Andrew Wolf stood in the dark, looking down Alvarado Street, visually checking for broken streetlights on the eastern border of MacArthur Park.
“There are no lights all the way to that corner,” Wolf said, pointing down Wilshire Boulevard and beyond. “There are zero lights on either side.
This is no small consideration, given the long history of criminal activity in the area and the large number of drug addicts who frequent the park, a hub of drug crime.
“I was driving yesterday and I nearly hit somebody. It was too dark and I couldn’t see anything,” Wolf said, adding that it’s been at least a year since the lights went out. “I’ve told everyone I know and they’ve responded.”
“It’s been a lot longer than that,” Eduardo Aguirre said.
“It’s probably been two or three years,” he told me, and Aguirre said that unlike the city’s streetlights and other materials that were stolen, these just needed basic maintenance and no one expected them to be fixed anytime soon.
Wolf, Aguirre and Elaine Alanis, all members of the local neighborhood association, gave us a tour of their neighborhood, where lighting is just one of many problems they said: Local businesses are plagued by theft and gang intimidation, a new playground at the park was damaged by fire and drug deals are openly conducted at any time of the day or night.
“I’ve worked with a lot of kids, and I don’t think they should be exposed to this,” Alanis said, walking through a crowd of people who appeared to be using drugs or in recovery from a previous drug use.
We came across a small group gathered on the edge of the park, so I pulled out my phone and showed them a photo: a photo of a young woman whose mother and grandmother had been searching for all her life.
“If she’s into drugs or something, this is the place to look,” the middle-aged man said.
“I think I saw her,” said his companion, Serena Brown, though she couldn’t quite remember where.
Brown, 46, said during his three-month sentence that fentanyl is especially dangerous if you haven’t had alcohol for a while, as your tolerance decreases and one strong puff can be deadly.
“I’ve only overdosed once when I got out of prison,” Brown said, “and luckily there were people around who administered Narcan and saved my life.”
When someone overdoses, people rush to the scene, but it’s not just to help, Brown said. They assume it must be a hard drug and they want to get it, he said.
I asked her if she could turn her situation around if she could, and she said she had very little money, was looking for a house, and wanted a change.
“If there’s independent housing available after rehab, I would go there. I’m not saying it’s free,” Brown said. “I would definitely, 100 percent go to rehab.”
But the urge to use can be hard to resist, especially with the highly addictive form of fentanyl, she said, and she’s lobbying local officials to increase the county’s stock of mental health and substance abuse treatment beds.
“I think fentanyl is a horrible, evil drug,” Brown said.
Wolf and I asked her if she had ever lost a friend to a drug overdose.
“Yeah,” Brown said. “We lost 12.”
She has represented the area on the Los Angeles City Council for nearly two years and said she wants city leaders to shift funding from law enforcement to community services, calling it a “care first” approach.
“This is not care,” Alanis said, as she witnessed the devastating toll of addiction and a variety of untreated physical illnesses, people with their heads bowed and faces blank, like characters in a horror movie.
Aurora Corona, another neighborhood association member who lives near the park, told me she thinks the care-first approach is good. But she’s furious that the situation is “out of control,” forcing families who live in small apartments with no outdoor space to flee the park. Corona said she wants to see increased law enforcement and a restoration of order, along with social services.
Hernandez said she is frustrated and sometimes “feels like screaming at the top of my lungs,” and that she supports the police’s role but thinks a larger share of the city’s budget should be spent on lighting, housing, sanitation and crime prevention.
Hernandez said he wants to expand the medical outreach team he runs in partnership with the University of Southern California, plans to launch a mobile overdose prevention unit, and is strategizing with Mayor Karen Bass to leverage federal grants, charitable donations and other sources of funding to invest in the community, including planned homeless outreach centers and facilities.
Will all this make a difference? Yes, but in MacArthur Park’s working-class immigrant community, the broken promises are a major problem.
When I wrote about Norm Langer remarking over a pastrami sandwich that he might retire and close his Westlake restaurant because of the neighborhood’s worsening problems, she later said, “At the end of the day, we have to do whatever it takes, and we have to respond with urgency.”
When it’s taking more than a year to repair street lights on a major downtown thoroughfare not far from City Hall, the word “emergency” springs to mind, and the irony is understandable. The rows of street lights on both sides of Wilshire Boulevard, which runs through the center of the park, are all out, but the lights in the park are still on. Wolf even created a map of the outages.
Instead of tackling a $2.5 million redesign of the park, how about fixing the lights?
Hernandez knows the lights are out.
The bus knows the lights are out.
Someone, anyone, needs to move the truck and equipment to MacArthur Park.
Not in six months, a year, or even three years.
immediately.
Please fix the light.
The final stop on our neighborhood tour was , which opened earlier this year in the southwest corner of the park.
“This park is located in the middle of one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in the entire city and county of Los Angeles,” Mayor Hernandez said at the park’s dedication in February. “The majority of residents in this area live in apartment complexes with no front or backyard green space.”
Wolf said the whole community is grateful, but he and his wife regularly visit the playground early in the morning to collect syringes before the children hit the swings, slides and climbing equipment.
And now there’s a bigger problem to deal with: A fire, which is still under investigation, damaged part of the building and melted part of the slide. The play area is now fenced off and has yellow “caution” tape around it.
Wolf looked on in disgust. He wondered aloud why the park couldn’t be declared a drug- and gang-free zone. He was wearing a T-shirt that read, “LIBERATE MacArthur Park Neighborhood.”
A young couple arrived with their two-year-old son in a stroller.
“We brought our son here almost every day,” the mother told me, adding that she didn’t know where her son would play from now on.
Victor Williams, a local resident who was visiting the park with friends, said he couldn’t understand all the vandalism, ransacking and open drug dealing. He called those responsible for the arson “savages.”
“Nobody talks about this,” Williams said, weary of the tacit acceptance of societal dysfunction.
But he looked east, gazing across the sparkling lake at the bejeweled downtown skyline.
“This park is so beautiful,” he said.
It always was, it always could be, and for a brief moment on a warm September night, with a smudge in the shadows, it was.
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