Community Relations

It's billed as the most exclusive new club in Los Angeles. But some neighbors in West Hollywood and Beverly Hills don't want the late-night carousing, traffic jams or paparazzi they fear will accompany the opening of the Los Angeles chapter of the decidedly British, members-only SoHo House. More than 80 residents have signed an appeal by the West Hollywood-Beverly Hills Neighborhood Assn. against allowing SoHo House to move into the top two floors of Luckman Plaza at 9200 Sunset Blvd.

Ronald Perkins and his neighbors were nearly outnumbered by the consultants and architects who showed up at the Jordan Downs community center. For three hours, they listened as a procession of planners depicted their home as an "island of poverty," and dissected it by "landscape character and typologies." But something puzzled Perkins as he studied the new homes that would replace their decrepit apartments. So when the tenants were asked for their opinions, he raised his hand: "How come I don't see no bars on the windows?"

Craby Joe's bar was known as a dive for cheap, bottom-shelf liquor and peeling faux-wood on downtown's South Main Street. It closed two years ago after it was made famous by author Charles Bukowski and infamous by former Los Angeles City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo, whose office called the place a magnet for "rock cocaine sales." If Craby Joe's reflected a troubled old downtown, a developer is proposing a bar at the site that would reflect the gentrified downtown of lofts, boutique hotels and night life.

Mention tigers to the residents of Indok Village and you elicit an immediate growl. The community of 300 families on the periphery of the Sariska Tiger Reserve says it has lost 20 cows and water buffalo in the last several months and 1,000 in a generation. For those living at subsistence level and measuring their wealth in hooves, that's seen as a pretty good reason to hate tigers -- and their protectors. "When the tigers attack our livestock, we're never compensated," said Buddhalal Meena, a farmer in his 40s dressed in a dirty undershirt, jabbing the air with a scythe to make a point.

Brush in hand, UCLA junior Jacob Castaneda was hard at work Tuesday, spreading a fresh coat of brown paint on the exterior of a classroom bungalow at Samuel Gompers Middle School. He was among an army of about 4,600 UCLA volunteers who came to the South Los Angeles campus and seven other spots around the region for a day of community service. "It's always nice to reach out to the community and it's always great to help out kids," said Castaneda, a Mid-City resident who recently transferred to UCLA from Santa Monica College.

The Los Angeles City Council voted Wednesday to approve a 12-story condominium building near the Beverly Center that had drawn fire for months from neighborhood activists and a nearby hotel. The unanimous vote will allow MCLV Properties LLC to demolish 84 apartments at the corner of 3rd Street and Wetherly Drive in the Beverly Grove neighborhood and build a 95-unit residential building. Opponents had included the Burton Way Foundation, a nonprofit group focused on the neighborhood near Beverly Center, and Burton Way Hotels, the owners of the nearby Four Seasons Hotel.

California transportation officials say that a new truck expressway is needed to handle an expected post-recession trade boom at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the nation's busiest seaport complex. But the neighborhood that has already borne the brunt of port pollution is setting up a legal roadblock to stop it. "There are at least 21 days to 28 days a year when the air is so bad here that we do not let the children go outside to play," said Elva Carrillo, who helps her husband, Alfred, run a small private school affiliated with his Apostolic Faith Church in Wilmington, just 750 feet from the proposed truck expressway.

Tucked in the middle of the San Gabriel Valley lies nine square miles of hilly land flanked by four freeways filled with motorists, most of them heading elsewhere. And that's the way many of the 32,000 residents in Walnut like it. As the outside world drives by, those who live here on the far edge of Los Angeles County see it as a hidden oasis with horse-friendly crosswalks, single-family homes and an open, rolling landscape. Clean and quiet, safe and serene -- Walnut, locals say, is the quintessential bedroom community.

They began arriving late Sunday morning, dozens of vans pulling up around the northeast corner of Echo Park Lake. Out came black trash bags overflowing with clothing. One woman spread a tarp on a strip of grass and neatly laid out children's clothes that she hoped to sell for 25 or 50 cents each. By 11 a.m., the merchants had turned Echo Park into a virtual swap meet. They displayed used clothing, VHS videos, toy trucks, dolls and baseball bats on each side of the sidewalk. One man displayed dozens of Hot Wheels.

The great sewer wars of Malibu have finally drawn to a close. Sewers won. The Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board agreed late Thursday to ban septic systems in central and eastern Malibu, a move that would end years of fierce debate over the wastewater devices still commonly used in one of Southern California's most picturesque and exclusive coastal communities. New septic systems will not be permitted in Malibu and owners of existing systems will have to halt wastewater discharges within a decade.