Long Beach Ca

Smarting from disturbances caused by rowdy bar patrons, a fashionable enclave in eastern Long Beach has become engulfed in a squabble between homeowners and business leaders over how to control the summer onslaught of customers who represent an economic benefit to the community and the city. The Belmont Shore Residents Assn.

Denis came to the meeting in the community clubhouse with a four-page statistical analysis. Howard came with a cocktail. Perhaps it was inevitable that they would eventually get testy with each other. "Are you going to overtalk me, or am I going to overtalk you?" Howard said at one point, as neither would yield as they reacted to a woman's comment. "Well, I guess you're going to overtalk me," Denis said, adding, "I'm still going to take five minutes when she's done." "You can take 10," said yet another person in the crowd.

After a day's work cleaning one hotel room after another, Maria Valdivia says she's often too fatigued to play with her three children once she gets home. "It pains me to tell my kids I don't have time for them," said Valdivia, a housekeeper at the Hyatt Regency in Long Beach. "But sometimes I'm so tired and so achy that I'm just worn out." Valdivia was among the hundreds of hotel workers and labor activists who took to the streets of Long Beach last week to launch a national campaign dubbed Hope for Housekeepers, designed to spotlight what union leaders call substandard working conditions at Hyatt hotels nationwide.

Riding her bike throughout Long Beach, Carol Hillis became a frequent sight for residents. She was a local teacher for 25 years, subbing the last six, and she was an avid runner and cyclist. She would cycle along the San Gabriel River, through her Long Beach neighborhood and at El Dorado East Regional Park. When she died of cancer this summer at 61, nearly 700 people came to El Dorado -- where Hillis had spent so much of her time -- to celebrate her life. The Hillises chose El Dorado park because it was central to their community and it was accommodating.

Long Beach City Councilman Dee Andrews cast a loud, drawn-out groan before describing what the Henderson Avenue neighborhood used to look like. "Henderson was just a bad, I mean, bad, bad street," he said. "That's where everybody came to pick up their drugs." Just a few years ago, two adjacent apartment complexes on the 1900 block of Henderson were havens for drug dealers and prostitutes, according to city officials. Neighbors were leery of leaving their homes, and the complexes drew a high number of police calls.

Sithea San rejoiced when Long Beach officials designated a strip of Anaheim Street the nation's first Cambodia Town in 2007. The name would celebrate the largest Cambodian population center in the country and help revitalize the gritty neighborhood, she believed. San envisioned one day looking down Anaheim Street and seeing facades resembling ornate Cambodian temples; a large-scale shopping center where tourists could sample Cambodian cuisine and buy handcrafts; and even a museum outlining the history of Cambodian Americans in Long Beach.

UCLA in the Rose Bowl: Jerry Crowe's column in Monday's Sports section on UCLA's plan in the 1960s to build an on-campus football stadium said that in 1966 UCLA upset top-ranked Michigan State in the Bruins' fourth trip to the Rose Bowl game. It was UCLA's sixth trip to the bowl game after having lost the previous five times.

TrizecHahn Corp., a large Toronto-based, publicly held real estate company that has been aggressively buying downtown office buildings across the United States, is making a move on the heart of Long Beach. Last week TrizecHahn bought one of Long Beach's premier office towers, Landmark Square, for $86 million from a partnership including broker John Cushman, co-founder of Los Angeles-based Cushman Realty Corp.

In a show of community spirit, the Junior League of Long Beach has donated the staff, money and materials to build a "portable garden" for Volunteers of America, which provides low-cost meals to the elderly of Long Beach. "The goal of the garden is to beautify the neighborhood," said Donna Skinner, director of senior services at Volunteers of America in Long Beach. It also gives the cooks and helpers an opportunity to get out of the kitchens and into the community, she said.

About 3,400 corn and soybean growers from more than 35 states are at the Long Beach Convention Center learning about some of the industry's rapidly changing tricks of the trade. At the third annual Commodity Classic, which ends today, farmers are learning about new insect-resistant seeds, satellite technology to improve crop production and a wide array of computer programs.