Gentrification

As Danny Hoch ambles through Echo Park, a familiar sight catches his eye. Although he's far from his home in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn, Hoch instantly recognizes the telltale signs of approaching urban Armageddon: pasty-faced guys in porkpie hats, prowling for overpriced espressos; pierced and tattooed young women pushing strollers; a vintage clothing store rubbing elbows with a Salvadoran pupuseria.

A decade ago, the stretch of downtown L.A.'s Main Street between 4th and 6th streets was a desolate collection of empty buildings and homeless encampments, an area where drug dealing was conducted in the open, and the only longtime residents lived in residential hotels. These days, that stretch resembles a bustling small-town main street. There's the neighborhood bookstore, where an attentive shopkeeper knows her customers by name.

For years, Orange County civic boosters have argued over where its "downtown" might be: Santa Ana's historic urban core? Costa Mesa's leafy arts complex? Anaheim's bustling Resort District? Now Santa Ana city officials are promoting a massive redevelopment plan they say should end the debate once and for all.

Check-in at the Cecil Hotel had to wait a few minutes because Kerri Torrance, the clerk working the graveyard shift one night in November, had to deal with a heist. A man staying on the 10th floor had called down to report that a woman had grabbed his money and bolted. After the woman dashed through the lobby and burst out the front doors onto Main Street, Torrance called police while a handful of guests waited. "She's right out there . . . you see . . . well . . .

It looked like trouble. Or maybe it looked like the stuff that dreams were made of. The street was dark and the lighting was eerie as the hard-boiled book publishers from New York gathered outside an old factory building in downtown Los Angeles. They eyed the crowd that had massed inside. Some of the dames looked like femme fatales; some of the guys looked like saps.

In the span of three hours Tuesday night, the 21 men and women who form the Greater Echo Park Elysian Neighborhood Council found the time to accuse one another, loudly and publicly, of "whining" and "bullying," of racism and reverse racism, of violating the separation of church and state, and of cultural insensitivity. Council President Jose Sigala was in dire need of a gavel, banging his pen on the table with increasing urgency while trying to shout down his out-of-order colleagues: "Mr.

The construction cranes that are roosting all over downtown these days are one thing. But the real hints that the neighborhood is changing come in more subtle forms -- such as the tours Derrick Moore has been giving around downtown recently.

LaVonne Spencer owns a beauty shop in a part of this tourist mecca that rarely sees out-of-towners -- or even people from other neighborhoods. For decades, Bayview-Hunters Point has been a social and economic outcast. The largely poor, minority area south of downtown is known for its high rates of violent crime and infant mortality -- and as a bleak industrial wasteland with 325 toxic sites awaiting cleanup.

Larchmont Village, the peaceable, walk-able stretch of small shops, eateries and caffeine emporiums that stitches together Hancock Park and Windsor Square, has come down with an ominous case of prosperity. The economic microbes that have been massing around it in recent years, as property values in that area of Los Angeles have shot skyward, are raising some residents' temperatures, and, especially, rents.

Broadway in downtown Los Angeles was long a symbol of the bustling city: site of the city's original shopping district, a boulevard for protest marches and the home of a rich confluence of movie palaces, once home to star-studded premieres and thousands of moviegoers nightly. The street's fortunes have ebbed and flowed along with most of downtown.