Gated

Actress Kate Walsh has listed her Spanish-style estate in Los Feliz at $4,295,000. The gated house, built in 1929, retains original details such as an intricately tiled main hall and staircase, arched windows and passageways and stenciled beamed ceilings. But the two-story home has been updated to include a combined kitchen-family room, two walk-in closets in the master bedroom and upstairs laundry. Oversized living and formal dining rooms, a breakfast room, a den/media room, a wine room, five fireplaces and four en suite bedrooms fill nearly 6,000 square feet in the main house.

SAN FRANCISCO — It's been almost 40 years, so many athletes, too many names to remember, and yet lost in the numbing routine of one game after the next I suddenly find myself rooting for someone to really make it. And I almost never root for anyone, as you know, and yet here I am preparing to gush. Who wouldn't pull for a 6-year-old kid who learns his mother has been shot dead only to grow up into the kindest, most approachable and forgiving young man one might ever meet.

Twin 10-year-old boys who were found floating unconscious in a backyard pool in Panorama City were revived by bystanders Sunday afternoon, authorities said. The boys were attending a party on Burton Street when they went into the gated pool unnoticed by others, said Brian Humphrey, a Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman. Neither of the boys knew how to swim, he said. Partygoers pulled the boys out of the pool and administered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

A public meeting on wildlife preservation on the Palos Verdes Peninsula will be held at 7:30 p.m. Monday at the South Coast Botanic Gardens. Results of a Rolling Hills survey on residents' knowledge of and attitudes about wildlife preservation will be announced at the meeting at 26300 Crenshaw Blvd. The mail survey, which had a 40% response, was conducted by a Wildlife Preservation Committee appointed by the Rolling Hills City Council after some residents said increasing urbanization is driving away skunks, raccoons, foxes, opossums and other creatures.

In response to Howard Cohen, in "North Hills Expanding Before It's a Reality," who was quoted as saying: "We don't want to be associated with the apartment dwellers and gangbangers." What an elitist comment, equating apartment dwellers with gangbangers. It might surprise Cohen that apartment dwellers are nurses, teachers, postal workers, bus drivers, senior citizens, young adults, engineers, med students, planners, secretaries, et cetera et cetera and human beings. In other words, all those who don't have the money to buy a single-family home, which means the majority of people in Los Angeles County.

As a longtime admirer and user of the Pasadena Public Library, I find nothing quite as forlorn as the sight of our beautiful Central Library locked and gated on Mondays. Therefore, every Monday for the past six weeks, I've spent three or four hours sitting on the library front steps with a handmade sign lamenting the closure. I also have a pile of leaflets detailing the latest library budget cuts and losses, along with the addresses of the City Council, mayor and governor to whom other concerned citizens might write or call to protest these outrages.

Re "Loss of Vehicle Fees Could Drive Some Cities to Brink," Jan. 17: After reading about the plight of the cities of Calipatria, Laguna Woods and others, I must come to the following conclusion: Perhaps some cities should unincorporate. Does a city such as Calipatria -- with such a small population (3,500) and "little more than a grocery and hardware store" -- really need to be a city at all? It seems that this unnecessary level of bureaucracy exists only because the good citizens of the rest of the state have been paying for it through taxes on their vehicles -- on which they have already paid taxes at the time of purchase.

"Dirty Harry" soldiers of fortune described in your article may keep drug dealers and users out of tenement housing, but, as you note correctly, it's at the expense of a tragic loss of civil rights. Nor does it end the sale and use of drugs; it just moves the place for the action. We will never deal with this problem until we provide communities with effective police protection, and programs within each community for social and recreational outlets that provide alternative behavior patterns.

Re "In the thick of Prop. 8 fight," Dec. 21 We can only pray to whatever deity we believe in that Proposition 8 will be overturned and that Abel and Robbie Ferreira will continue to live in a gated community. Lucky for the rest of us that their views based on fairy tales such as the Garden of Eden and explicit knowledge of what "God hates" remain locked up tight and away from the general public. Kudos to them for sanctioning counseling for people who are struggling with the same-sex urges they were born with; very much like struggling against an elbow.