For years, Ponderosa Park was both a stronghold of the neighborhood street gang and a magnet for its enemies. Rivals knew the park would be teeming with targets, so they came hunting.
Just yards from the Anaheim park's playground, members of the Boys From the Hood gang -- which also calls itself BFTH or Varrio Boys -- were standing together after dark in February 2005 when a carload of rivals blasted a teenage member in the face with a shotgun.
That May, a gunman from another rival gang pumped a bullet point-blank into the chest of a Varrio Boy, even as dozens of children played nearby after school.
And the following January, a Varrio Boy rushed to retrieve a handgun hidden in the wheel well of a nearby van after still another rival gang opened fire.
No one died in the shootings, but they reinforced what had been obvious to people who had been visiting the Haster Street park for years: day or night, they might be caught in the war zone.
These days, the gang's monikers still glare from the community center, scratched into the glass around the entrance.
But four months after a judge prohibited the gang from assembling anywhere in a 1.6-square-mile "safety zone" that includes the park and the Wakefield neighborhood, the tattooed young men who used to lurk here in packs are largely gone.
"It's a little calmer," said Elizabeth Ramon, 34, watching her three children play on the park's jungle gym recently. She doesn't know why the gangsters seem to have vanished, only that she feels better about coming.
Still, after living in the neighborhood for 11 years, it's not easy to abandon her guard. Up there on the corner, she said, gangsters once robbed her cousin. "I still feel insecure."
The park's transformation reflects a wider shift in the neighborhood since November, when Anaheim police received a judge's OK to slap about 90 members of Boys From the Hood with fat, 600-page civil injunctions prohibiting them from assembling in the zone, staying out past 10 p.m., drinking in public, or wearing gang attire. The gang favors Dallas Cowboys regalia.
With the injunction in effect, Anaheim police say that for the first two months of 2007, felony assaults are down 50% in the zone, compared to the same period the year before. Stolen vehicle cases dropped 73%, while reports of shots fired declined 75%.
