Andrew Wolfe stood in the dark looking out toward Alvarado Street, taking a visual inventory of the broken streetlights along the eastern border of MacArthur Park.
“There’s no light all the way down that corner,” Wolfe said, pointing to Wilshire Boulevard and beyond. “There’s no light all the way down both sides Langer’s.”
This is no small matter, as the area has a long history of criminal activity and a high number of intoxicated people in the park, which is the epicenter of the incident. The raging fentanyl epidemic,
“I was driving yesterday and almost hit somebody. You can’t see, it’s so dark,” Wolfe said, adding that the lights have been out for at least a year. “We’ve told everybody about it, but there’s been no response.”
“It’s been longer than that,” Eduardo Aguirre said.
“It’s probably been two to three years,” he told me. And unlike the street lights across the city, copper wires removed Aguirre said these materials and other items stolen by the thieves only needed basic maintenance, but no one expected them to be recovered in the near future.
Wolfe, Aguirre and Ellen Alaniz, who all serve on the area’s neighborhood councils, were giving me a tour of their home area, where lighting is just one of many issues. They said local merchants were troubled by theft and gang threats, a new playground in the park was damaged by fire, and drug trading was openly visible day and night.
“I’ve worked with a lot of kids, and I don’t think it’s okay for them to see that,” Alaniz said as we walked past a group of people who were either using drugs or recovering from a previous addiction.
We met a small group of people gathered at the edge of the park, and I pulled out my phone to show them a photo. It was a picture of a young woman whose mother and grandmother were looking for her.
Many of the street lights in or around MacArthur Park are not working. “We have told everyone we can about this to but have not received any response,” said one local.
(Michael Blackshear/Los Angeles Times)
“If she’s into drugs or something, this is the place to watch,” said a middle-aged man.
“I feel like I met him,” said his girlfriend, Serena Brown, who couldn’t remember exactly where.
Fentanyl is especially dangerous if you’ve been off the drug for a while, as she was during the three months she was in jail, said Brown, 46. Your tolerance level drops, and one hard hit can kill you.
“I’ve only overdosed once, when I got out of jail,” Brown said. “Luckily I was around people who Narcanned me and saved my life.”
He said if someone has overdosed, people will come running, and not just to help. Brown said he thinks it’s a very powerful thing, and he wants to take it into his own hands.
I asked if she would change things if she could? attending an eventShe said she is completely bankrupt, looking for a home and ready for a change.
“If there’s independent housing available after this, I would go to rehab, and I’m not even saying I want it for free,” Brown said. “I would definitely go to rehab, 100 percent.”
But he said it’s hard to avoid the urge to use, especially with the powerfully addictive fentanyl. Court action was taken on this Local officials were asked to increase the number of mental health and substance abuse treatment beds in the county.
“I think fentanyl is a terrible, evil drug,” Brown said.
Wolfe and I asked if he had lost any friends to overdose.
People gathered along the edge of MacArthur Park.
(Michael Blackshear/Los Angeles Times)
“Yes,” Brown said. “I lost 12 men.”
Eunice HernandezThe L.A. City Council representative for the area for nearly two years, said she wants city leaders to shift funding away from law enforcement and toward community services, and called it a “care first” approach.
“It’s like nobody cares,” Alaniz said as we saw the devastating effects of drug addiction and a variety of untreated physical ailments. People were bent and hollow, like characters in a horror movie.
Aurora Corona, another neighborhood council member who lives near the park, told me she likes the concept of care first. But the situation is “out of control,” and it makes her angry because families living in small apartments with no outdoor space have fled their park in fear. Corona said she would like to see more law enforcement and a restoration of order, along with social services.
Hernandez told me she, too, has been frustrated, and at times “I feel like I’m going to scream out loud about it.” Though she sees the role of the police, she said, she believes more of the city’s money should be spent on lighting, housing, cleaning, and crime prevention.
Hernandez said she wants to expand her medical outreach team, which operates in conjunction with USC, and plans to launch a mobile overdose prevention unit. She said she is strategizing with Mayor Karen Bass and using federal grants, philanthropic donations and other sources to invest in the community, including a projected homeless services center and a Redesign of the park,
Would these things make a difference? Sure, but the problems in MacArthur Park’s working-class immigrant community are because promises weren’t kept.
When I wrote about Norm Langer saying he might retire and close his Westlake restaurant because of increasing problems in the neighborhood, The bass went to listen to him over a pastrami sandwich. “Ultimately, we have to do whatever it takes, and we have to respond immediately,” he told me later.
When it takes a year or more to fix street lights on the main boulevard in the heart of the city, not far from City Hall, the last word that comes to your mind is “readiness,” and frustration naturally follows. In the middle of the park, an entire row of street lights on both sides of Wilshire Boulevard are down, although the lights inside the park are working. Wolfe has even created a map of the outages.
Instead of working on redesigning the park, which costs $2.5 million, how about fixing the lights?
Hernandez knows the lights are off.
All street lights on both sides of Wilshire Boulevard, which runs through the middle of the park, are out, although lights inside the park are working.
(Michael Blackshear/Los Angeles Times)
Bass knows the lights are off.
Someone, anyone, needs to drive trucks and equipment to MacArthur Park.
Neither in six months, nor in a year, nor in three years.
Immediately.
For God’s sake, just fix the lights.
Our last stop on the neighborhood tour was A $1.3 million playground which opened earlier this year in the southwest corner of the park.
“This park is located right in the middle of one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in the entire city and Los Angeles County,” Hernandez said at the opening ceremony in February. “Most of our residents in this neighborhood live in apartments that do not have access to green space in the form of a front or back yard.”
Wolfe said the entire community is grateful. But he said he and his wife regularly go to the playground early in the morning and remove syringes before the kids play on the swings, slides and climbing structure.
And now there’s a much bigger problem to deal with. The fire, which is still under investigation, damaged a portion of the structure and melted a portion of the slide. The playground was cordoned off, and yellow “caution” tape was wrapped around the perimeter.
Wolfe looked on in disgust. He wondered aloud why the park couldn’t be declared a drug-free, gang-free zone. He was wearing a “Free the MacArthur Park Neighborhood” T-shirt.
A young couple came in, pushing their two-year-old son in a stroller.
“We brought him here almost every day,” the mother told me, adding that she didn’t know where her son would play now.
Victor Williams, a neighborhood resident who visits the park with friends, said he doesn’t understand all the destructive behavior, vandalizing of grounds and open drug activity. He called those responsible for the fire “savages.”
“Nobody speaks out about this,” Williams said, frustrated by the tacit acceptance of civil disorder.
But then he looked east, across a shimmering lake, toward the skyline of the jeweled city.
“This park is so beautiful,” he said.
It has happened, and it can happen. And on a warm September night, in the shadow of its scars, for just a moment, it did.
steve.lopez@latimes.com
