Boyle Heights bears the scars and promise of L.A.

Today the community of Boyle Heights, lying just across the river from downtown Los Angeles, is almost entirely Latino, a land of tiendas and taquerias, check-cashers and panaderias. Drive past Mariachi Plaza or down Caesar Chavez Avenue, and it’s hard to imagine it was ever otherwise.

And yet the history of the neighborhood is vastly more diverse and multicultural than today’s street scenes might suggest. The district was once home to some of the largest Jewish and Japanese populations on the West Coast, and these groups lived amid their Yugoslavian, Russian and African-American neighbors in a melting pot of distinctly Angeleno proportions.

“Boyle Heights was once considered possibly the most racially mixed and integrated community in all the United States,” said John C. Arroyo, an urban planner who this week led a group of journalists on a tour of Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles, where he grew up (related slide show at end).

While vestiges of that multicultural past remain scattered in places such as the renovated synagogue Breed Street Shul and the International Funeral Home (Japanese-American), today the neighborhood predominantly consists of Mexican and Central American immigrants and their families. The community of roughly 90,000 residents is very young, with the average age around 25, and relatively poor, with income averaging near $30,000. Gangs and high levels of violence have plagued the neighborhood for decades; at one point Boyle Heights was home to an estimated 20 gangs. While their presence is still felt, the violence that once defined the neighborhood has abated, with homicides at 20-year lows.

The story of how Boyle Heights became the place it is today extends back through a century of planning blunders, racist housing covenants and policies and rapid urban development. While pre-World War II saw Boyle Heights reach its multicultural peak, the war would change all that, according to Arroyo. Japanese Americans were placed in internment camps and, for the most part, never returned. The Russian population began to die out. Upwardly mobile Jews began to seek out more affluent neighborhoods in areas such as Mid-Wilshire, the Westside and the San Fernando Valley. Boyle Heights, long divided along class lines between the extremely poor slums known as the “flats” and the more mixed-class “bluffs,” was largely left to the growing Mexican population.

The city’s policy of redlining minorities (certain minority groups where restricted to specific neighborhoods and denied loans by the banks when they attempted to buy homes outside those confines) had kept pre-war Jews, Mexicans and blacks confined in poorer districts such as Boyle Heights. When the redlining restrictions began to ease in the 1950s, the Jewish population largely moved out while their Latino neighbors stayed behind, isolated by language barriers, geography, income and fewer job opportunities (anti-Mexican signs were common throughout the city). The massive numbers of servicemen returning from the war were sent straight to the booming new suburbs while the city’s urban core was gradually abandoned to the poorest, most destitute residents.

Then came massive rail-yards along the river, and the freeways which would pave over homes as they bisect Boyle Heights before curling up into one of the largest interchanges in the world: Five major freeways colliding in a four-level Gordian knot. Once bucolic Hollenbeck Lake, a spot where families brought their canoes for a Sunday idyll, now had Interstate 5 cutting through its southern reach, massive concrete pillars rising out of the lake bed. The city sprawled; the neighborhood was surrounded.

A century of urban planning blunders may have helped shape Boyle Park today, but that doesn’t mean they define it. Community members, urban planners, city officials and private developers have all tried to improve and refashion the neighborhood in recent years, with varying results.

The Aliso Village housing project, built in one Boyle’s worst slums in the early 1940s by the city’s housing authority, was demolished in 1999 and replaced by the 470-unit Pueblo del Sol mixed-income complex (377 rentals and 93 for sale). While a stroll through the attractive development reveals tidy single-family homes, green lawns, and a sparkling swimming pool, Arroyo said there remain some lingering resentments in the community since the new complex provides one-third less housing than the developments it replaced.

The fact that many former residents haven't been able to return has been "a major sore point for the neighborhood,” Arroyo said. Such feelings have again resurfaced in the present controversy over a developer’s proposal to redevelop Wyvernwood, another of Boyle Heights’ housing projects.

These days the neighborhood is making progress where it can: New Gold Line light rail service connecting to downtown, a growing arts district, a new walking and jogging path, more glowing-green bike lanes, small pocket parks and alleyways reclaimed.

At Proyecto Jardin, a community garden behind White Memorial Hospital, neighbors tend plots of leafy vegetables and make use of a medicinal herb garden stocked with traditional remedies. It’s also an urban refuge of sorts because pockets of green can be hard to come by in park-starved Los Angeles.

According to John Arroyo, the city’s dearth of green spaces and parks wasn’t inevitable. He tells the story of legendary landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted arriving in Los Angeles in 1930 to offer the city a fully developed plan for a network of parks strung across the growing metropolis. Olmsted’s credits already included iconic civic feats such as New York City’s Central Park and Boston’s Emerald Necklace. But the city of Los Angeles, reeling from the recent stock market crash and citing worries about maintenance costs, ultimately declined Olmsted’s plan, which he’d offered for $1. It’s a decision that has reverberated down through the decades.

“The Olmsted firm had said, ‘If you say no to this plan now, you’ll be so deeply engrossed in this urban sprawl, it’ll affect health in so many ways, you won’t know what to do when it’s time to fix it.’ And we’re kind of there,” said Arroyo.

Photo courtesy of Sara Rubin, a 2013 California Endowment Health Journalism Fellow.

The above slideshow given by urban planner John C. Arroyo to the 2013 California Endowment Health Journalism fellows is for educational purposes only.