A Neighborhood’s Guiding Light

It is taking a soap star to scrub one Westwood neighborhood clean.

That’s what some people who live around UCLA’s fraternity row are saying about the improbable one-woman beautification crusade of actress Shelley Taylor Morgan.

Morgan, known for her roles on daytime television’s “General Hospital” and “Days of Our Lives” series and as host of cable’s “Pure Soap” show, has roped college students and city officials into spiffing up a 10-block area of apartment houses west of the campus.

Now she’s trying to cajole adults living in the picturesque neighborhood called North Village into helping.

“It isn’t easy,” Morgan said the other day after flagging down three passersby to help move a 750-pound trash container that vandals overturned onto Ophir Drive. The volunteers managed to turn the receptacle upright, but couldn’t lift it back on the curb.

Morgan received $7,500 in grants from Los Angeles and UCLA to purchase 15 of the decorative concrete trash receptacles for neighborhood street corners. The containers, she said, could collect the banana peels, condoms and beer bottles that were routinely tossed in bushes and onto lawns.

But within hours of their arrival late last month, two of the containers were pushed into traffic lanes despite their weight.

“I went to a UCLA fraternity presidents’ meeting the other night and told them the containers were already being knocked over,” Morgan said. “They were laughing until I said, ‘Hey, guys, somebody’s going to roll one of them down a hill and kill somebody.’ ”

Morgan and her husband, artist Greg Taylor, live in the neighborhood in a small apartment building that her parents bought in 1956. Morgan grew up there, eventually taking acting classes at UCLA before launching her career as a performer in soap operas, feature films such as “The Sword and the Sorcerer” and TV series such as “Hunter.”

She and Taylor moved into the four-unit building to manage it for her parents in 1990. She was surprised on her return by the area’s decline.

“It had changed -- the neighborhood was tired-looking. There weren’t families living here anymore like there had been. Some of the larger buildings were noisy. There was graffiti and trash and junk furniture was left next to the streets,” she said.

Morgan discovered that many of the apartments have absentee landlords and lack on-site managers to keep an eye on things. Students, crowded several to a bedroom, occupy about 60% of the buildings.

Because of the students’ short-term residency, there was a steady flow of abandoned sofas and broken refrigerators left on curbs. Few of the students, she learned, knew to call the city for free removal of bulky items.

In 2000, Morgan formed the North Village Improvement Committee and set up a Web site, www.yournorthvillage.org, to serve as a guide to municipal services and to the neighborhood’s history. She also took two vanloads of city officials through the area to point out problems.

“I felt like the tour guide at the jungle ride at Disneyland,” she said. “I had to get the city to understand this neighborhood is different from other residential areas.”

Soon, city sanitation workers were conducting weekly sweeps for abandoned furniture through North Village and supporting semiannual community cleanup days. Members of UCLA’s 18 fraternities volunteered to work; about 100 of them collected three tons of trash during the most recent cleanup day in November.

But only Morgan and one other adult resident of North Village showed up to work that day -- even though she had mailed more than 200 letters at her own expense urging local participation.

Now, Morgan has enlisted the city attorney’s office to add muscle to the ongoing maintenance of the area. The head of West Los Angeles’ Neighborhood Prosecutor’s Program will meet with apartment owners and residents Monday to outline strategies for using city services and dealing with area problems.

Deputy City Atty. Susan Strick said a series of seminars aimed at broadening the work Morgan has started is planned for North Village.

“With most groups, it’s always the same 10 people who are active in a community. In Shelley’s case, it’s always Shelley,” Strick said.

City Councilman Jack Weiss, who represents the Westwood area, agreed. “Shelley’s organization is called ‘Your North Village,’ but it probably should be called ‘Her North Village.’ She is a one-woman neighborhood improvement and beautification machine. She has single-handedly put her neighborhood on the map and cleaned it up.”

For now, Morgan is trying to figure out a way to anchor the new neighborhood trash containers to the ground.

She asked Sigma Nu fraternity member Will Grella, 20, to recruit fellow Greeks to hoist the Ophir Drive container out of the street and back onto the curb. Then she went knocking on doors, asking other apartment dwellers to adopt a container near them and regularly empty it, since the city does not provide that service.

Interest in her neighborhood, she said, needs to start picking up.