L.A.’s Mid-City still a community up for grabs

The old-timers seated on the patio at the Oki Dog remember when the neighborhood around Pico and La Brea was truly dangerous.

Twenty years ago, gangbanging and crack-dealing meant “killings on every block,” a fellow who calls himself “Smooth” recalled.

Now, the area is quiet enough that Smooth, and the others who survived that era, can send their kids out on errands alone.

That’s why Smooth was shocked when Ronald Barron was shot to death Sunday night outside the Cottage Bar next door. “I had just watched the Super Bowl there,” Smooth said. “I left for a minute, came back and he was dead.”

Barron was a former gangbanger who grew up in the area, turned his life around and was working to keep kids out of gangs. Police say he was shot to death by a 16-year-old tagger Barron tried to stop from vandalizing a storefront across from the bar.

“It was a fluke,” said Smooth, 41, “because this neighborhood is better than it’s ever been.

“One hard-headed kid with a gun and a spray-paint can,” he said, shaking his head. “And now it looks like the thugs are running things again.”

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The tragedy resonated with irony in most parts of this city. But here, in the neighborhood, it rang with dissonant notes.

I have friends who live a block from the bar where Barron was shot. We met for lunch nearby Wednesday, and I was surprised by their reaction:

They felt more embarrassed than scared.

The killing muddies the image of a place where they’ve lived for 30 years, where a middle-aged woman still feels safe walking alone to her church or her yoga class, and her two sons, now college grads, kick back at the Oki Dog over late-night snacks.

But there’s a real struggle here. This is a community still up for grabs -- people who have begun to take pride in clean streets and safe gathering spots and are flexing their power against bold young toughs.

My friends were headed out to dinner Christmas Eve when they spotted a group of kids tagging a building. They yelled at the teenagers from their car. The kids scattered. Skirmish averted. Or maybe just postponed.

A neighbor who confronted teenagers tagging a palm trunk on his lawn awoke the next morning to find expletives spray-painted across the front of his house.

They live just south of Pico, the dividing line between the neighborhood called Mid-City and the more prosperous Mid-Wilshire. They remember the riots in 1992, when the LAPD stationed a phalanx of officers to make sure that the looting and burning stopped its northern march at the boulevard.

That’s faded history to the area’s newcomers. Young people -- many of them white in a neighborhood that’s mostly black and Latino -- are moving into the hills on the north side of the street, drawn by elegant old homes at affordable prices. Following behind are new restaurants and boutiques launched by investors willing to look past the auto body shops and liquor stores to imagine a sort of Melrose vibe.

Like Carmen Salindong, who opened La Maison du Pain with her sister four years ago. The French bakery at Pico and Ridgeley Drive has graceful iron latticework instead of burglar bars and bistro tables arrayed on the sidewalk.

Salindong has been known to collar taggers -- grabbing one teenager by the ear, running off a group painting the shop next door. When she saw a crew defacing the billboard that fronts her shop, she tailed the group right to one boy’s doorstep, called the police, then went back later and confronted his mother.

She bristles at advice from police that she leave taggers alone. “Do you think I’m not afraid?” she said Wednesday as we talked about Barron’s death. “I am. But if I’m not going to be in charge of my home, I might as well just move on.

“We’re working hard to clean up the boulevard,” Salindong said. “Now we’re in the news, like: ‘Pico Boulevard is so dangerous.’ ”

They just want to be able to walk to church, push their baby strollers on the street, walk their dogs at night and ride their bikes.

“And we don’t want to move to Pomona or somewhere else to be able to do that... .. This is our ‘hood too.”

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You can take the measure of a neighborhood by its statistics, and crime is an unforgiving one: 14 killings took place in the last three years within one mile of the site of Barron’s death.

But how do you quantify a community’s spirit? Last year, volunteers with the Pico Neighborhood Council spent more than 600 hours painting, cleaning, planting, sprucing up the neighborhood’s streets and schools.

What I saw when I walked Pico -- from the tony Westside edge of Wilshire Vista Heights to the grittier Pico del Mar -- speaks to an evolution occurring in fits and starts. A grungy auto body shop shuts down, and in its place a preschool blooms behind sunshine-yellow walls and barbed-wire-topped gates, now painted bright blue.

A candle shop fails, but the owner doesn’t give up. It will reopen as a salon for writers’ workshops next month. A Cuban restaurant couldn’t be saved by cha-cha lessons but is making its mark now as a sports bar.

I imagine it’s not an easy road in a neighborhood where the lone community center sits across the street from a marijuana dispensary. The Whole Body Gallery, on the edge of the Pico strip that rises toward prosperity, offers “nutrition, fitness classes, art, healing and gifts.” At the other end of the strip, near the Cottage Bar, the production at Theatre Theater is Tennessee Williams’ “Orpheus Descending.”

sandy.banks@latimes.com

Starting next week, Sandy’s column will appear on Tuesdays and Saturdays.