Neighborhood of Strangers Is Now a Family : Communities: After a shooting, residents rallied around a neglected park. Crime in area is down and group wins Neighborhood of the Year award.

Sixteen shots rang out at twilight in Washington Park. But that was last October, before Family Fun Day, before neighbors knew each other by name, before Pasadena’s mayor and city manager dropped by parties at the park for baklava and Armenian shish kebabs.

The gang cross-fire, which injured three people, pulled together a neighborhood of strangers in Northwest Pasadena. In seven months, neighbors turned the neglected park around, planting flowers, lobbying for police patrols, holding festivals and even providing one area for taggers to have their say.

Crime dropped, graffiti nearly vanished, homeless people and gang members stopped congregating there. Washington Park was transformed into a place where 41-year-old Gary Khanjian can play with his two small daughters, and retired Avon secretary Thelma Jarvis can stroll alone.

What happened is that everyday people with everyday lives made the extraordinary happen. And earlier this month, the Friends of Washington Park received a $1,000 award for national Neighborhood of the Year. The award came from the nonprofit group Neighborhoods USA.

It took a gang shooting for Washington Park to become a neighborhood in the traditional sense of having block parties and borrowing cups of sugar.

Donna Prince, 39, and her husband hadn’t met their neighbors of six years.

Their lives went more like this: “Go out, do your thing, come home and watch TV,” said Prince, an artist and president of the Friends of Washington Park association board.

But the communal effort that focused on the park succeeded in ways no one had foreseen, bringing neighbors together in a way that Eileen Fykes-Carter never dreamed could happen in the notorious anonymity of most Southern California neighborhoods.

“You normally expect that in small, little backwoods towns where everyone knows everyone,” said Fykes-Carter, 37, a city administrative clerk and a park association board member. “That can happen here too.”

The Washington Park neighborhood is a mix of apartment buildings, turn-of-the-century mansions and Craftsman bungalows. Some houses have parched lawns and crumbling walls, while others have elegant porches and delicate stained-glass windows.

But the park itself was a mess.

People who lived around the corner or across the street from it seldom went there; the tennis, basketball and handball courts often went unused. Prince, who lives across the street from the park, had programmed 911 on her telephone’s speed dial because of all the crime.

Homeless people dried their laundry on the park’s chain-link fence, and drunks held court every day on the park benches, places that Prince avoided.

“One drunk came up to me and said, ‘Can I help you?’ ” Prince recalled. “Like we were invading his living room.”

The 10-acre park was full of knolls and hills and tall bushes--perfect hideaways for drug dealers and drunks, Pasadena Police Officer Kimberly Hunter said. Hunter, 34, grew up in Pasadena in the days when kids played tetherball and volleyball at the park. In the early 1980s, a city report says, the park started to go downhill and neighbors stayed away.

“It all comes from people not getting involved,” Hunter said. “From neighbors thinking it’s someone else’s job.”

October’s twilight gang shooting, which followed a stabbing death at the park a month earlier, pushed residents over the edge. The shooting occurred while 300 gang members picnicked in the park on a Sunday. A fight broke out with members of another gang. At 6:15 p.m., someone opened fire with a handgun, striking two people at a nearby apartment complex and a passerby.

Fykes-Carter was eating dinner with her husband, two small children and a friend when she heard the shots. She had never heard gunfire before. But she figured out that it wasn’t a car backfiring because the rat-tat-tat didn’t stop.

Prince heard the shots and ran outside, hiding behind a post. Cars swung into driveways, picnickers hopped fences and neighbors scattered.

About two weeks later, Prince and others organized an emergency meeting with neighbors, police and city officials. About 40 residents attended, 10 of whom decided to form the Friends of Washington Park association board, a group with no bylaws or voting rules. Policy is decided by consensus, not vote. Most of the board members had no civic experience. Among them: a salesman, a biochemist and a real estate broker.

“Everything else is like, well, someone gets a bike stolen or someone’s house gets burglarized,” Prince said. “It’s one at a time. This thing just hit everyone at the same time and frightened the heck out of everyone.”

Association members talked to neighbors, encouraging them to report crimes and use the park.

One day, a neighbor noticed a group of kids spray-painting a park wall. The neighbor watched a 12-year-old tagger walk home. That night, the association organized an eight-member group to talk to the girl’s parents. We’re sorry, the parents said, it won’t happen again. And as far as anyone knows, it never did.

Residents and local groups, including a Boy Scout troop, organized cleanup days to throw away trash and plant flowers. They talked police into beefing up patrols at the park, though last year, because of budget cuts, the city’s park rangers had stopped making routine patrols.

The association also persuaded the city’s Parks and Recreation Department to provide more trash cans, paint over the graffiti and trim the bushes behind which people used to hide.

Even taggers have a place in this park. The parks department put up a graffiti wall, a couple of plywood boards for taggers, which are painted over when they get full and are reused.

That helped keep graffiti off most park walls.

The association organized a Family Fun Day in late October, distributing flyers in English, Spanish and Armenian. Local businesses and the nearby Armenian Center donated food and door prizes. Mayor Rick Cole and City Manager Philip Hawkey dropped by.

Family Fun Day was a turning point. More than 300 people spent a Saturday in the park. The next day, association board member Bruce Hyman walked through the park with his Labrador retriever, Barney.

“It rang with life,” said Hyman, 28. “It was an opening of a new chapter, the rebirth of Washington Park. I got the sense that people all of a sudden realized the wealth that was across the street.”

The gathering was so successful that this month the association put on a Spring Festival.

In April, Fykes-Carter threw her son’s sixth birthday party at the park. The kids ate sack lunches on the same benches where drunks used to gather.

“We emphasized that if we don’t use the park, they will,” she said.

Park neighbor Martha Gerrie, 90, said she noticed the neighborhood has drawn closer together. On a recent walk near the park, she saw several young couples, all having garage sales. The park also seems cleaner and free of drunks, she said.

There is more work ahead. The association plans a meeting on Wednesday to discuss plans for the $1,000 award. Board members are exploring ideas, such as a community garden or outdoor theater.

But they don’t want projects to spiral out of control. They want Friends of Washington Park to keep its neighborhood roots.

“What I’ve realized,” Hyman said, “is the success that an individual can have in coming together to change a neighborhood.”