A Neighborhood Worth Fighting For

Piles of kids live on this block of Halldale Avenue, a well-manicured street between the Crenshaw and Exposition Park districts. The Garcias on the corner have five children, with a sixth on the way. There are three Keeble kids in the brown house next door. Two doors down, the Durrells have another three.

Despite all the neighborhood kids--enough players for a rough ‘n’ tumble game of football on the asphalt street--the quiet block stands eerily empty as the hot afternoons give way to muted dusk.

Halldale is rarely a street at play.

On this block, neighbors are waging a battle against drunkards, drug addicts and prostitutes, a struggle that simultaneously inspires and exhausts them. Their fight grows out of love for their street, but it also reminds them of how badly their block, like so many blocks in the urban core of America, has deteriorated. Even as they try to remind themselves of the values of city living, the lure of safer communities tugs at them.

The culprits on this block of Halldale are less threatening than random gang gunfire but equally impossible to ignore: a dirty alley where drunk transients gather and drug deals go down. A liquor store on the corner that feeds the flow of dazed and disoriented people who wander down the street. Graffiti that regularly scars the cement walls of the buildings on the corner.

The idea of moving on to a safer, more isolated suburb punctuates daily conversations among the firefighter and the policeman and the accountant. Husbands and wives debate the topic over breakfast or late at night when the threats outside loom larger.

“Every week, just about, we discuss [moving],” sighed Renada Keeble, whose family has a clear view of the daily activities--the urinating, drug dealing and sex. “But I’d miss the sense of community we have, that common thread--we really do care about each other. It’s worth the investment to fix up the area.”

Leaving would mean abandoning a childhood home, a warm community, an easy commute. Here, neighbors lounge on porches together and chat about who’s expecting the next child. Boys who threw balls together in the street now swap parenting tips.

And so the neighbors fight back together. They yell at the intruders to leave, refusing to back down. They paint over the graffiti. They work with the police. They have signed a petition to close off the alley, which city staff say will happen this week.

This street used to be a place where children spilled out onto the street, throwing balls and dashing up the block on their bikes. Kids would scramble across rooftops in games of hide-and-seek. They would tumble into the nearest house for a meal, then race back out to the street until dark overcame dusk and chased them home.

Many of today’ residents grew up on Halldale. Back then it was a close-knit neighborhood, but more than that, it was a safe neighborhood. Now, children play sequestered inside or in the backyard.

The alley is right across the street from firefighter Lance Keeble’s house. “Why would I want to keep my kids here?” he asks.

Yet he does. His heart remains on Halldale, his home for more than 20 years. He grew up in this brown house with a wide porch and cherrywood beams, moved out at 24, then brought his family back four years later, in 1993, after his mother moved to Texas.

Granted, residents acknowledge, Halldale is doing fine compared to some other streets. The lawns are mowed and bushes pruned, new houses have sprung up and old ones have been lovingly restored. Flowers explode with color in front yards.

But neighbors tick off a litany of dangers. Drug dealers, prostitutes and vagrants flagrantly waltz into yards and use them as toilets. Drunk loiterers hassle residents. A suspicious ice cream truck makes nightly visits to buyers on the corner.

When Keeble contemplates the blight eating away at Halldale, the frustration shakes his steadfast commitment to urban life.

“I think it’s hypocritical to serve the city and not live in it,” he said. “But I take my kids out to go to school and they see all that. Nobody wants to live like that. I’d rather pay the gas money and suffer the wear and tear on my car for the sake of my kids.”

The Durrells’ children, like others on the block, stay in the house all day or play in the backyard. “I don’t think that’s the way they should grow up,” said Mark Durrell, 35, a Los Angeles police officer who worked at the nearby 77th Division before moving to the personnel department. “Every time I see what’s going on, I think, ‘I’ve got to get my family out.’ ”

Durrell has an on-and-off-again relationship with this street, where he grew up next door to Keeble. After he got married, he and his wife, Tonya, moved to a townhouse in Woodland Hills, a gated community where she went jogging at night and the kids roamed outside with their friends.

In March 1994, they moved back to Halldale and bought the house next door to Durrell’s childhood home.

The familiarity of the community drew them back. But sometimes, the children miss the freedom they had in their suburban enclave.

“We used to ride our bikes with our friends,” sighed Kyla, 10. Now, she plays on the front lawn with her little brother and sister under the watchful eyes of her vigilant parents.

Gloria Torres, 47, lives next to the alley, where the smell of urine is so strong she keeps her windows tightly shut in a vain effort to block out the stench. Torres, who runs an accounting office in the building next door, is afraid. She says vagrants taunt her and throw rocks into the yard. One even threatened to kill her.

Three years ago, she reached her breaking point. She was ready to pack up and move out. But her neighbors convinced her otherwise. Stay, they said. We’ll work together. We’ll watch out for each other.

“I’m scared,” Torres worried recently, “because at night [the vagrants] stand in front of my home.”

“When I see them, I call the police,” Renada Keeble assured her. “I watch out for you.”

Police praise the efforts of the Halldale residents.

“It’s been frustrating when some community members run away instead of getting involved,” said the LAPD’s Bob Harrell, senior lead police officer for the area. “They may not even leave--they may just put bars on the windows, hedges on the front lawn and basically divorce themselves from the community. Everyone loses when that happens. But on Halldale, this community is their home. They are policing their community. They’re taking ownership of their block.”

“We grew up here,” said Mark Durrell’s brother Brian, 32. “We’re not going to have people run us out.”

Even so, the Durrells’ friends and family often ask them why they left the relative safety of the suburbs and moved back to their old neighborhood.

“We certainly could move away, but I think somebody has to stay and stand up for the community,” said Tonya Durrell. “That’s not to say that tomorrow I won’t be telling my husband, ‘Let’s get out of here. That’s it, we’re moving.’ It’s hard to just say we’re going to leave it.”