by Jennifer Ferro
Last month, I was pulled out of my descent into sleep by a shotgun blast from outside my window. I don’t know how I could tell it was a shotgun, but it was unmistakable. I ran to check on my two girls. Both were still asleep. Then I ran to a darkened room to look out the window.
Nothing. No people. No bodies. No barking dogs. Had I been dreaming?
Then I saw him. A man. Walking down the sidewalk away from me. Not fast, but purposeful. Carrying a shotgun. The barrel pointing up at the sky.
I live in West Adams. It was one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city at the turn of the century, with sprawling Victorian and Craftsman houses. Successful black entertainers began to move here in the 1940s. Hattie McDaniel, the Academy Award winning actress best known for her portrayal of Mammy in Gone with the Wind, won a famous lawsuit that overturned racist restrictions that kept black people from owning homes here.
The 10 Freeway sliced the neighborhood in half in the 1960s, dealing a blow to West Adams from which it has never fully recovered. The delicate ecosystem once known as “Sugar Hill” had been mercilessly bisected. Property values plummeted. Many of the old majestic homes were broken into boarding houses. Still, the neighborhood has always drawn people looking for grand, old, affordable homes.
I moved there from Venice in 2000. My husband and I were expecting a daughter and blending a family. We needed a lot of space, something we couldn’t find or afford in Venice. We were drawn to West Adams by the architecture and the possibility of owning a home somewhere central. My husband had also lived there a few years earlier.
After searching through many boarding houses and fixer uppers, we found a 100-year-old Victorian. It had two floors plus a full standing attic, four bedrooms, sleeping porches, and grand downstairs rooms. We loved it. It was also on a street with very few apartment houses, which meant our neighbors would be invested in the block.
Soon after we moved in, our neighbors, most of whom were black families, introduced themselves. Some brought over home-baked cookies, and others brought pizza and drinks. Having come from apartment living where the concept of neighbor meant annoyances through shared walls, I was happy to be in a real community for a change. My husband and I soon had a second daughter, and many of the neighbors had kids who were around the same age.
Because we’d stayed clear of apartment buildings, our street was mostly tranquil. But one property, a 1960’s-era complex, got in the way. It had once been a 15-room motel. Now it was illegally housing developmentally disabled adults. There were fights, shouts, occasional pantless men walking down the street, and a woman who made a habit of urinating on the lawn out front. We kept our girls playing in the backyard.
The intersection of Washington Boulevard and Western Avenue was close to our street, and it attracted unwelcome traffic. One night, when my husband was taking our pit bull for a nighttime walk, he was confronted by a young gangster. “Where you from?” asked the stranger. My husband, who is African American, explained that he wasn’t with a gang. The man refused to accept the answer and came closer, lifting his shirt to reveal his waistband—the universal signal for “I’m strapped.” My husband was carrying a nighttime walking stick (it’s more like a bat) and smacked the man hard in the head. The gangster fled.
This was right outside of our house. When I heard about it, I got so scared that I had my toddler and my newborn sleep with us on a mattress on the floor away from windows in case anyone came back looking for revenge. We didn’t call the police. We knew there wasn’t much they could do, and we didn’t want to attract that kind of attention. It might lead the perpetrator right to our door.
We’ve got to move, I decided. Enough is enough. But the days went by, and the prospect of a move seemed overwhelming. Our house was beautiful and huge. With each successive month the urgency began to dissipate.
One solace was the community spirit. We neighbors stuck together. Through any 24-hour period you could always be sure that someone was watching out over the street. Many of the houses in West Adams have wide-open front porches, and anyone sitting on a stoop can see most of the block. In the early mornings, a fireman down the street was outside working on his garden. During the day, a plumber down the street would come home often to see his family and sit with them out front. At night, there was the judge, a night owl who walked his two dogs in the middle of the street, picking up trash and interrogating anyone hanging around on the block.
The housing market during these years was steadily heating up. Some people started to cash out. The plumber, who’d lived there all his life, got his house stolen right out from under him by a former brother-in-law.
The motel across from our house remained a problem. Then the owner of it was indicted for systematically stealing his charges’ disability checks. The residents were dispersed into other homes. A new owner took over and rented out the small rooms to whoever could put a few bucks together. Low-rent week-to-week rentals attracted drug abusers and hot tempers. The motel continued to be a zone of middle-of-the-night brawling, cussing and police visits.
Still, the remaining neighbors stayed tight. We formed a neighborhood group. We chipped in and financed streetlights. The unofficial mayor of the street, a woman who has lived on the block for 40 years, made the LAPD pay attention to our collection of streets. She oversaw a campaign of complaints against the absentee motel owner. It worked. He left. The motel was purchased and run by someone who screened the tenants and cared who stayed there.
Real estate eventually reached its ridiculous phase, when anyone with a pulse could get a loan. Korean investors bought a couple of houses and turned them into guest homes for those visiting from the motherland. A couple with a young family purchased a fully restored home for a price we would have thought unimaginable a few years earlier. Two neighbors cashed out and moved to other parts of the city.
When the market finally crashed, the Korean entrepreneurs got foreclosed on and left vacant houses, but, despite the economic upheaval, the street also got calmer. With the absentee motel owner out of the picture, the sounds of drunken couples fighting in the street became rare. Police were called less and less. Distance set in with the neighbors. New people kept moving in, but I never learned their names, didn’t learn what kind of dogs they had or what their schedules were. We didn’t really need to watch out for one another the way we had before.
When we first moved to West Adams, homeowners in the neighborhood often sat out on their porches. Today, few do. I’m one of those who now spend most of their time indoors or out of the house entirely. The neighborhood has become more ethnically diverse, but also more atomized. Is it ordinary life that causes the distance? Kids growing up and drifting into new communities centered around their schools? The commutes to other parts of town? The two parents working? For me, at least, those are all factors.
That night, with my kids asleep, my husband out of town and my dogs quiet, I watched that shotgun and the man carrying it as he walked past all my neighbors’ homes. I realized I couldn’t warn them. I didn’t have everyone’s number anymore.
The police came. I learned that the man with the shotgun had attempted to rob someone right in front of my house. The victim had struggled and run away. The robber had shot after him. Thank God, he missed.
Later, I learned that the man I saw walking purposefully down my street had murdered a young MTV executive just two days earlier with the same shotgun. That young victim had lain dead outside his home for five hours. None of his neighbors had heard the gunfire or noticed a bleeding man on the sidewalk. I wonder if the same thing could have happened that night on my street.
Jennifer Ferro is the general manager of public radio station KCRW and a fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion.
*Photo courtesy of Jennifer Ferro.
I appreciate your insights about the neighborhood. I moved with my family to Mid-City and it is the perfect central location for us. The area has several high profile projects under construction and with the metro train coming there should be a renaissance of this area in the next ten years. However, there are still serious safety concerns and anyone out at night should also appreciate that. The diversity of this area is exactly what I want my children to respect and at the same time understanding that this area has been abused for years and it requires patience and a respect of history to bring it back to its glory. I used to live across from LACMA and in the nineties it was horrible. Today it is one of the jewels of the city. My family said a prayer for the unfortunate young man killed by the shotgun weilding parolee. A tragedy if there ever was one. My best to your family.
“The neighborhood has become more ethnically diverse, but also more atomized.” Combined with strong multiculturalism, ethnic diversity is often accompanied by a reduction in trust. This is quite natural. Close physical proximity does not itself create a sense community and trust.
If your new neighbors define their community in terms of their ethnicity, they won’t see you as part of their community and they may exhibit closeness and trust only with members of their (ethnic) community. Simply saying that they *could* define community in several simultaneous ways doesn’t make it so.
Mrs. Ferro speculates that a sense of common cause may have accounted for a prior sense of trust and community. This may be confusing cause for effect. Though a “common enemy” is often a short-term stimulus for community action, it often does not sustain community. More to the point, the prior sense of common cause was likely the *result* of how neighbors saw themselves and their meaning of community.
I came to California from NY in 1962, hired by a drug company as a “detail man.” The boundaries of my sales territory were exactly the same as the boundaries of the “curfew area” installed during the Mother of All Insurrections – the so called Watts Riots of 1965. Until that event, I loved moving around much of the older areas on the “Easy Rawlins” side streets off Central Avenue and the quiet dignified areas off West Adams. One of the loveliest Christmas parties I ever attended was at the home of Dr. Oner Barker in that area. While I chatted with him, he took a call from jazz great Ben Webster, his cousin, playing on the road somewhere. I was so pleased to see that West Adams had begun a resurgence some years ago. In the summer, one could play KGFJ on the car radio and turn down the volume because it was coming out of every screen door and store front in South Central.
Now, I realize that the gang scene has destroyed so much of what in some ways was a beautiful place to live. I hope Ms. Ferro is able to find a way to hold on there. It can come back again.
Great article. My wife and I moved just east of West Adams, near La Brea and Washington. We love our little pocket, but also feel like safety is an issue on the bigger streets. And the incident with the shotgun-wielding man worried us, of course.
I was thinking just today what could be done to improve the neighborhood. How could I become more active to help the city put some money into this area? My hope is that it gets better with the new metro. Washington is a great street with lots of potential — I just hope others recognize that, too.
On Saturday 6/4/11 the Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles (MCLA) was invited to participate in a community event organized by the West Adams Heritage Association at the Golden State Mutual Life Building (Adams & Western). This event was to bring public awareness and to help save the iconic 1949 murals by Charles Alston and Hale Woodruff, two of the most important African American artists of their day, painted in the lobby.
While talking to the several attendants to the 6/5/11 event I learned about their attachment to the community. I heard how – even though hard at times – they had decided to stay in the historical neighborhood that was part of their parents’ and their grandparents’ history. I learned about all the famous people who had lived in the West Adams neighborhood and about the successful businesses that developed in the vicinity of the Golden State Mutual Life Building.
On June 4th, 2011, I was honored and proud to meet many of the people that make the West Adams neighborhood. I realized then that the same spirit that moved the future-oriented optimism that surrounded the 1947 arrival of The Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Co. to the neighborhood, was still alive.
I invite you to rediscover your historical neighborhood that is home of the 1949 Alston and Woodruff murals “Exploration and Colonization” and “Settlement and Development” of California. These murals depict civic integration and African American history in the state. These murals speak of our history, of your neighborhood history. The sleek Golden State Mutual Life Building was designed by celebrated L.A. architect Paul R. Williams, the nation’s leading African American architect of the times.
Isabel Rojas-Williams
Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles (MCLA)
Executive Director
Thanks for the article. It reminds me of the four years I lived in that neighborhood while attending USC.
Every other day the USC police, known as DPS (Dept. of Public Safety), sent out crime alerts for incidents that occurred within their patrol area, which is a few blocks in any direction around USC.
Numerous students have been robbed at knife or gun point even in broad daylight. It is a very tough area.
West Adams belongs to the Bloods street gang. So, wear red instead of blue (Crips).
Walking to class was a convenience. But I would never live in that neighborhood again. The fear and anxiety that comes with the random acts of violence in the area just isn’t worth it.
We live in West Adams, also, near Western and Washington. Our story is very similar, lived in Venice, discovered we were having a family, priced out of the Venice market, etc. We discovered West Adams, and moved in 2001. We love the neighborhood, and are extremely close to our neighbors. Our neighborhood is defined by 6 blocks and we have an active neighborhood association. I believe it became strong and bonded us all together through monthly meetings at people’s houses where we could eat, drink and discuss happenings in the area. Technically called “association meetings” They were really monthly socials. They provided a forum to get to know everyone and a way to make community decisions on how to improve the neighborhood. In the 10 years that we have lived in our house, we have had TV’s thrown over our fence, had the block cordoned off by police so no one could get in or out, had a police swat team banging on our door at midnight searching everyone’s yard for an armed fugitive; just to name a few incidents. We also have great summer parties, Christmas parties and the kids all go to everyone’s birthday parties. I can’t imagine living anywhere else.
This is a fantastic piece. A great example of what Zocalo can contribute to the greater conversation, by providing good writers with a space for longer articles than those you’d be able to find in the newspaper these days. And the piece is all about social connections and a sense [or lack] of community, so it fits perfectly with Zocalo’s mission.
Bravo to Jennifer and the Zocalo staff!
Great article. I am renting a 1912 1 bedroom bungalow in the Adams-Normandie area. We moved there from Echo Park where we heard drive bys or gun fire about 3-5 times a month. It was something we got very tired of, but moved mostly out of finding an amazing house to rent and cutting our commute in half since we work on the west side. It was a surprise to us the amount of neighbors that talked to us as we moved in, introduced themselves, gave us their cell phone numbers, told us about the ANNA meetings and the community.
We are actively involved in the Adams-Normandie Neighborhood Association and it’s be amazing to see such a diverse neighborhood be very accepting of others and pull together to better the neighborhood. It’s amazing to have neighbors that will send you an email or call when they see something strange going on around my house.
Because of this, I have actually heard gunfire maybe 2 times in 3 1/2 years. When you look at the crime map every month, we are able to keep out most or sometimes ALL of the crime out of our little cluster of blocks. Community works and we’ve gained amazing friends. There was a lot of tension in Echo Park over the white man moving in so non of my neighbors wanted to know us and even all that gunfire couldn’t bring us all together.
The one thing I do find interesting about your article is about how the community aspect can change. For example, my fellow ANNA members say that when stuff was REALLY bad around there years ago, the Association had TONS of members. As the community improves and new people come in, it dwindles. You have to stay active at all times even if it’s just for the sake of other improvements (planting, tree trimming, graffiti, trash clean up, speed bumps, signs, lights, community service ect)in between any major concerns.
I really hope to see West Adams/Jefferson Park/Harvard Heights get rid of their stigma of being a bad neighborhood. My boyfriend and I are from Philadelphia and we love how much it kind of reminds of of West Philly in some ways. It’s amazing how many of my LA native friends have never been below the 10 Freeway. They have no idea this place exists. They just think “EWw it’s scary down there.”
I’ve lived in West Adams for over a decade, during which time my block has grown more cohesive (and convivial), not less, despite–and not necessarily because of–demographic change (grey African-American and Japanese American populations being replaced–not displaced–by young(er) “Whites” and “Hispanics.”
I’ve no security concerns having suffered from years of amnesia, salved by many a midnight walk.
I rented an apartment in one of those old houses converted to an apartment. I thought it was pretty rough. I did not have a car so walked a lot in the streets and I am a White woman and it was sometimes ok and sometimes not. I saw a Lot of violence almost on a daily basis and had to deal with tons of disturbing imagery and trash and waste and broken glass everywhere on he sidewalks and hit and runs and drive by shooting at 27th and cimmarron and every weekend and just the constant scamming and drama and fights I heard and saw. I don’t know what part of West Adams some of you lived in, but obviously being safe in west Adas, REALLY depends on WHERE you live! Because I would NEVER live there again–Ever… Worst experience of my life! got Mugged, saw way more domestic violence than i ever want to see again. there were so many stray animals that it was just so sad! I saw a Stray pack of dogs maul a kitten and then leave it partly alive. A guy was drunk and rove down the street and hit every single car, about 16 cars and then tried to run, I had a naked guy that would regularly end up in our lawn, I mean the list goes on and on… I don’t know I guess I just was in the wrong place a t the wrong time, but I REALLY ended up hating it even thought my place was super cool and I had a lot of room for way less money than i could have afforded elsewhere. It was depressing and sad to live there for me.
I did try to get to know my neighbors, but they were a little hard for me to relate to sometimes, dealt drugs with kids in the house, belonged to gangs, all on disability no one working, except maybe a little bit under the table or boosting or selling a little weed or whatever. hey people gotta do what the gotta do to survive, but I don’t wanna live like that forever. but to read the other posts, I guess all of West Adams is not like this, so,…