Community Relations

Satoru Uyeda has lived through Little Tokyo's shifting fortunes for six decades. In the 1940s, the removal of Japanese Americans from the entire West Coast after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor emptied out Little Tokyo. But when the war was over, his father opened the S.K. Uyeda Department Store on 1st Street to sell bedding, clothes, kitchen supplies and other goods needed for returning families. Eventually, the community rebounded. In the 1950s, the city took a key block away from Little Tokyo for the Parker Center police headquarters.

The telephone rang shortly after 8 a.m. on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend. The caller was a friend of my son's who said he needed to speak to him. "It's important," he said. I carried the phone into James' bedroom and shook him awake. "Joe?" he said into the telephone. "Joe who?" The call lasted only a couple of minutes, and my son looked up at me, dazed. He said Joe Loudon had attended a party the night before, drank some alcohol and was dead. Patrick "P.J." Gabrielli, then a high school junior who hosted the party, was in jail.

When the Larchmont Bungalow opened a couple of weeks ago, the "Artisan Cafe, Bakery and Brew" coffeehouse seemed a perfect fit for the tony neighborhood, with its exposed wooden beams, reconditioned hardwood floors and roasting coffee wafting through the airy space. But there was just one problem -- and it had everything to do with the chairs and tables where patrons sat, drank coffee and noshed on offerings such as red velvet pancakes and jerk chicken sliders. Those chairs and tables, contended a group of residents, threatened the very fabric of Larchmont Village because they transformed what had been permitted as a takeout restaurant into something vastly different.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In a sign of challenging economic times, UCLA has put on hold indefinitely plans to open a second campus of its experimental laboratory school, a project that had been touted as a major effort to expand its mission to low-income communities beyond Westwood. The UCLA Lab School had planned to open classrooms in South Los Angeles or the Pico-Union district near downtown, bringing its research-based programs directly to areas of poverty and low expectations. It was to be a new educational model, the first of two or three other campuses that would reach into Los Angeles' urban neighborhoods.

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.

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.