Boyle Heights

Guisados Location: 2100 César Chávez Ave., Los Angeles; (323) 264-7201. Price: Tacos, $2.50; taco sampler, $6.50; tamales, $1.50 or 12 for $18. Details: Open 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday to Saturday and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. Street parking. Credit cards accepted.

Dragons, graffiti, cartoon heroes. Gajin Fujita is known for mixing Japanese art with L.A. street and pop culture in paintings fueled by his eclectic imagination and experiences as a Japanese American from Boyle Heights. The Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena is spotlighting a major influence on these East-meets-Eastside creations: Fujita's passion for ukiyo-e , the woodblock prints that flourished in 17th- to 19th-century Japan. "Gajin Fujita: Ukiyo-e in Contemporary Painting," which opened in April, is what curator Bridget Bray calls "a focused solo exhibition of five pieces in which you see parallels to the print tradition such as dynamic compositions, martial figures, attention to surface detail and dramatization of the natural and supernatural worlds.

The old man with the Santa Claus beard pulled a black yarmulke from the trunk of his Cadillac and limped across the street. Hundreds of people had gathered outside an old synagogue in Boyle Heights for a program that looked back at the days when the neighborhood -- now overwhelmingly Latino and Catholic -- was the center of Jewish life in Los Angeles. Leaning heavily on a cane, Eddie Goldstein, 76, wandered aimlessly, as if lost in thought. Finding a friend, he locked arms with her and walked into the long-shuttered Breed Street Shul.

The civil unrest that devastated Los Angeles in spring 1992 and lighted a fire under the city's police department and political establishment also sounded an alarm to L.A.'s major cultural institutions: They needed to diversify their programming, expand their audiences, and step up their outreach efforts toward a population undergoing rapid demographic change. Over the past 20 years, institutions such as LACMA, the L.A. Phil, the Getty and L.A. Opera have attempted to attract larger audiences, particularly younger ones, from the region's growing Mexican American, Central American, Asian American and other ethnic-minority populations.

As a teenager growing up in the 70-acre Wyvernwood Garden Apartments in Boyle Heights, Jesus Hermosillo knew that life could be scary within its Depression-era buildings and vast lawns capable of swallowing football fields. In the early 1990s, when gang killings peaked in Los Angeles, even the intrepid pizza delivery guy wouldn't step into Wyvernwood, Hermosillo said. "We had to give the address of a place across the street on 8th Street, and go wait for the pizza in front of someone else's house," he recalled.

Bill Phillips' name doesn't often show up in histories of L.A.'s Eastside. But he, as much as anyone, helped foster its cultural renaissance. From a storefront on the old Brooklyn Avenue, he sold guitars, violins and assorted other instruments, giving out free lessons on just about anything that could make music. He stocked a cabinet with saxophone reeds and rented out amplifiers that boomed at many a backyard party and social-hall concert. Phillips' customers, in turn, provided the soundtrack to the social and cultural transformations that defined the Eastside in the 1960s, '70s and beyond.

On a sunny Sunday when men with 10-gallon vaquero hats mingled with men wearing yarmulkes, Sonny Estrada, his wife Susan Miller and their 9-year-old daughter Eliana stepped into the aging synagogue in Boyle Heights as unwitting symbols. The Mexican-American-Jewish family was celebrating the 61st anniversary of Israel's independence outside the Breed Street Shul -- while also honoring Jewish and Latino bonds in a part of town that once was home to the largest Jewish community outside New York.

When Margaret Fujioka was taken to a remote desert internment camp after Japan's 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Jesus and Carmen Garcia stepped up as faithful neighbors to guard her home. The immigrants from Mexico couldn't always fully communicate with Fujioka's parents from Japan, but their fast friendship transcended cultural differences. And when the war ended and Fujioka returned, Jewish neighbor Jane Leighton offered her a house-cleaning job. Other Japanese Americans encountered deep hostility in other parts of the city as they tried to reassemble their shattered lives.

First, a brand new high school. Now, a new police station. Change is coming to Boyle Heights, and the neighborhood and police threw a party Saturday night to celebrate the arrival of the luminous police station, a $31-million, state-of-the-art building at 2111 E. 1st St. Hundreds of residents joined Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and LAPD Chief William J. Bratton for the dedication. A mariachi band played. Old police cars were parked out front. And people lined up for tours.

Nobody walks in L.A.? Ridiculous! A gentle, flat walk in an urban setting, this is an East L.A. oasis in the midst of historic Boyle Heights, filled with old city history and fine downtown views. It's a popular weekend destination for local families for Saturday strolling or Sunday picnicking. THE STATS Distance: 2.5 miles Duration: 1 hour Difficulty: 2 (out of 5) Transit details: Metro Gold Line, Mariachi Plaza stop. Metro bus No. 620, Local No. 30. Free street parking.

In a case that heightened long-simmering tensions between Los Angeles police and residents of one of the city's most troubled housing projects, a federal jury has awarded $3.2 million to the survivors of a Ramona Gardens man who died after an altercation with officers. The civil judgment in the wrongful-death case, reached Monday, comes five years after 31-year-old Mauricio Cornejo, a wanted parolee described by police as a known gang member, was pronounced dead in a holding cell at the Hollenbeck police station.

Bill Phillips' name doesn't often show up in histories of L.A.'s Eastside. But he, as much as anyone, helped foster its cultural renaissance. From a storefront on the old Brooklyn Avenue, he sold guitars, violins and assorted other instruments, giving out free lessons on just about anything that could make music. He stocked a cabinet with saxophone reeds and rented out amplifiers that boomed at many a backyard party and social-hall concert. Phillips' customers, in turn, provided the soundtrack to the social and cultural transformations that defined the Eastside in the 1960s, '70s and beyond.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa opened for hip-hop musician will.i.am at the Mendez Learning Center on Monday to announce Los Angeles will join in an Obama administration program to boost the number and diversity of American students studying in China. "Who wants to go to China?" the mayor asked as he stepped to the podium, sparking a quiet reaction from about 100 students who are learning Mandarin. "Aw, man, I can't hear you. Boyle Heights in China, right?" Los Angeles is the third city to participate in the 100,000 Strong Initiative, which was launched last year and is supported by donations.

In its previous lives, the sprawling Boyle Heights building now occupied by Josefina López's Casa 0101 theater was a boxing gym, a sewing factory, a Buddhist temple and a U.S. post office branch. So when the Los Angeles actor, playwright, screenwriter ("Real Women Have Curves") and novelist ("Hungry Woman in Paris") moved her company from its old location a half-block away to its new home near the corner of 1st and St. Louis streets, she hired a woman to drive out any nettlesome spirits that might be lurking.

Step into the Libros Schmibros bookstore and lending library and you are, in a sense, stepping inside David Kipen's brain. The books that started the Boyle Heights store last year come from Kipen's personal collection of 7,000 or so used volumes, built over a lifetime of loving good literature. It's hard to find a bad book in the stacks. These days, however, Kipen's brain has been split in half, so to speak, between the Westside and Eastside of L.A.: A big chunk of the Libros collection has been shipped to Westwood.

Notably absent from the research done by Moira Kenney and the youth of the Benjamin Franklin Branch Library ("Pride of Place," July 15) was the significant African American presence in Boyle Heights since the 1920s. My mother's family came to the Heights in 1923 and she was born there in 1929. My paternal grandmother came to Boyle Heights during World War II, finding work at Union Station. The African American community in Boyle Heights centered on Michigan and Pennsylvania avenues, although African Americans lived throughout the Boyle Heights community.

Boyle Heights kids used to hang out there by the hour, testing the marimbas and eyeing the Fender guitars. Louie Perez and David Hidalgo of Los Lobos were among the future stars who'd drop by. English, Japanese and Spanish harmonized in a background chorus of chatter. Payment was accepted in pesos. And no matter how long you stayed, or how much money you had, or didn't, no one ever told you to beat it. From the late 1930s through the 1980s, Phillips Music Co. wasn't simply a place to buy instruments and check out the latest vinyl offerings in Latin jazz, classical, rock, Cuban mambo and Yiddish swing.

That the world regards Los Angeles as a very quirky place is a given. But when the world starts thumbing through the recently published third edition of "Museum Companion to Los Angeles," Borislav Stanic's exhaustive guide to every collection of art, artifacts and vehicles, every historic site, aquarium, botanical garden and zoo he's been able to uncover in Los Angeles County, the world may well conclude that it didn't know the half of it. ...