Macarthur Park

THERE'S a scruffy brick apartment building at the corner of 7th and South Park View streets in Westlake that hints at the history and possible future of the neighborhood. On the ground floor, a pharmacy and health clinic with signs in Spanish sit next door to an inexpensive Honduran restaurant.

In 2005, leaders of a gang that sold crack and other drugs near MacArthur Park decided to add a new business venture: extorting the vendors who crowd the streets each evening, selling clothes, pirated DVDs and electronics to supplement a hardscrabble existence. The new effort led to a bloody consequence in September 2007, when an 18-year-old tasked with gunning down a defiant vendor accidentally shot to death a 3-week-old infant. The baby's death triggered a large-scale crackdown on the clique that culminated with a two-month trial that began in March.

A 19-year-old man drowned Saturday after he chased a soccer ball into the lake at MacArthur Park, authorities said. "He jumped in to retrieve a soccer ball and got out too far," said Los Angeles police spokesman Don Cox. The victim was not identified. Onlookers, including the young man's brother, went in after him but couldn't find the body, Cox said. Four county lifeguards with scuba gear joined city park rangers and firefighters in the search, city fire spokesman Jim Wells said.

Los Angeles' civic argument over billboards covers many nuanced positions and attitudes, but stripped to the bare essentials, it often seems to come down to these two competing worldviews: One side sees Los Angeles as a city up for bid. It sees advertisers ready to cover every public space with garish billboards — lighted, digitized, turning every commute to work and every drive to the grocery store into a succession of pitches for movies, cut-rate...

The prayer in Spanish sounded like one from an ordinary Catholic Mass. But the man who led it wore a coyote-skin headdress and called himself the last of 13 generations of brujos -- witch doctors -- in his family. FOR THE RECORD: Santa Muerte: An article in Monday's Section A about followers of the sect of Santa Muerte misspelled the last name of Rick Nahmias, a photographer who has documented the movement, as Nahmais. — The name the worshipers invoked was not that of the Virgin Mary but of Santa Muerte, or "Holy Death," a Mexican folk saint linked to narcotics trafficking, a kind of female grim reaper with a skull for a face.

Thank you for your article ("A Park, Once Saved, Stumbles Again" by Jane Spiller, Nov. 4) about conditions in MacArthur Park. To one who has lived in the neighborhood for many years, this is an important topic. Less than 10 years ago, I used to walk to nearby Lafayette Park. There was a wonderful little public library in a charming brick building. I would check out a book or magazine and then sit in the shade of big trees reading, taking in the sights and just enjoying being out of doors.

Javier Prado marks his turf with a plastic folding chair. Ramon Alvarez guards a concrete bench. Efren Castellanos, the one they call La Hormiga ("the Ant"), brazenly goes wherever he pleases. He should, he argues. He's been here the longest. "Just let them try and tell me something," he says. "I've earned my spot." The Polaroid photographers of MacArthur Park are old-timers, the last of a dying breed. They've been sparring under the palm trees now for nearly 40 years.

Despite a massive police crackdown on drug dealing in MacArthur Park, you reported that on one recent afternoon "young men brazenly peddled bags of marijuana," and others openly offered crack cocaine for sale (Metro, June 25). Park problems are complicated by "scores of homeless people, runaways and other street people who are themselves either drug addicts or merely destitute." Later in the article you note that the area around the park is "the most densely populated in the city" and is "the entry point for poor immigrants from Central America," and that "60% of the drug arrests at or around the park are of Central Americans."

When Al Nodal, director of the Otis/Parsons Gallery, helped launch the MacArthur Park Public Art Program in late 1983, his aims were clear: "I want to alter the boring and formal art-in-the-plaza tradition to one with a social function, while changing the current bad image of the park. And I want to knit the community into the process with as much intimacy as possible."

Sept. 29, 1957: More than 100 musicians performed before a crowd of 6,000 as Los Angeles dedicated a new band shell at MacArthur Park. They played "music by Romberg, Schubert, Elgar, Verdi, Sousa and other composers," The Times reported. The "wood and plaster shell, 45 feet deep and 71 feet wide," was "set in a natural amphitheater" and cost $40,000, the newspaper said.

Bombino Where: Levitt Pavilion, Pasadena When: 8 p.m. Thursday Price: free Info: http://www.levittpavilionpasadena.org Where: Levitt Pavilion, MacArthur Park, L.A. When: 7 p.m. Friday Price: Free Info: http://www.levittla.org

Four years ago, Eddie Cota had a problem. The then-24-year-old concert promoter and booker was hired to take the musically staid Pasadena and energize its live music scene. This was an enormous undertaking for the new booker of Pasadena's Levitt Pavilion for the Performing Arts. The free summertime shows were a reliable local draw, but the bookings had begun to feel uninspired. Though he'd thrived at internships at Capitol Records, Interscope Records and several radio stations, the nonprofit entertainment world was new to Cota, and he had to quickly instantly grow competent in a range of genres.

Wilshire Boulevard, the most heavily used bus corridor in Los Angeles with lines running every couple of minutes and tens of thousands of passengers enduring lengthy and crowded rides, is about to get a facelift designed to bring riders some relief. To streamline and speed commutes from MacArthur Park to Centinela Avenue at the eastern edge of Santa Monica, the Los Angeles City Council voted Tuesday to construct bus-only lanes along 7.7 miles of that stretch. Officials estimate that it will shave 11 minutes off a nearly one-hour trip.

Los Angeles City Council members called on transit officials Wednesday to study a shorter bus lane project for Wilshire Boulevard, but they refused to officially support the 5.4-mile option, which would eliminate the Westside leg of the planned route. Council members voted 11 to 2 to add the alternative to an ongoing environmental review of a 7.7-mile busway system planned by the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Los Angeles Department of Transportation.

Bus-only lanes that would operate during rush hour on busy Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles were approved Thursday, but a mile-long section of the proposed project was eliminated to ease the concerns of Westwood residents. The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority board voted unanimously to build the $31.5-million bus rapid transit project, which includes 7.7 miles of bus lanes on both sides of the street between South Park View Street, which borders MacArthur Park near downtown, and Centinela Avenue on the Westside.

Bus commuters along congested Wilshire Boulevard have long dreamed of barreling along in their own special lane, unimpeded by automobiles and other vehicles. Come Dec. 9, they could get their wish as the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority board considers a $31.5-million proposal to designate bus-only lanes during morning and evening rush hours along 8.7 miles of the busy boulevard, the region's most heavily used transit corridor. The Bus Riders Union and other proponents tout the Wilshire "bus rapid transit" project as a boon to public health and the environment that would improve the reliability of service, shorten transit times and encourage more drivers to get out of their cars and take the bus. But high-rise residents of Westwood's "condo canyon" are pushing to exempt a nearly mile-long stretch of Wilshire between Comstock and Selby avenues because, they contend, the bus-only lane would cause huge backups for motorists in an area where traffic already moves smoothly.

Despite its tarnished image and ongoing face lift, MacArthur Park has been immortalized, for better or worse, in a song by the same name. But 100 years from now, will anyone know what life was like for the thousands who came from Central America to make their homes in the neighborhoods around the park? The answer is yes, thanks to a time capsule that is to be opened in 2093.

One week after the shooting death of Guatemalan day laborer Manuel Jamines, MacArthur Park was jumping Sunday, but not with protesters. It echoed instead with the sound of soccer players, fruit vendors and mariachi bands. The shooting, which occurred just blocks from the park, sparked days of angry protests and sporadic violence. By week's end the mood had cooled, or at least that was the case Sunday night during the conclusion of a 50-show summer concert series. However, even as Mariachi Reynas de Los Angeles serenaded families on the grass from Levitt Pavilion in honor of Mexican Independence Day on Thursday, the shooting wasn't far from some people's minds.

She poses for the camera in front of a boxy Dodge roadster, wearing a flapper-style hat, a fur stole and an uneasy smile. For weeks, detectives wondered about this mystery woman, believed to be the owner of a trunk discovered last month with the mummified remains of two babies inside. On Thursday, they identified the woman as Janet Mann Barrie, a Scottish-born nurse whose life story has only further deepened the intrigue. Of particular interest to detectives is her relationship with Dr. George Knapp, a dentist, and his wife, Mary, who lived in the MacArthur Park apartment building where the trunk was found.