L.A.’s greater than its parts

I grew up in Hollywood in the 1970s. Later my old stomping grounds got renamed East Hollywood. In recent years it’s been carved up, at least on city signs, into even smaller chunks known as Little Armenia and Thai Town.

These days, I drive across the city and find more and more little blue rectangles -- announcing the existence of officially designated neighborhoods. Some, like Brookside and Mount Angelus, are small enough to run across without breaking a sweat.

I love Los Angeles. All of it. From San Pedro to Sylmar. And in the mania to divide our city into ever smaller units, I see a dark force at work.

Fewer people take pride in claiming as their home that larger, messier and more complicated place called Los Angeles.

We want to shrink our city and its sprawl. So we subdivide the communities we live in, and call these ever-tinier places home.

The term Angeleno was coined in the 19th century, when Los Angeles was still a burg clinging to its namesake river and a few nearby hillsides. But you don’t hear it said with the same verve and chutzpah with which people on that other coast proclaim, “I’m a New Yorker.”

We don’t call ourselves Angelenos, but we argue about which streets and landmarks divide the Westside from the Eastside. We call Eagle Rock or West Adams home and are offended when told we really live in Highland Park or Mid-City.

My colleagues in The Times’ Mapping L.A. project brought a lot of angst to the surface when they decided to carve Los Angeles into 113 manageable neighborhoods.

“Windsor Square is part of Hancock Park for all intents and purposes,” a reader called “Lefty” wrote on the Mapping L.A. website, in response to their decision to make the former a separate neighborhood. “The only people who don’t think so are people in Windsor Square who want to be above and beyond Hancock Park.”

Yes, pride and property values are among the things at stake in these neighborhood boundaries. Generally speaking, the more ethnically and economically diverse a neighborhood is, the more people will argue about its borders.

Mid-Wilshire was the most ethnically diverse neighborhood in the Mapping L.A. project. My colleagues defined it as the stretch of city bordered, roughly, by Crenshaw Boulevard, Fairfax Avenue, Pico Boulevard and 3rd Street.

This definition left some readers unhappy.

“I live in Park LaBrea and hardly ever go south of Wilshire,” wrote Nancy Impastato. “We are more related to the Farmer’s Market and the Grove.”

The 2.8 square miles of Mid-Wilshire is many worlds all in one. It’s shared by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the check-cashing joints on Pico Boulevard. To some, the idea of calling this place a single neighborhood is absurd.

“The Miracle Mile is in the Miracle Mile, not Mid-Wilshire,” wrote James O’Sullivan, president of the Miracle Mile Residential Assn.

Jere Burns, an actor, recently moved to the northern part of Mid-Wilshire with his wife, Leslie. According to street signs, they live in either the Museum District or the Miracle Mile, or both. Their new home invites people to walk about, and I found the couple, formerly of Hollywood, pushing their toddler in a stroller on 8th Street.

“It’s the best neighborhood in L.A.,” Jere said. People in Mid-Wilshire actually greeted the Burnses with friendly hellos when they moved in, he said, adding, “It’s cleaner and more civilized here.”

Jere likes his corner of the city, but he doesn’t call himself an Angeleno. “I say we live in L.A., but I never say we’re from L.A., even though I’ve been here for 24 years.”

“There are parts of L.A. I don’t relate to,” he explained.

Down on the other end of Mid-Wilshire, near the corner of Crenshaw and Pico, is a part of L.A. that might fit in that category. The buildings are lower to the ground and there are fewer pedestrians. Across the street from Queen Anne Place Elementary, I found carpet-installer Ricardo Mendoza eating ice cream with his daughter.

Mendoza, 38 and a native of Puebla, Mexico, has lived in Los Angeles for 20 years. Like Burns, he told me he doesn’t identify much with Los Angeles. “What I like about California is what is outside of Los Angeles,” he said.

His children were born and raised in L.A., but the crowds and violence he encounters in the city put him off. “I’ve seen black and Latino teenagers fighting there,” he said, pointing to the park across the street from the school. He said he dreams of moving to Perris or Temecula.

In my own mind, Mid-Wilshire is at the heart of Los Angeles. It’s a busy crossroads where I made childhood visits to the La Brea tar pits. It’s also where I saw smoke rising and looters running during one harrowing day in 1992.

Is it possible to pull all these different people and experiences together into a single community? One of the joys of being an Angeleno is when you encounter those who strive to make it so.

Peter Schulberg is one of those people. He runs the Eco-LogicalART gallery on Pico, where he turns recycled billboard vinyl into art canvases. His gallery, a remodeled light-bulb warehouse, has become a place of cross-cultural encounters, where people from the Westside, Eastside and Koreatown come together.

“It’s that demographic that’s no demographic” is how he put it.

Schulberg’s next event is the Saturday unveiling of three new works of art on a billboard atop the gallery. Even the day laborers who gather at a parking lot across the street have helped out, he said. They cleaned up the sidewalk outside at no charge.

His corner of Mid-Wilshire, Schulberg says, is “a funky neighborhood that’s not quite there yet, but that’s near the center of everything.”

It’s a description that fits the city of Los Angeles too.

My hometown is a funky intersection of people and their dreams. It starts to grow on you after a while. Live here and linger, cross its invisible neighborhood boundaries, and one day you too may call the whole of it home.

I’m trying to find a new, more aggressive way to pronounce “Angeleno.” With authority and conviction and maybe even a proud little scowl.

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hector.tobar@latimes.com