South LA

Hoping to see the Shuttle travel through South L.A. this weekend?

They don't look like they're on their way to church, I thought as I eyed up the handful of serious-looking young men lined up outside a corner liquor store.

When neighborhoods suffer foreclosures, everyone on the block gets hurt. The abandoned buildings can quickly become blight and attract criminal activity. The decline of a block can hurt the self-esteem of a community. It is also hard to bring communities together through block clubs and neighborhood councils when people are struggling to stay afloat and the neighborhood is in constant flux. At the very time neighbors most need to come together to support each other, their own struggles may leave them little time or energy to do.

Just one week after Angelenos proved they could happily bike and walk their way through Carmageddon, they get to put their freshly honed skills to the test at the nation's biggest car-free festival.

Sunday evening, at approximately 7:20 p.m., a 20-something year old man was stabbed by two women -- one in her early 20s and the other in her early 50s -- while traveling southbound on the Metro Blue Line.

When people look at questions of transportation, livable streets, or complete streets, they sometimes look at them in isolation, as if they stood alone from socio-economic issues. Slate's recent touting of LA's transit system as the next big thing, for example, never addresses questions of who is riding, how, and why. Or, why not, in the case of many Angelenos, who may find public transit cumbersome and/or have less than favorable opinions of the "public" that rides it or the neighborhoods it passes through.

“Do you need any help?” I asked the tall Russian guy.

"That's a lot of wood," mused Ben Caldwell of the 400 trees on the chopping block along the Space Shuttle Endeavour's route to the Science Center.

When I first reported on the notices posted on trees along Crenshaw Blvd. back in July, I did not realize that those notices were more or less the extent of the outreach the Science Center had done with the communities that the Space Shuttle Endeavour would be traveling through.