NationStates Jolt Archive

Hiya people. I'm doing a bit of fiction writing.

I'm trying to research where are 'ghetto' areas in Los Angeles, or just bad areas you wouldn't want to be alone at in the dark of the night. Specifically any place that small-time drug dealers are known to loiter in.

Obviously such a topic is not formally documented. So can someone who has experience/knowledge (either from visiting or living in L.A) of this make a reply?

Central Los Angeles.

I've heard the area around the University of Southern California is pretty bad. It sure looks bad. The Compton and Watts areas were pretty bad but they might have improved

OMG I lived in the So Cal Torrance/Red Beach area from (birth) to 1987. Went back a few times thru the 90's.

When *I* was there, it was Hawthorne, Inglewood, Compton, becoming Long Beach...don't listen to me tho, I'm sure it's changed!!!!!!

I've heard the area around the University of Southern California is pretty bad. It sure looks bad. The Compton and Watts areas were pretty bad but they might have improved


It does indeed look bad, but it's really not too bad as a lot of the area is actually student housing.

Watts is definitely still not a good place to hang out.

Compton and South Central.

something to remember is that we're giving you very general areas. U$C, Hawthorne, Inglewood, etc. have good and bad areas, as opposed to places like Brentwood, Westwood, the area with the tall buildings, Century City, Santa Monica, most of the San Fernando Valley, etc. Another thing to keep in mind is that some of these parts of LA like Hawthorne and Santa Monica are not part of the City of Los Angeles

Listen to a rap song..anywhere they shout out=bad place in LA. Simple.

OMG I lived in the So Cal Torrance/Red Beach area from (birth) to 1987. Went back a few times thru the 90's.

When *I* was there, it was Hawthorne, Inglewood, Compton, becoming Long Beach...don't listen to me tho, I'm sure it's changed!!!!!!

I have lived in torrance/redondo beach since birth (coincidentally in 1987) and i still live in the area. Traditionally, south central, compton, watts, and inglewood have been known as ghettos, but actually now the're getting better. The thing abouth these places is that without the gang violence and drugs they are actually really nice neighborhoods. For example inglewood has some houses that were used as mansions by movie stars back in the day. A lot of these places had gotten so bad that they could really only improve and that is kinda what is happening now.

Probably the worst place now is East LA the rest of LA isnt as bad as you would think. Its not like in the movies where people are getting shot 24/7. You could walk down the street and no harm would come to you.

But if you want some real ghettos check out some areas of Washington D.C. I went there and in some areas its really bad. Im talking buildings with only 3 walls because one has fallen down. Thats bad

One year I attended SIGGRAPH in LA when I was looking for work. I operated on a shoestring budget for one week in LA, and stayed at an older hotel right across the street from MacArthur Park. As I recall it was called the Park Plaza, although it was a fairly seedy place.

MacArthur Park was a pretty unhappy-looking place, with hundreds and hundreds of homeless people sleeping on the grass around the tar pits. I first noticed them on my way from the hotel to the conference, my first morning there. There was also at any gien time dozens of weary-looking, spandex-wearing, middle-aged prostitutes parading their fading wares in a fairly vulgar fashion all about the area the hotel was situated. I guess the only reason I wasn't propositioned was that I wasn't behind the wheel of a car (I don't drive).

On the way in on the airport shuttle the afternoon I arrived, one of my fellow passengers (a local) told me to, in all honesty, not set foot outside the hotel grounds after dark. In the mornings when I roved through the area in search of likely places to eat, I discovered these huge roadsigns that read something like:

WARNING

you are entering a known drug area

-and I think it either said something about cars being subject to police searches, gave an area radius, or detailed in brief the penalties for possession/distribution...this was a while ago, so it's now unclear.

I think they called that part of town 'Silver Lake' or 'Silverlake', or something. Wiltshire Blvd. passed to one side of the hotel and Macarthur Park, though. The best I was able to find in the area, foodwise, was a 24-hour 'Teriyaki Bowl' - I waited in line one morning in the stupid assumption that they'd have some sort of breakfast menu, only to find myself choking back a soggy bowl of sticky rice, sub-par chicken and wilted vegetables, lovingly garnished with a jellylike glob of supersweetened MSG.

Local dining choice number two was a burger franchise, further down the road towards downtown. I'm trying to remember the name of it - and all I can remember is their logo, a rotund cartoon boy. Damn, this is bugging me. It was called - 'Fatboy'? 'Badboy'? 'Big - yeah that's it. Big Boy. I just googled images for Big Boy and there it is. Hey, wasn't that the same as the escape rocket Dr. Evil used in Austin Powers? D-uh, I just finally made the connection. Goes to show how poorly integrated into consumer culture I am, I guess.

Anyway, that was an experience in itself. The restaurant was obviously secondary to the drive-through window and parking lot, a smallish, quiet place with welded seating. To order food, you had to speak through a microphone embedded in 4-inch bulletproof glass, and payment was made through a tiny trapdoor/lazy susan combination. The order taker sat behind her own pane of bulletproof glass several feet away, the distance between the two panes of glass taken up with a moving tread, like the ones used at grocery-store checkouts.

I watched them prepare the meal (burger, shake, fries), saw it come rolling out to a little door next to where I stood waiting. When I removed the tray, I saw that they'd thoughtfully provided a straw, and went to get some napkins, maybe a fork - and realized that there were no provisions of that sort. For that matter, no toilets were in view, and I realized I'd probably need to visit one soon.

I found a place to sit and found much to my surprise that the burger wasn't half-bad, and the fries were fine, if perceptibly peanutty. But that shake. The memory of that shake will haunt me. It tasted awful. It was a strawberry shake and it tasted just vile. I decided to pop off the lid and see just what the hell I was ingesting.

It was white, like vanilla, but as my straw moved through the thick glop, it stirred up some hot-pink striations of something or other - what was it? I touched my finger to a dense swirl and licked it tentatively. Zoingg! Supersweetened concentrated strawberry flavour. I tried mixing the shake by hand, and found that there were whole hunks of unmixed strawberry flavour crystals floating partway down the shake. By this time, I wasn't interested in finishing the shake. I was now definitely interested in finding a bathroom.

They claimed not to have one there, so I went looking for one. Indoor plumbing would seem to be scarce in this part of town, as I could find no shopkeeper or restaurateur willing to admit to owning a toilet bowl. I walked for an hour rying to find someplace to relieve myself, before I gave up and let fly behind one of these enormous 'drug zone' signs.

This story doesn't really go anywhere, I'm just rambling. Baldwin Hills was an interesting place to visit, as well - I'd seen 'Ed Wood' and knew it to be the final home of Bela Lugosi, so one day I trekked out there on a bus with a girl I'd met at the conference to see the shitty movie 'Spawn', as we both knew people who'd worked on it, and we'd wanted to get out of Silver Lake, anyway. Baldwin Hills, it was explained to us by a talkative local along the way, is a black enclave of LA. He tried illuminating us as to which areas of the city were black, hispanic, white, korean, etc. but I can't remember all the particulars. The movie, like I said, was shitty, although the movie theatre (the Magic Johnson Theatre) was nice.

There was a shopping mall adjacent to the theatre, and we killed some time shopping at a music store. The two women running the store were both very charming, very helpful, and spotted us as foreigners right off the bat. They asked us where we were from (we were both from Toronto, though we'd only just met that week in LA), and when we told them they laughed and laughed. I didn't get the joke. She said, 'Well, you-all live together up there in Toronnah, right? It ain't like THAT 'round heah' I took a moment to sort out what she was saying...you-all...me and her? the girl I was with? no...that didn't sound right. Me and who? Oh, wait - not ME, in particular, ME like as in the plural form...me, whitey! Ahh...it's a racial thing. In Toronto, blacks and whites living together in the same neighbourhoods...well, more or less true. Close enough for jazz. I told her it might not be quite as rosy a picture as she might have heard, but it was essentially true, there's all sorts of different people living in the various neighbourhoods around TO.

She told us we were both 'good kids' and the two of them became worried when we told them we were planning to take the bus back to the hotel. They said it wasn't safe for waiting around in this neighbourhood - that most of the people would just see us as two more unwanted white assholes in their neighbourhood. It was late enough in the day that the sun had gone in, and it was getting steadily darker. The cab we'd called for never did come, though we were (apparently extraordinarily) lucky to hail one...this after having cars circle us many times, having cars' occupants taking delight in pointing dark objects at us through their car windows, etc. It was most unsettling. I think we waited for about 45 minutes before we found that cabbie. Still, I wouldn't say that Baldwin Hills was a bad area: I think it's probably a great area if you're black, but it'd probably suck if you were of some other racial heritage.

LA is just a weird damn place. Like a lot of other American cities, its' downtown core looks like a ghost-town on weekends. I think most of the residents must do their grocery-shopping in the suburbs. With the big 'drug zone' signs, it's as though the cops are giving notice on behalf of the city that they just can't be bothered to deal with the underlying social problems that cause drug problems.

Oh, I did end up finding a place to eat - off a sidestreet near the convention centre, a tiny family-owned Mexican restaurant that also featured American dishes (burgers, fries, etc.). They didn't speak a word of English, I guessed a lot of Spanish ones - and thanks in part to my knowledge of French, got enough of them right to be able to impress them, and got a free beer for my efforts.

Holy crap, that was long. I must have had mental constipation. Sorry to go on at length like that.

Good night.

if that's all true, Jiang Guo just got his setting