L.A.'s Mid-City still a community up for grabs

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Category: Community News

Published on Tuesday, 16 February 2010 20:46

Written by Sandy Banks LA TIMES

Residents and merchants take pride in sprucing up the evolving neighborhood, but taggers and gang-bangers remain a problem.

The old-timers seated on the patio at the Oki Dog remember when the neighborhood around Pico and La Brea was truly dangerous.

Twenty years ago, gangbanging and crack-dealing meant "killings on every block," a fellow who calls himself "Smooth" recalled.Now, the area is quiet enough that Smooth, and the others who survived that era, can send their kids out on errands alone. That's why Smooth was shocked when Ronald Barron was shot to death Sunday night outside the Cottage Bar next door. "I had just watched the Super Bowl there," Smooth said. "I left for a minute, came back and he was dead."

Barron was a former gangbanger who grew up in the area, turned his life around and was working to keep kids out of gangs. Police say he was shot to death by a 16-year-old tagger Barron tried to stop from vandalizing a storefront across from the bar.

"It was a fluke," said Smooth, 41, "because this neighborhood is better than it's ever been.

"One hard-headed kid with a gun and a spray-paint can," he said, shaking his head. "And now it looks like the thugs are running things again."

The tragedy resonated with irony in most parts of this city. But here, in the neighborhood, it rang with dissonant notes. I have friends who live a block from the bar where Barron was shot. We met for lunch nearby Wednesday, and I was surprised by their reaction: They felt more embarrassed than scared. The killing muddies the image of a place where they've lived for 30 years, where a middle-aged woman still feels safe walking alone to her church or her yoga class, and her two sons, now college grads, kick back at the Oki Dog over late-night snacks.

But there's a real struggle here. This is a community still up for grabs -- people who have begun to take pride in clean streets and safe gathering spots and are flexing their power against bold young toughs. My friends were headed out to dinner Christmas Eve when they spotted a group of kids tagging a building. They yelled at the teenagers from their car. The kids scattered. Skirmish averted. Or maybe just postponed.

A neighbor who confronted teenagers tagging a palm trunk on his lawn awoke the next morning to find expletives spray-painted across the front of his house. They live just south of Pico, the dividing line between the neighborhood called Mid-City and the more prosperous Mid-Wilshire. They remember the riots in 1992, when the LAPD stationed a phalanx of officers to make sure that the looting and burning stopped its northern march at the boulevard.

Sent to the Neighborhood News by Allan DiCastro