Everything in L.A. is Fine.
ESPECIALLY MACARTHUR PARK METRO STATION
Last month I went down to MacArthur Park with a photographer for a story about streetlight outages and copper wire theft. In Westlake, on the outskirts of downtown, the 35-acre park dates from the late 19th century, but at least since the 1980s it’s been a carnival of crime, drugs and gang wars – with a murky lake at the center known for the bodies and handguns that turn up when they drain it. A long way from the “Champs Élysées of Los Angeles,” as it had apparently been known in the early 20th Century.
Donna Summer did a disco version of “MacArthur Park,” written by Jimmy Webb, in a gentler time when “old men playing Chinese checkers” was still the main recreational activity. But when I drive down Alvarado Street, through Echo Park and Westlake, I always think of “Carmelita,” by Warren Zevon. (Everyone from GG Allin to Linda Ronstadt covered it, but the best version will always be Dwight Yoakam’s with accordionist Flaco Jimenez).
Well I pawned my Smith & Wesson / And went down to meet my man / He hangs out down on Alvarado Street / By the Pioneer Chicken stand
Carmelita, hold me tighter / Yeah I think I’m sinkin down /And I’m all strung out on heroin / On the outskirts of town
That Pioneer Chicken stand is now an El Pollo Loco. If you follow Alvarado south from there you’ll hit MacArthur Park. The relative halcyon days of heroin and crack are long gone, replaced by 24-hour open-air fentanyl and meth. All in spitting distance of playgrounds and schools. In 2022, this area had more deadly overdoses than any other zip code in L.A. County. Cops say they can’t do anything; most arrests for dealing only result in citations and without a stay-away order, dealers come right back. And unlike the old days, most street level dealers these days are also users.
I asked my friend (and former editor at the Pasadena Star-News) – Frank Girardot, the best crime writer you will read– what he remembered about this well-worn lore. I told him I’d driven eight long blocks from Temple to 7th Street in complete darkness, not a single working light, and he said it reminded him of the late 80s and 90s when it first became a zombie town. What was it like then?
In the 80s you could buy fake ID at Alvarado and 7th. And Langers just down the block. Hookers worked Wilshire on the K-town side and the public restrooms in the park were gay cruising spots. Pretty sure there were some corner boys up on 6th slinging rock too… Lots of murders in ‘89 and ‘90.
Lots of murders. In the early 1990s LAPD’s notorious Rampart Division, which now covers a dense 5.5-mile territory, had one of the highest homicide rates in the city, hitting 138 in 1992. Gang violence cooled, but there are new problems.
Langers is still there, slinging pastrami and blintzes in the middle of it all.
When we got to the park, where someone had recently felled a bronze sculpture for scrap, my photographer was less interested in the lights. He dragged me down into the Metro Station. The Red Line.
I wrote this later that day as if I’d dreamed it:
All around the station, dozens of people are swimming in their own seas, at once aimless and furiously intent. Some yell at interlocutors, real or imagined. Someone asks where the elevator is. A woman with dyed black hair, weathered skin and faded tattoos points behind us and says, ‘It’s filthy! But what did you expect? It’s MacArthur Park.” Soon she’s crouching down with a cluster of people against the entrance gate, fishing in her bag.
At the top of the stairs an emaciated girl with close-cropped hair leans against the rails, her arms and legs covered in sores. She is one of many, but something about the shape of her follows you past the gates. We descend into a cloud of flies. To the left, men hauling carts piled with debris stumble from the elevator. We walk through a tunnel, glimmering with Aegean-blue tiles.
You needn’t pay to enter the gates of hell. The turnstiles are thrown open.
A tinkling of classical music gets louder, but still sounds smothered. Experts decided playing this music would deter things, like sleeping or dying. Dirty needles pepper streams of detritus lining the train tracks. Metro “ambassadors,” young girls weighted down with every kind of device except one that might protect them from this place, are there to help. Two police officers move toward a gate that leads to a dark tunnel and peer over. They abandon it, head the other direction, neither hurried nor relaxed.
My companion says to keep moving, and a thick wind of subway air blows over us. There are mostly men here, slinking or holding still, ready as cats. A train stops and a few people filter in and out. The doors stay open on a still life: a large bottle of liquid surrounded by used napkins or toilet paper. Let’s decide it’s napkins. A picnic. The doors close and the train moves.
We move on too, suffocating on the subterranean air. Finally back up, through the stench of urine and the cloud of flies, into a searing noon and the crush of vendors and addicts, trailing carts and strollers and hapless blue-eyed puppies on a rope.
In the sprawling park across the street, people are strewn about the concrete, dreaming under shadows cast by tall palm trees. On benches and grass, they pass squares of silver foil, fold in on themselves, dance as if suspended in aspic. There is a desiccated bird carcass, maybe a goose set on fire, or maybe it’s a palm frond. But something about it is animalistic and disturbing. Spinal, fractal, talismanic.
There are tiny fish in the swamp-thick waters of the lake, gasping at the surface.
On April 5 a 32-year-old man was struck and killed after falling on the tracks at MacArthur Park Station.
Ten days later, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass’s State of the City address touted her administration’s milestones – including a new and improved Metro.
But by then a fresh wave of violence had already begun: In mid-April, a string of unhinged assaults on bus drivers, followed by the savage murder of a 66-year-old woman aboard the Red Line. Mirna Soza Arauz was returning home from working the graveyard shift as a security guard at a burger joint. A man who had already served time for assaulting a Metro passenger, and who had three arrests in the past four months, stabbed her in the throat with a pair of kitchen knives.
I wrote about the public safety crisis here.
Los Angeles is putting its bus drivers in shatter-proof glass cages. Metro quickly blamed the attacks on “the drug abuse epidemic and untreated mental illness crises,” at least naming what policymakers won’t. (Despite unaccounted billions spent on “homelessness,” the crisis has only worsened). Crime, broadly speaking, is largely decriminalized; felonies knocked down to misdemeanors, which the D.A. knocks down to nothing. Meanwhile, activists are still telling Metro to get rid of cops and replace them with unarmed ambassadors.
Most politicians continue to ignore material reality– the flesh-and-blood sacrifice, the abuelitas slaughtered at dawn– in favor of virtue signaling and social justice abstractions.
It’s an obvious perversity that the people who suffer the brunt of these failed policies are the urban poor and working classes who rely on public transit. They are expected to live with darkness, decay, chaos above and below.
The truth about MacArthur Park is that, before it became a civic gem in the late 1800s and early 1900s– home to genteel boat rides, exclusive clubs and well-to-do concerts– it was a dump. Literally a city dump. That gives me hope.
Everything is fine, really.
You can follow my reporting at The Epoch Times and California Insider. Or stay tuned for more dispatches here.
– B