9th District

Tuesday was supposed to mark the first City Council election in the 9th District in 27 years without Gilbert W. Lindsay in it. But six months after Lindsay died at 90, voters in what he liked to call "the Great 9th" were still measuring Lindsay's potential successors by the long shadow cast by the 5-foot, 3-inch totem of South-Central Los Angeles.

Los Angeles City Council candidate Bob Gay accepted a $10,000 international trip in 1987 from a Hong Kong businessman who was attempting to develop a huge hotel and office project in the 9th District, where Gay worked as an aide to then-Councilman Gil Lindsay, according to interviews and records. Gay said on Friday there was nothing improper about his acceptance of the trip, which he considered a gift from a personal friend, developer Howard Yeung.

Los Angeles City Council candidate Bob Gay accepted a $10,000 international trip in 1987 from a Hong Kong businessman who was attempting to develop a huge hotel and office project in the 9th District, where Gay worked as an aide to then-Councilman Gil Lindsay, according to interviews and records. Gay said on Friday there was nothing improper about his acceptance of the trip, which he considered a gift from a personal friend, developer Howard Yeung.

On the Sunday afternoon that I launched my campaign for the Los Angeles City Council, I was given a handwritten note by an area resident. Mr. Marshall didn't come to make a fuss, nor was he particularly interested in the festivities at my campaign headquarters. He was not, after all, a "political" person. Retired after 34 years as a city employee, he has lived in the 9th District for 45 years and was tired and frustrated by what he saw around him. His message was simple: Our streets are dirty, sidewalks broken, curbs unrepaired and alleys so filled with trash that passage is nearly impossible.

In a sometimes heated exchange, 9th District City Council candidates Rita Walters and Bob Gay on Saturday debated issues that centered on the need for better city services in the poorer parts of the district. About 70 people in Kinsey Auditorium in southwest Los Angeles listened to the candidates in the June 4 runoff election, which will determine the first new council representative in almost 30 years for the district, which includes downtown and parts of South-Central Los Angeles.

The candidates rarely mention his name, but three months after his death Gilbert W. Lindsay remains a central figure in the campaign for the Los Angeles City Council seat that he occupied for 27 years as the "emperor of the Great 9th District."

He got up from his bed in a doorway. He pushed his shopping cart filled with water bottles and three pairs of old shoes to a small office on Skid Row. There, Willie Ponder, 34, homeless and fresh out of jail, registered to vote. "I just got out of jail for a crime I did about 10 months ago--attempt to burn property," he said. "I was slightly intoxicated."

A federal judge on Thursday allowed Los Angeles school board member Rita Walters to run for the City Council seat of the late Gilbert Lindsay, overruling city officials who said she had not met a 30-day residency requirement. U.S. District Judge Robert M. Takasugi said the city residency requirement was unconstitutional in this case because it did not give Walters and other candidates enough time to move into Lindsay's 9th District and declare their candidacy after the councilman's death Dec.

For black people in Los Angeles, an era of political stability is ending. The funeral Friday of Gil Lindsay, the city's first black City Council member, along with the news that another black council mainstay, Robert Farrell, would not run for reelection have brought home the message that black politics in Los Angeles isn't what it used to be.

In 1963--at a time when the majority of black Americans were not allowed to vote--Gilbert W. Lindsay became the first black member of the Los Angeles City Council. His appointment represented a dramatic rise from his days of picking cotton in his native Mississippi and of scrubbing toilets in Los Angeles. The 90-year-old Lindsay died on Friday nearly four months after an incapacitating stroke left him paralyzed--and his 9th District without a voice on the council.