SOUTH BAY / COVER STORY : Islands Unto Themselves : Some residents of unincorporated areas enjoy the independence, but others seek annexation over neglected stepchild status.

Some people call it El Camino Village, or western Gardena, or Alondra Park.

Some label it No Man’s Land.

They are describing a neighborhood deep in the heart of the South Bay, an area of one-story tan stucco homes much like those lining the streets of any middle-class suburban city in Southern California.

But this is no city.

El Camino Village is an unincorporated area, lacking a city hall, a city council, a mayor or even a police department to call its own. In city-rich Los Angeles County, that makes it a rarity, an island of innocuous pale yellow in a Thomas Guide awash with cities highlighted in bright pinks, purples and oranges.

In all, a dozen such islands dot the South Bay map like scattered puzzle pieces, stretching from the gritty streets of Lennox near Los Angeles International Airport southward to the upper-crust homes of Academy Hill on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

These islands are sometimes rich, more often poor. Some are seen as the neglected stepchildren of mammoth Los Angeles County, which oversees unincorporated areas. In others, residents seem to enjoy life removed from bureaucracy.

In short, life on one of these unincorporated islands offers a litmus test of attitudes toward government--some people want more societal structure around them, and some want less.

And nowhere is this split more apparent than in the eastern flank of El Camino Village, where a civil war of sorts is brewing.

Some residents, weary of the anonymity of non-city living, have risen up and lobbied to latch onto neighboring Gardena. After years of struggling to procure services from Los Angeles County--whether more sheriff’s patrols or better tree trimming--they long for a smaller-scale city such as Gardena to call their own.

“It is so difficult to try to get through the maze of (county) offices,” says annexation supporter Paul Stone, “while with a smaller place that is so much closer--you can go there in person.”

Others, however, are fighting to retain their unincorporated status, fearful that their freedom could be encroached upon.

“We don’t feel comfortable with having a whole other layer of bureaucracy,” explains Ursula White, an annexation opponent and a leader of Neighbors Concerned About Annexation. Now, with an annexation election tentatively set for April in the 861-home neighborhood, residents are being showered with sometimes vitriolic flyers extolling the dangers--or glories--of joining Gardena.

But others say it hardly matters whether they live inside or outside a city--just as long as the garbage gets picked up on schedule and police arrive promptly when summoned.

Most South Bay residents are oblivious to these islands wedged among cities, and are unaware that some well-known facilities lie within them--San Pedro Peninsula Hospital perched amid a tiny unincorporated area called La Rambla; El Camino College sitting not in Torrance but on unincorporated turf; bucolic South Coast Botanic Garden topping a former county landfill.

But many who live on such islands are all too conscious that they are not part of any city.

And for some, that has become a source of deep distress.

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Pat O’Hara remembers as clearly as if it were yesterday that evening three years ago that she took her teen-age daughter and a friend to a dance concert at El Camino College.

When they returned afterward to O’Hara’s home in El Camino Village, the two girls began practicing jazz steps in the family room, where a large sliding-glass door leads to the back yard.

Suddenly, the girls burst into the kitchen, exclaiming they felt they were being watched. Discovering that her back gate was open, an alarmed O’Hara called the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which patrols her unincorporated neighborhood. She was on the line when she saw a stranger stride up to the glass and peer inside. Startled, the girls hid under the kitchen table.

Despite her report of an intruder, O’Hara says, a squad car never arrived at her door--at least, not until the next week, after she complained to the watch commander at the Sheriff’s Department’s Lennox station. Luckily, the man had left, but her peace of mind was shattered.

“There were no police, and that’s a very scary thing if you’re a woman with a young daughter, living alone,” O’Hara says. That experience spurred O’Hara to join the annexation drive in her neighborhood, lodged between Crenshaw Boulevard, Marine Avenue, Van Ness Avenue and Manhattan Beach Boulevard.

Concern about law enforcement is a key issue in the annexation debate. Some residents claim that the Lennox sheriff’s station can take one to three hours to respond to a call in little El Camino Village.

“They’re a good bunch of guys and they try very hard. They’re just spread too thin,” said Peggy Halberg, recording secretary for the El Camino Village Assn., which is remaining neutral on the annexation question.

But others defend the sheriff’s deputies.

“I think the sheriffs are just much more professional and much more respectful than the (Gardena) police,” said Nellie Plake, who carried petitions door to door opposing annexation. “I would rather deal with them than with some little law enforcement (agency).”

At the Lennox Station, Lt. Bob Hudson said that records no longer are available to explain why sheriff’s deputies did not respond to O’Hara’s call three years ago. The department aims to respond to a report of a back-yard prowler within 20 minutes, he said.

But he refuted reports that the neighborhood regularly lacks late-night patrols. Two sheriff’s deputies in “Car 34” are assigned to El Camino Village and Alondra Park around the clock, Hudson said.

“Day in and day out. Seven days a week,” he said. And although the Lennox Station staff is currently stretched because of budget constraints, he said, hiring should swell staffing numbers within a few months.

The people of El Camino Village are split over other issues as well.

Some would welcome city-coordinated garbage pickup, while others like the freedom to contract with the garbage company of their choice.

Unincorporated areas are frequently confused with the cities around them. Some unincorporated land around Harbor-UCLA Medical Center is often called Torrance because it has a Torrance mailing address. And a large sign in the median of Manhattan Beach Boulevard announces “Welcome to City of Gardena,” even though the north side of the street is really unincorporated turf.

Other snafus arise, such as the time a few years ago when residents of the unincorporated area east of Harbor Gateway accidentally received flyers announcing a special Los Angeles city pickup of items too big to be picked up by the trash truck. Residents carted their throwaways to the curb, but no city crews arrived to pick them up--since their block of West Fiat Street is not part of the city. Finally, after days of phone calls, the city agreed to haul the trash away.

And in an unincorporated area near Carson known as Rancho Dominguez, Vaughn Holiday and other residents insist they’re not getting services they deserve. “The trash people do not make the pickups they’re supposed to,” he said.

*

Over the past 20 years, the number of residents living in unincorporated areas has declined. In 1974, the number was 1,046,500, or nearly 15% of the county’s population of 7.1 million. Today, while the county population has swollen an additional 2 million, the number of residents in unincorporated areas has declined to 962,000--just over 10% of the total.

The drop might not be so significant except the remaining unincorporated areas--left behind by happenstance or their own choosing--are often low- to moderate-income neighborhoods. That can mean some of the neediest areas receive the least attention, officials admit.

“All areas of the county can have a lack of social services because of the economy and needs of a changing population. But the unincorporated areas usually have the greatest need,” said Lorraine Barber, executive director of the Federation of Community Coordinating Councils of Los Angeles County.

Most of the areas that have not been absorbed by cities already are older pockets of residential neighborhoods.

For the foreseeable future, a lot of unincorporated areas may have no choice but to stay unattached, according to city and county officials. That’s because in Southern California’s battered economy, interest in annexation appears to be waning.

Cash-strapped cities may not want to go to the trouble of annexing areas that could require costly services, such as police patrols or environmental cleanup.

Plagued by environmental problems, some residents of West 204th Street east of Torrance might understand why a city may not be eager to annex their neighborhood.

Their homes sit directly east of a federal Superfund hazardous waste site and just south of a Superfund nominee near Harbor Gateway. Federal officials discovered this spring that the pesticide DDT was buried in the unincorporated neighborhood, prompting temporary evacuation of 33 families.

Community leader Cynthia Babich believes the absence of a city has hampered residents’ efforts to get government attention.

“We don’t even have a city council where we can go and complain,” Babich says. “It just becomes apparent that the reason we’re unincorporated is that there’s a lot of pollution there. No one wants to take the responsibility to clean it up.”

Historically, officials say, unincorporated areas have been largely working-class communities that did not have the tax base necessary to support their own cities.

“The unincorporated areas tend to be older, and if they haven’t been annexed by now, there is usually . . . some compelling reason,” said Jim Colangelo, executive officer of Los Angeles County’s Local Agency Formation Commission, which oversees annexations and incorporations.

Yet just a few miles southwest of Babich’s polluted neighborhood are two unincorporated areas that might easily be featured in Better Homes and Gardens.

Academy Hill and Westfield are surrounded by some of the South Bay’s wealthiest suburbs. Streets in Academy Hill are named after great thinkers (Rousseau Lane, Pascal Place, Montaigne Lane). And in neighboring Westfield, where the lack of sidewalks and the occasional peacock evoke a pastoral air, Pam Gault serves as the official “greeter” to welcome newcomers to the community.

“It is the kind of community where you could expect to be greeted,” said James Vandever, president of the local parks board.

Westfield seems to do fine without a City Hall. Amid recent concern that local horse trails were turning into lovers’ lanes, about two dozen residents met at Vandever’s home to discuss solutions. Later, the parks board decided to install posts to prevent cars from driving onto the trails.

And, in an age when many city halls use computer-generated agendas, the parks board gets the word out by posting notices on a simple wooden sign at the Westfield entrance.

*

Lacking city halls, some unincorporated areas cope by concocting quasi-governments.

In Lennox, a port of entry to many Spanish-speaking immigrants, residents have learned to turn to school officials in lieu of a city hall.

Lennox Elementary School District has a long tradition of offering non-school services to the community, providing health fairs, clothing drives and translation help. In the broadest sense, anything that’s bad for Lennox can be seen as bad for the children, which is bad for the schools.

Last year, residents complained about a freeway tunnel at Ocean Gate and 104th Street, which had become a home to prostitutes and homeless people. Parents walking their children to a nearby school complained to Supt. Kenneth Moffett, who wrote letters to Caltrans and County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke. The tunnel was closed.

“As the unofficial mayor of Lennox I’m busier here than I normally would be,” said Moffett, who lives in Manhattan Beach, “but that’s OK.”

Residents of tiny Del Aire near Hawthorne rely on an informal network of “block captains.”

That network mobilized this fall with news that the state Employment Development Department was opening a temporary office on Aviation Boulevard. Bristling because they were not told early on about the plan, residents met with county and state officials early this month in hopes of negotiating some concessions, such as better parking plans.

“If we were a city, they wouldn’t have snuck in the back door,” complained Del Aire resident Janice Rotella.

Residents in the El Camino area, exasperated with weed-infested medians and unrepaired streets, banded together in the late 1980s to create a community association.

Now, with the group pressuring the county, she reports, the weeds are getting cut and the streets repaired. County officials even agreed to install signs reading “El Camino Village” on roads leading into the neighborhood.

“It’s just the case of the squeaky wheel gets the oil,” El Camino Village Assn.’s Halberg concludes.

But for some in the neighborhood, that isn’t enough.

“If you are part of some of the other cities around here, you have a certain loyalty and camaraderie with that city and the people in it,” said Stone, who continues to push for annexation to Gardena.

“We’re not just swallowed up by a big monstrous whatever.”

Times staff writers Lisa Richardson and Greg Krikorian and correspondents Jon Garcia and Jeff Kass contributed to this report.

Patches of County Land

The South Bay is dotted with unincorporated areas that are not part of the city. They include:

1. Lennox

2. Del Amo

3. Athens

4. El Camino Village

5. West 204th Street

6. Rancho Dominguez

7. Academy Hill/Westfield

8. South Coast Botanic Garden

9. La Rambla