Pacific Avenue

As city animal control officers see it, it's a simple case of illegal sheep. "It's a routine complaint," says Lt. Tim Goffa. "He's maintaining sheep (too close) to the neighborhood dwellings." But in San Pedro, where residents are up in arms over rampant apartment construction, the battle between the city of Los Angeles and developer Art Corona is more complex than that.

Jantina Hoyt picked out sugar, cigarettes and soap from the shelves, then braved a long line at the checkout counter. Hoyt, 72, did not seem to mind the wait, even though the counter next to her was closed and bright red signs swinging from the ceiling informed patrons that all cash registers would be open during rush hours. What bothered her was the fact that on Monday the Vons supermarket will close permanently.

On Saturday afternoon, March 18, approximately 300 San Pedro residents came together at Peck Park auditorium. For 300 San Pedro residents to gather on such a lovely springlike day, the reason had to be important. It was, for today San Pedro has a crisis brewing. The crisis is a building industry that has gone crazy. Anyone who has to travel on Pacific Avenue or Gaffey Street in the mornings and early evenings or wants to park his car in front of his residence knows what I am writing about.

The city of Los Angeles on Thursday ordered a builder to completely cover deep holes drilled for foundation pilings at a construction site for a two-story house in San Pedro. The open work site at 525 Shepard St., near Pacific Avenue, must either be fenced or 24 holes must be covered at night, said Alexander Bruce, manager of the San Pedro branch of the Department of Building and Safety. The order was issued to the home's builder, Atul Jain, who lists a post office box in Westchester on permit applications, Bruce said Thursday.

I read with interest your March 29 editorial "Natural Tests of Judgment." As the president of a homeowners association whose units were significantly impacted by a hillside failure on Dec. 6, I have made many surprising discoveries in the last four months. In 1993 I bought a townhouse in a new 16-unit complex on a hillside in Costa Mesa. I accept that with the well-publicized disasters California has suffered I knew there was some risk in buying a house on a hill. However, I believe that when buying a property, a consumer has the right to assume that city officials have insisted that developers follow city laws and that they have enforced their own building codes and regulations.

City officials thwarted a neighborhood's effort to block off one of its streets from traffic Tuesday, telling an audience of more than 350 residents that officials must first review the city's other traffic projects. Members of the Los Cerritos Improvement Assn. had hoped the city would begin studying its request to shut down Pacific Avenue at the San Diego Freeway (405) underpass, just north of Wardlow Road.

When the City of Glendale replaced old-fashioned cast-iron lampposts along Colorado Street with sleek 40-foot-high aluminium poles and bright sodium lights, it created "one of the least-attractive streets in Glendale," according to the Glendale Historical Society. In a report submitted to the City Council, the society charged that the installation of new light standards throughout the city is destroying the "character of neighborhoods and historical districts."

Union Pacific Avenue--a wide, quiet and normally deserted industrial street in Boyle Heights--would seem an unlikely place for one of the city's biggest cruising hot spots to develop. But locals say hundreds of cruisers with sporty cars and boom boxes blaring have turned a quarter-mile stretch of the brick-walled and barbed-wire lined street into a fearsome block party of yelling, drinking and the sound of gunfire.

The house being built in Long Beach will not be the Boys Town that Bob Sullivan remembers. When "Sully" first arrived at Father Edward J. Flannigan's sprawling home for boys outside Omaha, Neb., it was 1947 and regimentation was the key word in controlling youngsters. Sullivan was 9 years old, and he did not like it. So he stole Flannigan's new Chrysler and went to town. "After they brought me back, Father Flannigan sat me down and asked me why I did it," Sullivan remembers.

ORANGE COUNTY SHERIFF'S DEPARTMENT (*55 unsolved murders in unincorporated areas) Dorothy Gale Brown, age 11, July 3, 1962 The girl's nude body was found in the ocean about 200 yards offshore, just south of Cameo Shores near Corona del Mar. The cause of death was listed as asphyxia due to drowning. The victim had last been seen alive July 3, riding her bicycle near her home in Torrance. She was found the next day by a diver, who brought her body ashore with the help of another diver.