Former Nuns Tackle a Dangerous Mission : Social work: The women will try to improve conditions on notorious Blythe Street.

The women of a venerable Southern California religious community known for running schools and a college are taking on the problems of one of the most dangerous streets in Los Angeles.

Undaunted by the gang slaying of a building owner last fall, the Hollywood-based Immaculate Heart Community will try to extend its tradition of service to the residents of Blythe Street, a block of run-down buildings near the closed General Motors assembly plant in Panorama City.

The community’s board of directors endorsed the undertaking Saturday. A coordinator hired for the project toured the street Thursday, looking over a donated apartment that will be used as an office while organizers try to secure the donation of an abandoned building on the street for use as a base of operations.

Immaculate Heart, founded as an order of Roman Catholic nuns in Spain in 1848 and established in Southern California in 1916, wants to use the building as a community center and offer classes for residents from preschool age to adults.

The women are no longer officially Catholic nuns. In 1970, after a much-publicized dispute over control of their lifestyle with the leadership of the Los Angeles Catholic Archdiocese, the order became a nondenominational Christian lay organization. But most of its 185 members--the majority of them former nuns--still live communally and continue to operate Immaculate Heart High School in Hollywood and Queen of the Valley Hospital in West Covina. Immaculate Heart College, founded by the community, closed in 1980, but the organization continues to have links to a center for graduate studies in Hollywood.

Margaret-Rose Welch, a member of the Immaculate Heart Community who will direct the Blythe Street project, said she hopes to use her organization’s many contacts to attract better health care, legal advice, marriage and family counseling and other services for the street’s 4,000 poverty-stricken residents.

She said she also hopes to provide an alternative to gang life for the more than 200 members of the Blythe Street Dukes that might help them return to high school or get vocational training and jobs.

“We are committed to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and compassion to the poor, but we also wanted to empower people to live in truth and dignity and to reach their full human development,” Welch said.

“We feel right now in Los Angeles the most crucial thing is to do something about the great imbalance between the haves and the have-nots.”

She acknowledged that the street is unsafe, especially at night. But, she said, “if you want to help the poor, you have to go where they live.”

Chuck Leber, the Los Angeles Police Department’s senior lead officer on the street, welcomed the educational and social project. But he said the project workers would be safer if they wore the religious habits of their days as nuns, which they no longer do.

“It’s at least a start,” Leber said. “I wouldn’t want to discourage her. Some of those kids she’ll be able to salvage.”

Maria Soriano, a cafeteria worker who has lived in the same Blythe Street apartment for 17 years, is part of a tenants’ council that will advise the women on the street’s needs.

“I hope we can have a better education for everybody, the kids and the parents, and we want jobs,” said Soriano, who raised three sons as a single mother. “We want to work. We want better lives for our kids. Those are the basic things we want.”

She said other efforts to improve living conditions in the neighborhood have been long on promises but short on results. “If they really, really want to help maybe we’ll have something good and positive this time,” Soriano said.

During the first eight months of the project the religious community will spend more than $50,000 to, among other things, pay the salary of a coordinator, Welch said. The size of the community’s financial commitment for future years will be determined annually, she said.

Wanda Morris, the coordinator, will evaluate the services available to the street, assess the educational needs of the 1,000 children and teen-agers who live there and assist parents in communicating with teachers and officials at nearby schools. Morris, who toured the graffiti-marred street Thursday with Welch, agreed that it will be a challenge to penetrate the wall of distrust put up by the youths that the project is intended to help.

“I will tell them: ‘I’m not here to fight you. I’m here to work with you and together we can bring about change,’ ” said Morris, formerly principal of Dolores Mission School in East Los Angeles.

The project will also commission a survey of the street’s residents by a marketing organization to find out what services they believe are needed.

The announcement by the community is but one effort to improve living conditions on a street where residents have been virtually paralyzed for years by fear of the drug-dealing gang. A “community impact team” of city and private agencies dealing with housing, education, health and other issues has been discussing the problems there, although some participants say little has been done.

Genny Alberts, a prominent building owner and manager on the street, is helping form a youth club as an alternative to the gang. So far, the group has conducted two carwashes and, on Saturday, will participate in a block-long cleanup project to raise money for sports equipment.

Even though they are participating in the club, several youths interviewed Thursday were skeptical of the Immaculate Heart project’s chances.

“We’re not going to go over there” for the classes that are planned, said George Larios, 16, who said he is on probation for assault and attempted murder. “That’s just for little kids.”

Last Halloween, a group of a dozen or more armed gang members surrounded a vehicle driven by Donald Aragon, the owner of a small apartment building who had been trying to organize his fellow landlords to make the street safer. Instead of handing over his keys, Aragon reached beneath his seat for a gun and shooting broke out. Aragon and one of the assailants were killed, and another was badly wounded.

A 17-year-old youth awaits trial in the killing.

The outrage of property owners at the slaying prompted a sustained police presence on the street, which resulted in numerous arrests and drove many of the hard-core cocaine sellers elsewhere.

On Thursday, a handful of Blythe Street Dukes members stood watch in the middle of the block, ready to do business. When a police car drove up, they sprinted away.

Painted on a wall next to the boarded-up building that Welch and Morris hope to use as a community center was what could pass as a sobering warning:

“Blythe Street. Los Dukos Controlamos Todo” or “We Dukes Control Everything.”