One Woman’s Dream of Dignity for Mothers With AIDS

The house sits on South Burlington Avenue, three blocks from MacArthur Park, between Wilshire and 7th. It is one of those faded jewels of Victorian architecture: ornate wood columns and leaded glass built-ins. Imposing oak balustrades. A butler’s pantry and a servant’s staircase off the kitchen.

It’s the kind of home you imagine filled with pine boughs and good cheer, warmed by the laughter of chubby, well-scrubbed children. But that would have been decades ago--back when the neighborhood was nice. Back before it all went to hell.

Low-rent apartments and parking lots line the street now, and the sidewalks support a busy, open-air crack dealership. The house is one of only two single-family homes on the block. Both are testaments to the idealism--the stubbornness, anyway--of Ellen Snortland, a 40-year-old writer and self-defense instructor who bought them in the mid-70s and who refuses to let them slip away.

“The easy way out is a parking lot,” Snortland says.

She hung on for years, until death threats from crack dealers finally got to her. When the city closed MacArthur Park for Metro Rail construction in 1991, the dealers slimed onto her block. Unable to interest cops or anyone else in the burgeoning crack mall outside her home, Snortland had taken to registering her dismay through a bullhorn pointed street-ward from an upstairs bedroom window.

“I’ve got your license number,” she bellowed. “Get out of here.”

She was messing with the customers. Bad move.

“You’re a dead woman,” the dealers told her.

“Actually,” Snortland says, “I was a crazy woman.”

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Maybe that’s her secret. Today, she dreams of helping turn her place into the Red Ribbon House, the only AIDS hospice in Los Angeles County geared to the needs of dying women and their children.

Snortland has joined forces with the Red Ribbon Foundation, a nonprofit group that raises money through the sale of red-ribbon pins for groups providing direct services, such as meals and laundry, to people with acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

The hospice is the foundation’s most ambitious project, and one that its founder and 32-year-old president, Brian Cotton, hopes can be replicated around the country.

So far, Cotton and his lone paid staffer, Gene Fay, have enlisted a troop of volunteers--including a doctor, an architect and a general contractor--for the project.

They have been navigating the maze of state and local license requirements. And, of course, they have been trying to raise money, everyone’s least favorite part of the project. They need an estimated $700,000--$300,000 to remodel the 4,200-square-foot square house and $400,000 to start up the facility, which will house 10 dying patients and their children.

Fay has been living in the house. But after four recent break-ins, he’s decided to move.

Not surprisingly, the foundation’s immediate priority is a good fence and a responsible tenant to care for the home before it becomes a hospice.

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Last week, I stood on the front porch with Snortland, Fay and Dr. Jeannie Brewer, an AIDS specialist who will serve as the hospice’s medical director. We watched the dealers, as they, unfazed by our stares, watched back. Transactions took seconds: Customers pulled up, traded cash for rocks and drove away. A small child was in the back of one car. A businessman in white shirt and tie sauntered down the sidewalk on foot to make a buy.

“Brand new! Brand new! Brand new!” yelped a wobbly woman, flashing a crack pipe at customers in a minivan. “She does police lookout for the dealers,” Snortland said.

In the fenced parking lot next door, we noticed the attendant poking around on the ground.

“He’s looking for crack,” Fay said. “They toss it there when the police come.”

So why bring women here to die? Why not find a nice spot in the suburbs, something in a pleasant neighborhood?

“That’s just the problem,” said Brewer, 33, a former associate medical director at the AIDS Clinic at County-USC Medical Center. The majority of women with AIDS, she says, are not white and not middle class. They come from neighborhoods like this.

“We (the medical community) expect them to come to us ,” she said. “We want to set up clinics in ‘safe’ neighborhoods. But the idea of a hospice is to offer terminal, palliative, supportive care. It’s about people dying in dignity and comfort. If you take people somewhere to die and they can’t have their kids and their families near them, it doesn’t support the mission.”

Perhaps by this time next year, the Red Ribbon House will be filled with pine boughs and children’s laughter. And tears and talk of heaven, too, in a place that’s seen its share of hell.