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%.
Gang-related calls for service, however, have jumped 72% -- a sign, police and prosecutors say, of the neighborhood's newly emboldened attitude toward gangs in their midst. Apartment owners and security guards have been trained to call if they see two or more gang-bangers together.
Serving the gang members with the injunctions has resulted in 15 arrests, and in some cases already, convictions.
Jesus Hernandez Salinas, who was already facing three felony probation violations, pleaded guilty to loitering with other gangsters in the safety zone and received 16 months in state prison.
Orange County Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas hails the plan as a success, at least so far.
Saturday, he joined Anaheim police and city leaders for a Family Festival Day at Ponderosa Park to celebrate wresting the park from the gang's hands and returning it to the people. "This territory is ours," he said, but added: "Gang members are very persistent. Every time you start lightening up the pressure, they start popping up again."
Anaheim Police Chief John Welter spoke cautiously. "Today, it's the safest park in the city. Next week, it's still a question," he said. "There will be a time when new gang members will fill the void."
The 9-acre park is well-maintained, with a lighted baseball field, volleyball court and a large playground. It is, in many ways, the center of a neighborhood of close-packed, low-rent apartments and small houses where open public space is otherwise scarce.
"Right now there are a lot of babies, a lot of families coming," said Rodolfo Salgado, 25, who carried his infant daughter at the park Saturday. Not long ago, he said, gangsters hung out here and drank beer. Fear kept him and his family confined to their apartment down the block.
"We didn't go out," he said.
Anaheim police say that in a city with some 20 gangs and 2,000 gang members, Boys From the Hood was the most active, extorting from food vendors, stealing cars, and terrorizing those who dared to testify against them. In February 2006, police say, a handful of members raped a woman in a motel bathroom, apparently in retaliation for her friend's testimony against the gang. And last June, an innocent bystander, 22-year-old Wilman Arellano, came outside to buy a tamale and was killed when a rival gang tried to gun down a Varrio Boy.
The Wakefield neighborhood sits in the shadow of the Crystal Cathedral, whose tower can be seen over the rooftops.
Disneyland lies only a few blocks away.
The neighborhood contains signs of the gang's abiding presence, such as graffiti monikers scrawled on alley walls. But the gang members themselves, these days, are harder to spot.
