The Great Blight Way : Alleys Have Become a Magnet for Illegal Dumping and Crime. A City Pilot Project Hopes to Change That.

THEY WERE ONCE THE KEY TO LOS ANGELES’ PRISTINE front yards, allowing cars to quietly pull into back-yard garages, obscuring utility poles from view and hiding trash cans away for pickup.

But the city’s labyrinthine alleys have grown into eyesores, longtime illegal dumping grounds for outside haulers and careless residents.

Some have become lairs where prostitutes turn tricks on discarded sofas, thieves escape from police, crack addicts score drugs and the homeless find shelter amid the debris.

Los Angeles spends about $6 million a year to clean them up, much of it in South Los Angeles.

Forty percent of all alley cleaning occurs in the 8th and 9th City Council districts, represented by Mark Ridley-Thomas and Rita Walters, respectively. Some alleys there are cleaned up to 15 times a year--five times the average, city officials say.

“The people come in trucks and they don’t give a darn if you hear them or not, they just dump--rugs, mattresses, automobile tires. They got a whole fire hazard down there,” said Alice Boutte, 79.

Boutte’s house in the 9100 block of Wall Street is next to one of the city’s worst alleys, where debris is piled so high some garages are hopelessly barricaded.

“For 30 years, (the city) has been saying they’re going to block this (alley) off, but I don’t ever see it,” complained Boutte, who has lived in the neighborhood for 37 years.

That’s about to change. Boutte’s street is part of the city’s pilot project to close off half a dozen problem alleys in South-Central and turn them over to property owners for community gardens and recreational use.

The goal is to cut down on the city’s exorbitant cleaning costs and eliminate the nuisance the alleys have become to residents, said Bob Hayes, public information officer for the Board of Public Works.

To help with the project, students from Cal Poly Pomona surveyed 1,150 of the 3,600 alleys in the 8th and 9th districts last year,

identified a dozen “nuisance alleys” in need of immediate closure and designed alternative uses for residents to choose from. The designs include walkways, vegetable gardens, sitting areas, barbecues and recycling bins.

Alley conditions have never been as bad as they are now, residents and city officials agree.

On a recent morning, only two out of nine alleys in Melinda Stewart’s neighborhood, near 92nd and Towne streets, could be driven through. The rest were clogged with waist-high weeds, carpets, tires, couches and trash. Rats and roaches crawled freely through some of the piles and sometimes made their way into homes.

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“Midnight dumpers” are the major cause of the problem, public works officials say. Small tire shops, contractors and waste haulers--business people who operate on thin profit margins--dump behind homes to avoid costly landfill fees. Residents add to the debris with sofas, TVs, cribs, car batteries and other bulky or hazardous objects that city garbage trucks won’t pick up.

Stewart even recalled seeing a man dump urine and feces from the toilet of his mobile home in the alley behind her neighbor’s home, just two blocks away.

“The stench from the urine would get so bad that I would just keep praying for it to rain and wash some of it away,” said Stewart, 56.

Stewart’s block club has already signed a petition calling for the city to close the alleys in the neighborhood. The 91st-93rd Street block club is shopping around for gates to make it permanent and has already selected designs that include a trellis, walkways made from old railroad ties, gardens and play areas for children.

“Right now, the children have no place to play except in the front of the house,” she said.

Residents must pay for gates to block their alleys and assume responsibility for maintenance and liability of the city-owned property once landscaping is completed.

As Stewart’s block club has done, a majority of homeowners have to agree to the project and raise the money for the gates, which could cost at least $2,500. Hayes said the city will draft landscaping plans and find donated materials--such as benches and railroad ties for walkways--from city surplus.

Four to six months after the alleys are cleaned, Hayes said, the transformation of them should be completed.

“This is something that I think everyone will benefit from all around,” said Herbert Ferberow, a planning lecturer at Cal Poly and supervisor of the student group that studied the alleys. “The city is looking to save some money and the people are looking to regain a sense of community and get this land in shape.”

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Two alleys--stretching from 90th to 92nd streets and from Towne and San Pedro streets--were the first to be cleaned for the program and poles were temporarily erected to prohibit dumping. Street maintenance workers cleaned a third alley--the one next to Boutte’s property--on Wednesday.

“These are the demonstration alleys,” Hayes says. “I want people to see that it can be done and to see what a difference it can make.”

The idea of closing alleys is not a new one. In the 1970s, the city allowed property owners throughout Los Angeles to eliminate alleys altogether by constructing fences down the center of them, increasing the size of their back yards. But homeowners never took the city up on its offer.

In 1983, the city engineer proposed simply closing the alleys to public access, but at the time the council rejected the idea. The same proposal was made again in 1993. This time the council approved it.

Half a dozen block clubs have jumped at the alley conversion proposal, hoping to end years of living behind festering mounds of garbage and fire hazards.

But the idea doesn’t sit well with everyone. A few homeowners say it will be too expensive for senior citizens and others on fixed incomes since it is the residents who have to dip into their pockets for the gates.

“There were quite a few people ready to go along with the conversion project until they found out they had to pay for these wrought-iron gates that can run anywhere from $2,500 to $5,000. That’s about $300 to $350 per household,” said Melodie Dove, community organizer for Concerned Citizens of South Central L.A.

Dove, who heads a coalition of 45 block clubs in the Vernon Central Block Club Council, said the clubs favor any plan to clean up the alleys. But many residents believe that the city should fund the cost of the gates since they will be saving money by not having to clean the alleys.

Layvonia Miller, president of the 34th Street block club, said the city should revive the idea of deeding the alleys to property owners, who would move their property lines back.

What makes it even more painful for some homeowners to live with the blight is remembering what it used to be like 30 and 40 years ago, when the alleys were a convenience.

Stewart remembers seeing city inspectors patrolling the streets in the 1960s and citing residents who left small piles of weeds or a rusty old chair in their back yards for too long.

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But things changed. First people started throwing bottles and cans in the alley, she said, then tree branches or pieces of wood. The problem now is so bad that many South-Central alleys are inaccessible to firetrucks and police cars.

“The pileup of trash in the alleys is a real concern for us and a concern for the Fire Department,” said Capt. Larry Gloebel of the Police Department’s 77th Street Division. “What happens if there’s an emergency at the back of the house and a (fire department) truck or (squad) car can’t get there because of the garbage in the alley?”

Many residents have given up on getting to their garages from the alleys.

Ruth Walker hasn’t walked into the alley behind her house to check her garage in five years. Walker, who is in her 70s, padlocked the garage inside and out because of repeated break-ins.

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“As fast as they can clean it up, there’s someone waiting to dump right there again,” said Walker, a 35-year resident of the area. “We never had a problem with the alleys when I moved here. Never a problem with people dumping or cars being pulled in and being stripped.”

On Oct. 1, about 2,000 volunteers armed with pale blue garbage bags combed through alleys throughout South-Central and the rest of the city as part of the Police Department’s annual Operation Sparkle campaign.

Nearly three weeks later, though, on a drive through the 77th Street Division with Officer Keith Thomas, some of the bags were still lying in alleys waiting to be picked up by city crews. And new piles of trash and couches were back in the middle of other alleys.

Thomas, who lives in the area, is a proponent of simply doing away with the alleys. “What use are they for anybody anymore? When I look for a house (to buy), I don’t look for an alley behind it. . . . Plus it will add a few more feet of property for people.”

To keep the alleys in his patrol area clean, Thomas started an Adopt-an-Alley program last December. Business owners and residents take responsibility for cleaning up alleys and discouraging transients from picking through garbage.

One alley in the 9100 block of Western Avenue, adopted by the owner of a neighboring liquor store, is nearly spotless.

“I would love to have all the alleys adopted by someone. That might be the first step in getting rid of the problem,” Thomas said.

Some residents who have been battling the growing mounds of trash for years are ready to give up because the problem is so out of control.

Sang Brown, 72, still goes out every now and then with his neighbors on 40th Place and Hooper Avenue to pick up trash near his home of 47 years.

“We try and keep it up a little bit, but if the city can’t even keep on top of it, I don’t expect we could do a real good job trying to keep the dumping down,” Brown said with an air of defeat.

Farther west, near 42nd Street and Gramercy Place, Wanda Garcia and Thelma Jones sift through a torn plastic bag of trash and clothes. There are old Wang computer disks and operator manuals, magazines and unopened mail--all addressed to a resident who lives two blocks away.

Jones, Garcia and residents in the neighborhood complain that their homes have become easy targets for thieves who climb over the walls late at night.

The homeowners have asked for Ridley-Thomas’ help and are circulating petitions to include their alley in the conversion project.

Recently, a dozen property owners huddled in Garcia’s living room to discuss converting their alley with Hayes of the Board of Public Works. All were willing to forget about their garages if it meant they could feel safer at night.

“Everyone is more than willing to have the alley closed up,” Garcia said. “And they’re willing to pay whatever it’s going to cost to have that sense of security.”

Nuisance Alleys

In a novel approach to cleaning up nuisance alleys plagued by crime and illegal dumping, the city is closing off at least half a dozen of them in South-Central and will turn the city-owned land over to the adjacent land property owners for community gardens and other recreational uses. (graphic follows)

How to Get Alleys Cleaned

1. Call the field deputy in your council member’s office. The representative for Council District 9, Kim David, is at 237-1088. Sandra Howell, field deputy for Council District 8, can be reached at (213) 485-7616. The information will be forwarded to the Board of Public Works.

2. Residents will receive a petition to circulate on their block.

3. The petition should be submitted to a council field deputy, who will send it to city engineers along with information regarding how the alleys will be maintained and who will be responsible for them. The petition calls for the alley to be restricted from public use and closed. However, restriction of the alley is revocable by the city or petitioners.

4. The petition goes to the Board of Public Works for review, and then the council’s public works committee. Hearings will be scheduled for public comment.

5. If the petition passes this process, it goes before the City Council for a vote.

6. After final approval, the alleys will be cleaned and barred off with poles. Residents have six months to purchase wrought iron gates for permanent closure.

7. Residents must decide on an architectural plan for the alley conversion and sign a form agreeing to a specific schedule for implementing the plan.