Exclusive Neighborhood

For residents of Santa Ana’s historic French Park, Washington Avenue is the asphalt equivalent of a party-crasher.

“You can’t even hear yourself think,” said Debra Jo McEwen, a horse trainer and past president of the Historic French Park Neighborhood Assn.

The street generates more noise than a rowdy guest in this neighborhood dappled with Queen Annes, Craftsmans and European revivals.

Spurgeon and French streets also contribute to the traffic, residents say, bringing a daily stream of cars across Washington Avenue and posing dangers to children and pets. Fed-up residents want all of these streets at least partially blocked off.

“I literally cannot sit on my porch and have a conversation because of the noise from all that traffic,” said McEwen, who has been battling for five years to have concrete barriers installed on nearby streets. “This isn’t living.”

But cross Washington Avenue into blue-collar, apartment-dominated French Court and it’s a different story. Many there say that their French Park neighbors have more on their agenda than reducing traffic.

“They think they live in Irvine,” said Leo Ramos, a maintenance worker who has lived in French Court for 17 years. “When I lived in front of Washington Avenue, we used to have barbecues in front of the apartments and sit back in the afternoon and talk. We could hear ourselves fine.”

When residents in French Park and French Court voted in a neighborhood election in October to partially close Washington Avenue and two other streets, it revealed the symbolic border between the neighborhoods.

Critics say the closures will create a kind of line between the haves and the have-nots. Supporters say the closures will discriminate only against outside motorists angling for a shortcut. The barriers could go up this month.

The vote pitted Latino leaders, a school principal and working-class Latinos against a group of overwhelmingly white homeowners passionate about protecting their way of life. It was a five-year battle that featured seemingly irreconcilable differences in these northeast Santa Ana neighborhoods, just west of downtown.

For French Park residents such as Barry and Donna Jensen, closing streets is a way to protect their five young children.

“Some people think I’m crazy, but if I find somebody blowing through or coming to a screeching halt at a stop sign, I follow them and have a chat with them,” Barry Jensen said. “My No. 1 concern is the safety of the kids.”

But as far as Ramos is concerned, all the street closures will do is create more distrust between groups of residents who already don’t deal much with each other.

“When I walk through that neighborhood, sometimes I feel like people are looking at me and thinking, ‘What are you going to steal now?’ ” Ramos said. “Putting up those barriers, I don’t even want to know how it’s going to feel walking through there.”

Traffic on Washington Only Average, City Says

By Santa Ana standards, the amount of traffic on Washington Avenue is average for a collector street, said Ruth Smith, an assistant city traffic engineer. Whatever the area’s potential for car-versus-pedestrian accidents may be, statistics show few such incidents in this part of Santa Ana, she said.

Homeowners in French Park say about 8,000 cars pass through that street daily by their reckoning. City officials say it’s closer to 4,500. Resident Paul Giles says either count is too high.

“Let’s assume it’s 4,000. That’s too many cars on my front steps,” he said. Living in an urban area “doesn’t mean people here have given up their expectation to enjoy life.”

Other homeowners said closing those streets would discourage north-south cut-through traffic to streets such as Civic Center Drive or 17th Street.

But French Court residents said they don’t see what their French Park neighbors are seeing. And they fear their neighborhood is getting a bad rap.

Ramos said that despite the occasional problems that surface in his tough, working-class neighborhood, it’s a place he has been happy to have raised six children.

“This place has given my kids some hometown roots,” he said. “They’ve made tons of friends here and we’ve made the best of living in this neighborhood. . . . There’s some people who cause problems, like with any neighborhood, but most people here, I’d go to war for them because they’re good, decent, hard-working people.”

Few Closures Just About Traffic, Analysts Say

The gulf this issue highlights shouldn’t come as a great surprise, experts say.

Street closures are rarely, if ever, just about traffic, said Ed Blakely, dean of the Milano School of Urban Planning and Management in New York. Thus, the matter can seldom be resolved by counting cars.

As with their gated community cousins, street closures often provide a lens through which the differences between people--their concerns, their fears, their hopes for the future and their dislikes--are magnified, Blakely said.

And while closures don’t prevent people from walking through neighborhoods, studies show that once barriers go up, walking patterns change, Blakely said. “It’s a symbolic gate. People don’t walk the same streets. If they do, they feel like they’re trespassing.”

Prickly closures often occur near real or imagined cultural or socioeconomic divides--South Pasadena near El Sereno, Carlsbad near Oceanside, Santa Monica near Venice--or between neighborhoods in the same cities with distinct income or cultural characteristics.

Few cities illustrate this divide like Santa Ana, a city that’s nearly 80% Latino but that historically has been run by a largely white, Republican establishment. Strident debates have raged over illegal immigration and high-density apartments. Latino leaders have long said they suspect “gentrification” underlies many of the city’s actions, including the creation of the Artists Village in downtown, which they say caters to a predominately white audience and artists.

“The political body here consistently acquiesces to this constant separation between the haves and the have-nots,” said Amin David of Los Amigos of Orange County, a Latino civil rights organization based in Santa Ana. “What keeps downtown Santa Ana alive is the 4th Street traffic and the walkers, who are mostly Latinos. But the city is uncomfortable with Santa Ana as a Latino city. They want it to be an All-American city.”

Apartment Dwellers Weren’t Given a Vote

Last October’s vote only increased suspicions because apartment dwellers were prohibited--by city policy--from voting. One month later, the City Council approved the measure by a vote of 4 to 1.

“It’s done this way to preserve the residential character of a neighborhood,” said George Alvarez, Santa Ana’s chief traffic engineer, in defending the long-standing policy.

Besides, apartment dwellers don’t have to worry about property values, and they tend to have a shorter-term interest in a neighborhood, said Manuel Gomez, the city’s assistant city manager.

But for French Court residents, the fact that they were barred from voting made it easier to listen to those who said the street closures should be avoided at all costs.

“It’s absurd. All individuals whose lives are going to be affected directly should have the right to have a voice,” said Fabian Sanchez, an apartment maintenance worker who lives in French Court. “They have taken from us the voice of the vote simply because we live in apartments.”

Gordon Bricken, a former mayor of Santa Ana, said that, in retrospect, the policy is unfair. It empowers homeowners but strips the influence of renters, who tend to be poorer and more disenfranchised, he said.

“The voting process . . . really contains, in my opinion, a lot of unfairness,” Bricken said. “It kind of harkens back to the early days when the Constitution said that the only people who could vote were male land-holders.”

French Court Alliance Sees Vote as ‘Elitist’

In a hardscrabble neighborhood with no association and few leaders, French Court residents looked to people they perceived to be more plugged in, including employees at Wallace Davis Elementary School.

That alliance bothered French Park homeowners, who thought residents were being led astray by people eager to play the race card.

“Many residents in French Court do not understand they can have a better life. They don’t know how to fight for it, how to ask for it,” McEwen said. “They put their faith in a handful of people, one being the principal of Wallace Davis. . . . When is more cars better than less cars? Especially when children are involved?”

But Principal Maria Gutierrez Garcia said members of the Historic French Park Neighborhood Assn. are angry because they couldn’t just slide their proposal through. “It seemed very elitist to not allow people who pay taxes and work hard to have a say,” she said.

There’s a great sense of community in French Park that comes from a bond resident Paul Giles calls “an unexplainable addiction to old houses.” They aggressively rehabilitate their homes, visit each other and excitedly talk about their improvement projects.

“The year I moved here, there were four people doing the same thing as me. We were all in stages of heavy fixing, and there was just a tremendous sense of community,” McEwen said. “You just wanted to pick up the phone” and talk about your house.

Residents are proud that seven children from the neighborhood attend the nearby Orange County High School for the Arts, that they have summer jazz concerts and have welcomed an AIDS hospice.

Neighborhood Tidy If Not Neighborly

French Park homeowners have a good relationship with city code enforcement officers, who at times have cracked down on French Court and other renters over code violations. Tenants who hung clothes from balconies were warned to stop. It made the neighborhood look bad, one resident said.

In many homeowners’ views, the rigorous code enforcement improved the neighborhoods. “Working with the city, asking for things, working with code enforcement--we busted our chops for a decade to make the quality of life better for everyone,” McEwen said.

But not, as far as French Court residents feel, to make life more neighborly.

Used to be, when Margarita Abarca, who lives in a Washington Avenue apartment with her two children and husband, came back from the market, she would sit on benches in the tiny triangular park that lies in historic French Park. “When it was hot, it was very fresh just sitting there,” she said.

But the benches, which had also been a hangout for construction or other workers during lunch, were taken away.

“I don’t think they wanted people hanging around there,” Abarca said.

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Cutting Traffic

Members of the French Park neighborhood association won the right to have three streets closed to traffic beginning this month. Proponents say the closurs will reduce traffic; foes say they’re an attempt to separate havs and have nots.