‘Nest’ Is Not Just Empty -- It’s Gone

Officer Martin Martinez could hardly believe his eyes. The building that had haunted his imagination for nearly 18 years was splintering under the blade of a bulldozer.

He never expected to see the notorious El Nido senior apartment complex in South Los Angeles turned to wreckage. But then again, Martinez never expected to have spent a third of his career embroiled in a fight over a single, maze-like multiplex of studios-with-kitchenettes that officers called simply “the Nido.”

The complex had proved a formidable opponent. Even now, its retro white cottages reduced to rubble, it gave Martinez an uneasy feeling.

The demolition earlier this month of the 39-unit complex at West 83rd and Figueroa streets was a drastic finale to years of work by the veteran Los Angeles Police Department officer, neighborhood residents and various city officials determined to tame the Nido’s demons.

Nido means “nest” in Spanish, and police allege that the horseshoe-shaped development had long been exactly that, a nest of vice.

It housed a vibrant open-air drug and prostitution market, they said. Police got an average of 20 calls a month at the site, including reports of shootings and stabbings. Prostitutes would do business in the laundry room, Martinez said. Drug dealers and their customers conducted business so brazenly that, at times, they called police to resolve disputes.

Mere mention of the Nido also drew sighs from local firefighters.

“We’d be there all the time,” said Los Angeles Fire Capt. Jason Ing of nearby Station 57. There were fuel spills, injuries and overdoses, sometimes more than once a day, he said.

For years, the Nido was known as a place to buy drugs, and it was at the center of the historically troubled strip of Figueroa, said Jimmie Hill, 42, who lived next door. “The wild, wild west,” he called it, adding that neighbors were jubilant when the bulldozers rolled. “After so long, we can finally breathe and say that it is over.”

Even the Nido’s residents testified to its malevolence: “I’m won’t miss it.... There were too many roaches. They’d give you bites all over. The pipes didn’t work. We couldn’t take showers for days. There were rats!” exclaimed 15-year-old Lindele Smith, whose family -- along with other residents -- will soon be relocated by the owner.

The teenager, who sat near piles of debris in front of one of the Nido’s last remaining buildings, merely grinned when asked about drug dealing. “Oh, yeah, there was drug selling,” he said. “Some crazy stuff.”

Despite the high number of police calls, in court documents the city lists relatively few police reports of violent crime or narcotics- and vice-related offenses at the Nido.

The owner denied that the problems were as severe as the city alleged. Mischief-makers would cut the wires on new lights and break new locks on the gate, according to court papers.

And an effort to restore the Nido to its original purpose as senior housing backfired, according to police and court documents. Elderly residents were exploited by local prostitutes and drug sellers.

A sign still attached to the property’s fence last week showed what the owner was up against:

“Please keep the gate closed. Please follow the rules,” the sign said. “Whatever!” someone had scrawled in response.

The city sued the absentee owner of the property, listed in court documents as Earle Cowell, and won an injunction in 2001 that imposed a list of conditions.

But soon after, convinced that the problems persisted, Martinez began all over again, collecting documentation for a lawsuit filed in 2003. By this year, multiple building, safety and health violations had helped bolster his cause. In the most recent lawsuit, the city sought to close the property for a year.

Instead, the owner opted for demolition, after giving the required advance notice and aid to tenants. Dennis Kinnaird, attorney for the owner, declined to comment for this article.

But in court papers, Kinnaird argued that the owner had made a good-faith effort despite conditions over which he had no control. The crime problem at the property was abating, the defendant argued -- a view supported by teenager Smith.

In a phone conversation, Kinnaird would only call the outcome -- the razing of more than three dozen low-income units -- “a tragedy.”

Even Martinez, despite his long effort to gather police evidence for the lawsuits, said he never meant to create an empty lot.

The neighborhood can do better, he insisted. It “has its bad stereotype. But the way I look at it, it’s prime real estate. We just haven’t woken up to it.”

For now, Martinez said, he is mainly eager to ensure that the Nido doesn’t spring back to life in a new form -- as a new nuisance on the corner.

Hill, the neighbor, said the most striking aspect of the demolition this week was the way the old, unofficial denizens of the Nido had come to gawk at the ruins -- “their eyes wide, their mouths open, like they tore down a monument or something,” he said.

Hill compared them to “birds coming back to the nest” -- only to find that, this time, the nest was gone.