thing.”

The voice identified itself as a graduate of Stanford Law School who had lived in tony Hancock Park for 17 years until he fell on hard times. Now that he was renting an apartment on a slightly scuzzy street in Hollywood, he had to look out for himself.

“The city is splitting up into war camps,” the voice said. He didn’t know how neighboring tenants felt about the gates. He doesn’t know any of them.

Up above the gates, the reaction Sunday to the court decision was different. Up the steep grade of Whitley Avenue, in the hills near the Hollywood Bowl where Marlene Dietrich and Judy Garland once lived, neighbors greeted each other by name as they strolled quiet streets in front of jazz-era Mediterranean homes perched on steep lots.

The Friedrich family plucked sweet oranges from a tree on its patio as Pat Friedrich reminisced about the neighborhood’s good old days. From their living room, 15-foot windows reveal a view of Los Angeles that stretches clear to the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

Friedrich recalled with horror the day her teen-age daughter discovered a naked, drugged-out man in her room. He had entered the house, helped himself to the refrigerator and the shower and tried on the clothes of various family members.

Her husband, Dennis, pointed across the street to another well-landscaped home and noted that the woman who had lived there “had been murdered and raped--in that order.” Hollywood is different, he said, from the place he has known since the 1950s. That’s why he and and his wife are unhappy that the gates cannot be closed.

Their son, Jason, disagrees. The 22-year-old graduated from Fairfax High School in 1988, and says he enjoys the freedom of walking in and out of the neighborhood. “Streets should remain public,” he argues. But his parents, who are trying to sell their house to move to a smaller place, figure that the loss of the gates may make their house even harder to sell in a soft market.

Across Los Angeles, similar debates are going on between people who want to wall themselves off from crime and those who say gates are further Balkanizing an already divided city.

Friday’s court ruling appeared to be a momentous victory for anti-wall forces. It may mean that 146 other neighborhoods that have applied to gate or barricade themselves won’t be able to, and that half a dozen communities that are already shut off may have to fight to keep their gates.

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The people of Whitley Heights claim they are not trying to remove themselves from the city, even as they vow to appeal the anti-gate judgment once it is made final. Karen Newman, president of the Whitley Heights Civic Assn., said that by strengthening their neighborhood, they will help shore up the Hollywood area as a whole and maintain a solid, taxpaying base of homeowners.

“If we feel more comfortable in our homes, then we can go out and do things in the greater community,” she said Sunday. Newman said leaders of the neighborhood association are active in helping the homeless in Hollywood and in other revitalization efforts.

But just below the gates, many apartment dwellers felt differently Sunday. “It’s not fair” to cut off the hilly streets, said Balbina Ferrer, who likes to take walks on the upper tree-lined streets, which are much more pleasant than the trash-filled streets to the south.

Dennis Friedrich understands the argument against walling off the city, but says that neighborhoods have to take action to defend themselves. “After Rodney King,” he said, “Los Angeles seems to be an area where everyone has to protect himself.”

Building a community, he said, means getting to know your immediate neighbors; the whole city is almost too big to handle. “There isn’t a cohesive L.A. anymore,” he said.