Communities, Grit and All

Neighborhood. The word used to evoke front porches, the corner grocery where everyone knows your name, and folks waving across the street or stopping to gossip in the local park. But in recent years, “neighborhood” has become the province of city officials charged with breathing life into charter provisions creating a network of community councils. Defining neighborhoods has become a wonkish debate about stakeholders, boundaries and demographics.

A modest exhibit at Los Angeles’ Central Library gently reminds us that neighborhoods are still really about the people who live and work in them. The “L.A. Neighborhoods” exhibit, another in a series drawn from the library’s 2.5 million images of Los Angeles, introduces viewers to the just-folks communities of North Hollywood and San Pedro. Both neighborhoods, gritty places that make no claim to hipness, have had their troubles over the years. But each has held on to something valuable.

Photographer Slobodan Dimitrov’s family came to San Pedro soon after emigrating from Yugoslavia. “The first friends we made in this new country were from San Pedro. Those that have not passed away are still our friends, as are their children to this day.” San Pedro, long regarded as an appendage, is a community that sees this as the moment when it finally receives the attention it deserves. Dimitrov’s San Pedro is a neighborhood of hard-working people and graceful public places. It’s a place where the local Christmas parade is still a big deal, and where a long day on the docks wrestling pallets of frozen swordfish earns you a tall one at the local bar.

Gerard Burkhart’s North Hollywood is a “funky, artistic” place. He sought to capture its “independent spirit” before redevelopment brings more homogenous chain stores. You can see that spirit in the ear-to-ear smile of North Hollywood High School’s Class of 2000 valedictorian, a flowered lei over his graduation gown. And on the face of a woman determined not to let her crumbling home fall to the wrecking ball or in the serenity of monks praying at a Buddhist temple.

This, after all, is what neighborhoods are really about--life lived in close proximity to family and friends, life with joy and sorrow.