Drive for Amber way Nears Council

Blythe Street is known as one of the most crime-plagued, poverty-stricken neighborhoods in the San Fernando Valley, but the the Panorama City street has recently undergone a makeover and has benefitted from intensive policing.

Now, city officials, property owners and some residents of the area notorious for street terrorism are bent on changing the neighborhood’s image by changing its name as well. Their choice: Amber Way.

“Whenever I tell friends and co-workers where I live, they say ‘Oh my god, that’s such an awful, horrible place. How can you live there?” said Renee Wike, a seven-year resident of the street.

Wike is one of 500 residents of the half-mile stretch of Blythe Street, between Van Nuys Boulevard and Brimfield Avenue, who have signed petitions asking to for the change.

“For a very long time, this street had a very bad reputation,” she said. “But the police have come in and there’s been a massive effort to improve the street.

“We figure the new name will take away some of the bad aura,” she said.

The new name was inspired by a neighborhood cleanup program which planted liquidambar trees up and down the street.

Federal and local agencies have spent more than $4 million in the last few years renovating slum properties on the street and providing anti-gang programs.

In addition, the City Attorney’s Office obtained a court injunction in 1993 against members of the Blythe Street Gang. More than 40 Blythe Street Gang members have moved out of the area under the pressure of a heightened police presence that has yielded more than 150 arrests since prosecutors obtained an injunction against gang activity in 1993, officials said.

Calls for police service have dropped 60 percent since the injunction was approved by a judge. The number of violent incidents has declined from 155 in the year before the injunction, to 125 in 1994 and 117 in 1996.

Councilman Mike Feuer said the new name recognizes the progress that has been made.

“The name Blythe Street is synonymous with blight in the San Fernando Valley,” Feuer said. “It is synonymous with gangs and crime and drugs and yet Blythe Street today is very different than that.”

The petitions, organized by the Los Angeles Police Department, states that signers support “efforts to improve the quality of life on Blythe Street, including the change of street name, improvements to the lighting and the installation of speed bumps to slow the local traffic.”

After 90 percent of the street residents signed the petition, the proposal will go before the city council this month.

Some, like Danny Aristegui, are skeptical of the benefits of the name-change to the street he calls home.

“It’s really the people out of the area who have a problem with the name,” he said. “To people who live here it doesn’t make a difference. There is too much emphasis on the name,”

Margaret Welch, a social worker who runs the Casa Esparanza housing program on the street, said she fears the name change is part of an effort by landowners to gentrify the area so they can charge higher rents, driving out low-income residents.

“I don’t think changing the name is going to accomplish anything,” said Albert Melena, who for the last five years ran an anti-crime education program on the street for the San Fernando Valley Partnership.

“I think people might want to start over, but it’s got too much history,” said Melena, who provided more than 200 Blythe Street parents and children with classes in how to avoid substance abuse and gang life.

Despite some progress, members of the Blythe Street Gangb still congregate on the street and sell drugs, Melena said.

Some of those who support the proposal, including Deputy City Atttorney Jule Bishop, said the change is long overdue.

The City Attorney’s Office has been asking for renaming for three years, but the request went nowhere until the construction of a shopping center at the old General Motors plant was well underway, Bishop said.

“Now everybody is supporting it,” Bishop said.

As the person who administers the gang injunction on Blythe Street, Bishop confirms that the street is safer and more attractive than it was five years ago.

That’s what has inspired residents such as Wike

The new name would be a setback and challenge to the Blythe Street Gang, which for many years has tried to rule the neighborhood, Wike said.

“Can you imaging gang members getting Amber Way tattoos?” she said.