STOCKTON — Fifteen years ago, tiny Gleason Park told the story of this hard-luck Central Valley town: It teemed with hoodlums, hookers and crack dealers.
The city had battled to rid the park of its criminals but failed and ultimately gave up. For years, thugs and addicts freely shot, stabbed and robbed each other, blocks from the Police Department and City Hall. Nearby, pensioners huddled in houses they couldn't hope to sell.
Today, the criminals are gone. The city has razed the park's bathrooms, basketball court and benches, and plans to build a school and affordable housing in their place.
Gleason Park is one sign that a new attitude, like a sheriff with a tin star, has come to Stockton.
As the Central Valley grows away from agriculture into the state's next big population center, many farm towns are losing some of their rough edges. Stockton, a long-disparaged but once-vibrant city, is at the vanguard of the transformation.
Working-class Stockton (population 279,000) has California's highest crime rate and a long way to go. But if it once exemplified how a city could be overwhelmed by crack and gangs, defeatism and grime, it is now a case study in how small victories over blight, decay and criminality can refurbish a municipal image.
The city applied the "broken windows" theory, championed by Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton first in New York and then in L.A.: Clean up the minor blight -- broken windows, abandoned cars, graffiti-scarred walls -- and more serious issues of crime and decay will start to fade.
Stockton's homicides have dropped from 62 in 1990 to 41 last year, though the city grew by 70,000 residents. The overall crime rate dropped about 25%.
But most important, residents say, the feel of the city has swung from limp pessimism to the aggressive confidence of the city's early days.
Stockton has bet $126 million of taxpayer money on what officials believe is California's largest redevelopment project: a 5,000-seat baseball stadium and a 10,000-seat hockey, soccer and concert arena along the long-neglected delta waterfront. A Sheraton hotel and condominiums are under construction.
"It's absolutely amazing that Stockton is moving forward given the social challenges arrayed against it," said Robert Benedetti, a political science professor at the University of the Pacific in Stockton who has spent years studying the town and teaches a class on its politics.
