Watts Ca

It's an improbable place to find a home-building boom in the midst of Los Angeles' sluggish housing market. Yet only three blocks from the Imperial Courts public housing project, along a stretch of land once used as a neighborhood dump, 44 homes are rising in Watts within sight of its famous towers.

The Clippers, a fast and feisty basketball crew of 14- and 15-year-olds, were having a terrific year, bounding up and down their court at a Watts park, heading toward a city tournament. Then, on Feb. 22, their coach, Salim Dawson, 22, took a bullet in his heart and died on a Watts street corner, blocks from where his Clippers played. Rushing to take over the team was Marcus Tonodeo Jr., another 22-year-old with a tankful of youthful exuberance.

Aug. 13, 1965, proved to be the first day of the rest of a new life for Eric Priestley. That morning, the 21-year-old college athlete emerged from the Central Avenue pool hall where he was living to investigate what sounded like the far-off tinkle of wind chimes.

The disaster application center at the Watts Senior Citizen Center will close after Wednesday because too few people are using it, officials said. Traffic into the center has diminished rapidly; only three people were served Friday, said Ruth Austen, a spokeswoman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The center has served about 1,000 riot victims since it opened. Eight other disaster centers will remain open until July 15, Austen said.

Sporting broad smiles and clutching their morning newspapers, two men pushed open a pair of restaurant doors at 6:10 a.m. Monday and uttered words that have not been heard in this part of town for 27 years. "Two for breakfast, please. We'll take a no-smoking booth," said Carl Henderson as he and his friend Robert Edwards made history by being the first customers of the first large, family-style restaurant to open in Watts since the 1965 riots. The order of the day?

Watts and West Adams are two strikingly different neighborhoods, separated in physical terms by a few miles of freeway, but in human terms by a yawning gap in family income, property values and upward mobility. Life is upbeat in West Adams, an attractive mid-cities district of red-tiled Spanish homes and neat lawns. White-collar blacks and whites have been busy gentrifying the area since the early 1980s.

Eighty-five years after it was constructed, the once-deteriorating Watts train station was reborn Thursday. More than 100 people gathered at 103rd Street and Grandee Avenue to celebrate the grand reopening of the wood-frame structure, which will operate as a Department of Water and Power customer service office and a mini-museum of Watts history.

Many remembered her as a child of the Watts projects, a little girl called Dee Dee, a dynamo who was always running, never seemed to get tired and had a fierce determination to win every race, whether it was on the schoolyard, in the streets or on a track. They remembered Florence Griffith Joyner at a candlelight vigil Tuesday night in South-Central Los Angeles, and paid tribute to a athlete who died too young.

A Watts neighborhood activist who just last week organized a candlelight vigil for slain 82-year-old Viola McClain suffered a loss of his own: His daughter and niece were killed in a highway accident near Barstow, authorities said Sunday. Jeffrey Coprich and six family members were traveling to a church concert in Las Vegas early Saturday when their Ford Taurus hit a median ditch and flipped over on Interstate 15 about 60 miles northeast of Barstow.

Eddie Lewis hasn't forgotten how it used to be. The gold records. The packed nightclubs. The concerts with the Temptations and Gladys Knight. Twenty-five years ago he sang tenor for the Olympics, a popular quartet positioned at the edge of stardom. Already nationally known for a string of hit tunes on the pop charts, including the classic hits "Western Movies" and "Do the Hully Gully," the Los Angeles natives were at fame's doorstep. The Watts Riots slammed the door in their faces.