Taking Back the Old ‘Hood

The area south of Downtown is one that many try to avoid. They’ll tell you that gangs and drugs flourish there, that graffiti stain its walls and rubbish mars its streets.

Well, I say things are changing in one of L.A.’s oldest neighborhoods. All those elements of violence and despair are on their way out, and when they’re finally gone forever, you’ll be able to say it all began on 23rd Street.

I’m talking about an area that stretches from Washington to Adams boulevards and from Figueroa to Hoover streets, a mixture of stores, apartments and grand Victorians that have weathered many eras.

On a Thomas Bros. map, it occupies a tiny southwest corner of the Downtown square, a barely noticeable speck in the vastness of a city that sprawls in all directions at once.

Like so many once safe and flourishing sections of L.A., the neighborhood began to deteriorate under the weight of crime and poverty, and for a couple of decades indeed seemed a place to avoid.

Then Patsy Carter came along.

She’s a tall, blond woman of 56 with blazing blue eyes and an ability to organize that has neighbors up at 3 a.m. painting over graffiti, and police paying close attention to what she says.

A former lawyer, she moved to West 23rd a dozen years ago, brushed aside the fear that was a palpable presence on her street and opened a bed and breakfast business in what was then the unlikeliest place in town.

The Inn at 657 was her dream come true, but turning dreams into reality is risky stuff. She chose the area because land was cheap, but it was that way for a reason Carter didn’t like. So she set about to change it.

*

“What we had to do first was clean the place up,” she said the other day in her apartment at the inn. It’s an airy, immaculately kept building with lush gardens in full bloom. The colors of spring gleam in the afternoon sunlight.

“Trash and graffiti send out messages that an area is open to evil, that we aren’t watching and don’t care. The junk had to be removed from the streets and graffiti from the walls and buildings.”

Carter saw her area as a working-class, predominantly Latino neighborhood, but couldn’t believe that they didn’t care about their environment. So she organized them into the 23rd Street Neighbors, alerted the police they were in business and went to war.

The first problem, Carter felt, was to get rid of the graffiti that, when she moved in, covered half the buildings. It wasn’t enough to simply paint over them once. Taggers are persistent. Names and gang symbols kept reappearing. But when they did, the 23rd Street Neighbors would just paint them out again.

“It was a war,” Carter says. “We’d take a fence the way you take a hill in battle, and then we’d keep it, even when it meant meeting at 3 a.m. to protect it. When we conquered the fence, we’d move on to a wall.”

Meanwhile, the city was being lobbied to keep the streets of their neighborhood clean, and when Caltrans ignored a request to tidy up a freeway off-ramp in their area, the 23rd Streeters did it themselves.

“About eight of us trimmed the bushes and picked up all of the needles and stuff that was there,” Carter says. “A petty official at Caltrans was furious. He said it was his off-ramp and not to do it again. I said, ‘So, arrest me. I’ll call the L.A. Times.’ I never heard from him again.”

*

“She’s an amazing person,” Sgt. Don Linfield says. He’s head of the LAPD’s Southwest Division community policing unit. “Without her, there would be no neighborhood. It has improved significantly. Crime is way down. You can walk the streets now and not be afraid.”

Carter believes, as does Linfield, that community organizations must work closely with the police to improve their areas. The more she got to know the officers, the more she became convinced their morale suffered from lack of a contract with the city.

She began a letter-writing campaign urging that the matter be settled forthwith. In the process, she brought other neighborhood associations together for the same purpose and organized them into the L.A. Citizens Congress.

Since then, the purpose of the congress has broadened to include a general war on blight and crime, and a determination to fight them both the way the 23rd Street Neighbors are fighting them.

The idea isn’t new. Community associations have been trying for years to improve their areas. But most of their effort, as Linfield points out, has involved talk and no action.

A tough and determined woman, Patsy Carter brought action to her neighborhood, and now, like the flowers at her inn, West 23rd Street blooms with new hope. It’s a damned shame she isn’t an army.