With the Halloween horror of 2001 at a close,
     Time to give thanks that our early appetites for adventurisms in the straits of Taiwan and on the Korean peninsula have quieted.(for now).
     Time to be grateful for the 'gray’ Davis summer.  The bills will be acoming you bet.
     Time to nurture the folk atryin’ to come to sensible grips with that nightmare construct the idiot savant professer has helped foist on the Los Angeles City Charter.

B.  Our Old Hollywood

    Time, long past since we asserted to effectively council amongst ourselves to best contemplate and resolve disparate concerns.  Our belief:  that the appropriate mechanism is our Hollywood Coordinating Council...now, kids, really in an idling mode.  The task is to revive it as an ongoing forum for neighborhood governances.

Neighborhood Councils:  Events continuingly to confirm our caution:  don’t enlist, just work informally to address local problems in concert with all officialdom.  Avoid the deadly traps inherent in this misbegotten concept.
    Good people are now haplessly engaged in the realization of this bizarre legislative construct, which we sadly lament, will only, in the end, add to a despair for the ‘democratic’ process. 

The Dancehall Fad:  Chris Breed believes that the current craze for dancehalls will last about 5 years.  Chris is owner of the Sunset Room, a restaurant/dancehall and the restored Pig & Whistle restaurant on Hollywood Blvd. and voiced this opinion during his speech at the Hollywood Coordinating Council’s Dec. meeting.
    Those who unquestioningly support the spread of these businesses and their liquor licenses should take heed of the ‘hangover’ effect.

13th Election:  The winner Eric Garcetti is settling in.  Our best wishes to a nice young feller new to the trade. 

4th Dist. Election:  Thank heaven we now have a veteran of civic strife on board, alive and eager to serve civic ‘wants’ (as we have to let him know).  Mary Presby has retired and now Michelle Fleenor is on board.  Same phone and Toluca Lake office location.

Gang Graffiti:  Still with us and blossoming anew with concurrent competition in the drug trade and turf conflicts.  W.A.V.E.’s  former plague:  the “Player” has evidently moved to the Western & Santa Monica Blvd. area..  (Call us for our info  on him).  ’Wacky’ has emerged again, from his earlier fright...emboldened by turf and the ‘trade’, and our disemboweled LAPD.
    Mr. Cooley’s deputy finally responded to our position re our Summer letter and Petition to hold gangs entirely responsible for their print display of territorial terrorisms. 
    The response was first: ‘lost in the mail.’  The belated response, is, in our mind, insulting...just dodging the bullet in a demeaning fashion, i.e., “Each defacement is individual,” and conveniently the purview of the City Attorney, not them folks in the District Attorney’s. office.  We reiterated our position that:  if Coca Cola had slapped their adverts wherever,.you wouldn’t go after the painter, you’d go after Coca Cola.  Same with de gangs.
    As the TV cook proclaims, undoubtedly, we’ll have to ‘kick it up a notch.’  We’re agoin to have to bark loudly and show some fang, I suspect..  So much for elected fervor against Street Terrorists.  It does seem to decline once ensconced in office.

Drugs:  The 18th & others are always acoming out of jail and looking to settle and work the turf...’very active in the Yucca Corridor’@ Cherokee & Hollywood Blvd. and Hollywood & Highland, etc. as are prostitutes.
    Our Fettered LAPD. Chief Parks, alone, has had the moxie to stand up to the anarchists who have totally neutered our Public Safety needs.  You can’t say that about any other elected person.  He is now taking the hit for enforcing the settlement regs. which empower criminals to deter law enforcement, by the device of filing complaints which now take years to clear off an officer’s employment record.
    An illustration hereabouts:  A sergeant, while gently detaining a ‘confused’ citizen who violently mistook tree trimmers for tree removers, - by cuffing her with hands in front, rather than -most uncomfortably, in her back, became victim of her written complaint that he discriminated in her favor!  This will be in his ‘folder’ til eventually evaluated, some years later probably.

    Warren Christopher.  The first of these sledgehammer crews, went on to decimate our National security during his term as Sec. of State.  You’ll recall that early on, he leisuredly treked to China, stopping repeatedly, to orate loudly on just what China agoin to have to do when he visited, only to have to tuck tail and come on back when they slammed the door in his mindlessly arrogant ‘diplomatic’ face.  Such arrogances of power, have isolated the U.S. from all in the world.

    Bill Sterling, our Supervising City Attorney for Hollywood Municipal Court has been appointed to the Superior Court!!  A great guy has made it into our judiciary!!!  Bill, as you recall, wrote our A.B. 1035 and testified for it in Sacramento.  It is now PC 653...denying loitering with the intent to solicit prostitution or sale of drugs....Passed by 1 vote.

    Virginia Charon has delegated responsibility to nettlesome new neighbors  De Longpre park problems.  She arranged a special meeting, and.got only a lot of flack for her troubles.  Blessings, good luck she says to ‘em...Don’t whine to her.  Virginia’s worked hard and with some success to date, staying the removal of ‘live’ little businesses on Highland Ave. historic structures, just for a marginal expansion of McDonald’s next door, long troubled by the drug trade  and lacking an on-premise guard.

The  IVAR Ave. vicinity:  Back to gunfire, arson and retreat of the civilised, according to one in despaired flight.  (10-01).  Hope things have improved since.

Hollywood Blvd.:  Still lacking a role, save salacious underwear outlets. and long empty buildings .  No plans for employment of long vacant crumbling theatres, nor even such as the formerly glorious Warner Pacific.  Pacific Theatre folk apparently believe it should continue as a tourist attraction as a filthy, abandoned, rusting ruin. 

Yucca Corridor:  Struggling out of the mire.& quicksands.  Trying to eradicate ‘cancerous businesses’. 

Cahuenga Blvd.: Has achieved a major planting of Queen Palms.  Beautiful.  (Persistence rewarded!!!)

The Triangle Park @ Cahuenga & Franklin Ave.:  Long, impatiently awaited plans for a ‘Grand Entry’ to Hollywood are slated for a ‘ground breaking’ ceremony early in Jan. 2002.
    Petitions for the abatement of crime/nuisance centers @ the Pla-Boy Liquor complex are proceeding.  We hear that offers to purchase by afflicted neighboring owners, have been rejected.

The Yucca Plaza folk have responded with a ‘poverty plea’ to our presentations of overflowing trash bins and debris on the sidewalk.  Gossip avers that tenant businesses have had a recent major rent increase.....oh heck all gee....

Wilcox Ave. (Blvd North).  The Mayfair Apts. nearing completion of a total interior restoration is looking great and expensive.  A boom boom club is nearing an opening just south of the Blvd. with Selma Ave residents already uncomfortable with an adjacent one on Schrader Ave.

‘LEGGS’@ 1835 Cahuenga.  Happily.fire gutted this nudie bar/dance hall.  Problem:  What will be next there?  An applic. for a new restaurant there...and liquor licenses on this postage stamp  sized property obviously impend.
    The liquor businesses still plague us here, Yucca St. at Las Palmas Ave.  The Regency liquor plaza now just blessedly clean dirt..only fer now.  Most folk wish the plans fer the Rec./Park Center are abandoned and the land again to be used for needed rental housing.  (The ‘historic’ use, before converted to liquor use in the ‘60’s.)

The Rec. Park idea in ’96 wuz: One way we could purchase de property to abate de nuisance and decay dere.

We say:  Time to take a new look;
               That demographics has changed;
               Now, more dogs than kids,
               Kids don’t play there 
               Bums hang out. 
               Rangers are understaffed.
               Mature adults
All, sense that a dumb ‘plague’ is about to be inflicted upon us...with the best of intentions, of course.

Time to reassess:  Plans to close Yucca St. to serve nonexistent needs will severely impair real needs.

    Parenthetically:  All this due to the State of Calif. being dominated by the liquor industry in the 60’s and tossing a dozen new licenses here to our utter ruin.  That randy politico from Modesto, (Gary Condit) recently in the news...his claim to National office was his authorship of  an Assembly bill in ‘87, denying cities and counties their right to veto gas station beer & wine applications. ( A.B. 937)
    Now that’s devotion an industry would kill fer. You just don’t git fellers like him enuf. 

Hollywood & Highland:  Our deepest hopes for fullest success despite lack of the more popular restaurants..a. key failing.  Everybody needs to visit, shop, &  dine.  Remember, folks, it’s our money now.  Fourteen years ago it would have been private money and private initiative, and for the Egyptian and others as well.  Good intentions are the road to..where we is..

Quiet despair for Vine St developments despite avoidance of the trap of multitude of screens and myriad dancehalls.

Marketplace and Capitol Records are saddled with hosting macabre ruins of the past, which compromise a functional and charming future there.  Regency Properties, the original, confused hopeful...lucked out and ducked out.  Their unreal concept failed before ground breaking.  Looks like their successor has failed too, given the implacable demand of Hollywood Preservation fanatics that an obscure ruin of a forgotten past be propped up as a continuing cemetery marker.  No sensible investor or financer would risk their ‘own’ money...if anything happens there...be sure that it’ll be with ‘your’ money.

The new Hollywood High School...is to be located on the KTTV site  on Sunset Blvd.  What’s proposed is the removal of every structure, however modern, and the 400-car parking garage, to be replaced with a politically correct campus with a 220-car parking structure.  All to no real service and at truly astronomic cost....at a time when public coffers are past empty.  ED HUNT of Melrose Hill Homeowners Assn. urges imaginative adaptation of extant buildings.  The Problem:  implacable regulations, it’s said.  A joint site inspection, finally, after some 6 months of stalling. is imminent according to Ed.  (Editor’s Note:  Gray Davis could, and should negotiate an easing of the straitjacket/stranglehold of maniac regs. so that a new Hollywood school could be housed in TV Sound Stages.  What the hell, kids, we’re at war!!!)

The Housing Shortage a major blessing!!...to Older buildings.... New civilised residents, who otherwise wouldn’t think twice about living here 3 years ago, are again willing to endure lack of parking, late hour noise, panhandling drunks, habitual vagrants, pee and poop,..till better times, of course, as in the past.
    Wilful drunken vagrants still aplenty & off sale liquor sites to attract and addict them.  And to frighten and disturb all civilised.  Curiously, Joe Shea praises ‘em publicly as ‘community minded’  Joe, what the xxxxx heck????” They’re just interested in selling alcohol and pacifying us local peasants.  Community minded?  No, no, stop selling cheap drugs to the alcoholically habituated and socially incompetent...and the socially mischievous and malicious.  If you’re agoin to sell em booze, provide an ‘outhouse’ fer ‘em and a flop house and free food dispensary as well, and... do it elsewhere, dammit.

    Crazy” Bob, finally got arrested yet agin, at the 7-11..if a resident testifies, he may gain a blessed ‘shelter’ for awhile.  Bob tends to take papers from the sidewalk racks, sell ‘em to the liquor stores so’s he can buy their liquor.  He must have felt shorted and took it out on everything around him.  Bob does tend to be physical...***(Update at presstime, Bob’s out!  So much for interventions).

Historic Ecologic Disasters:  Apartment life division.  Even before the State sanctioned the flood of booze in the mid ‘60’s, State interventions, with the best of good intentions, scuttled the ecology of apartment buildings.  Those prison gates, so pervasive now, those electronic buzzers, the environ of alienation and fear didn’t just ‘happen’,they were created by State intervention, in all innocence. 
    No greater urban ecologic disaster was ever created, rent control, not withstanding. 
    Legislation eliminated 24 hour onsite managers and lobby phone switchboards ‘manned’ by residents, i.e., a 24 hour resident control of the building.
    The perceived ‘need’: that they had to be paid minimum wages, overtime after 40 hours, etc.. Not informally and in kind and in lieu of rent, etc., as had been the case.
    Within weeks of this unaffordable ‘quack’ intervention, switchboards were closed, lobbies, were bereft of furniture, manager presence limited first 9 to 5, and eventually just 9 to 11am ‘week days’.
    With nobody to tend the ‘store’, truly amiable, truly affordable living became a dim memory.  Entries became empty and dangerous, hallways became frightening.  What was once home, became ‘housing’. 

    Dilettantes rave over the personal attentions of elderly concierges in ancient housings in Paris and London.  Little do they know that we once had it here.  And we can’t, excepting only in ultra luxury class abodes.

The Lesson: Never underestimate the mischief that a “professional” full time Legislature can do.  (Until the 60’s we enjoyed a part time Legislature, gave ‘em a daily allowance whilst they were away from their regular jobs.)

The 4th Election ....footnotes

    VERA Tylecek held a special 4th dist. elect. candidate forum.  And, nobody, excepting Tom LaBonge had the decency even to return her invite call.  TOM not only responded, but actually showed up  and spoke to audience issues.!!! She’s greatly disappointed in Garfield, whom she’d volunteered for in a past election for College trustee.
    Linda Lockwood simply lacked funds to get any momentum.
    Fares Wehbe had a respectable showing but, unfortunately, belief is that Hollywood Vote is a dead issue as a consequence.
    TOM LA BONGE, had the blessing of HUELL HOWSER.  Had he been elected instead of Goldberg, 8 years ago, what a pleasant world we would be basking in.

The Hillview Apts, historic ruin and Halloween horror that it’s been on Hollywood Blvd @ Hudson Ave, for some 7 years now!!!, is being quietly ‘reassembled’..This will be something to see.  In a political gridlock since ‘94, this catastrophic presence on the endangered Hollywood Blvd locale was mindlessly deemed affordable’ housing by the Council Office.
    Naive investors were dissuaded from improving it by impossible demands of Preservationists.  So, finally, a pariah is in charge, and will ignore ‘em all.  Well, I wish him well.  Mavericks are in short supply and he surely has ‘moxie’.  This is a ‘Hollywood’ story in itself. Watch and behold. A Fire Update: On January 2, 2002 around 9:00 a.m., a suspicious fire broke out in one of the four-floor apartments which engulfed a major part of the interior structure and injured a firefighter when parts of a ceiling collapsed. An investigation as to the cause of the fire is underway.

PUBLIC POLICY ISSUES:

Southland Population:  Enuf alredy?  Or, subsidize and recruit more of such?

    Advocates of the latter policy generically have a material interest in its continuance, i.e., politicians, housing mfrs., construction industry, the ethnically pius etc, etc.
    Our recent position posted on the web site, advocates that the costs of newcomers and their added needs be borne by them, rather than by us.has had a mixed reception....’weird’, saith one.
    But, when an arid Southland’ has reached the limits of natural resources, and we are constrained so severely now mitigating our massive presence, we can be expected to be rationed air next.  ‘Breath slowly, you’re emitting too much carbon dioxide,’ ‘Poop only once weekly, and, over the border, if you can’. 
    We’ve exported all our labor intensive industry because it’s ‘dirty.’  We’re contracting with Mexico for them to site a power plant we won’t allow here, next we’ll be ashippin ‘em our poop for disposal.
    Seriously, each new resident needs:  schools, housing,  sewer capacity, water ‘reuse’ capacity, etc., all ‘the infrastructure’ are expensive, and constraining.
    They should have to ‘buy in’.  Put up the costs of their presence, or ‘buy out’ when someone is leaving.
    This is common in water districts, etc.  Time will come, when to have a kid, you’ll have to fund the needed resources, or send relatives away when you have a new arrival.
    We’re not alone.  KPCC radio reports that the folks of Orange County of North Carolina have realized that they just cannot keep up with the burden of even supplying just the schools for the burgeoning new housing tracts, and are intent on stopping the accommodation of more people at local’s cost.  No more housing, they say.

Zero Population Growth activists, so insistently loud, before the flood of demogogically endorsed migrants in the past several decades, remain curiously silent.
    Some have found happy ‘cause’ in denouncing the rest of us, burdened with supplying housing, employment, schools, jails, our money, of course, for this accomodation of newcomers.  We have ‘failed’ em, they now joyfully shout!  Miserable selfish louts that we are.
    We now comprise 10 million people in Los Angeles County. What quality of life will remain @ the expected growth of 35%.  Considerably less, fer dang sure.
    Well, evidently our sentiment is still legion, as North Carolina  would seem to indicate.

Enuf.....
Happy New Year...

    John Ehretz      Ed., & co-chair

Visit us @www.ushollywood.net
by snail mail to:
1811 Wilcox  Ave.
Hollywood, CA 90028
by email:    ehretz@pacbell.net
or fax:        323 465-3525

Friends:  A personal aside: 

    Of recent years, the spectacle of our Nation’s wayward foreign policies.leads one to believe that attending to local matters is akin to waxing the deck of the USS Titanic.
    When old Henry Kissinger writes a book: “U.S., in search of a Foreign Policy” he dimly attends to our dire condition.  All of us must need to understand why.
    Why? YELTSIN  in’99, thundered “Mr President, you have gone too far!”, and proceeded to hand over power to a KGB professional, PUTIN, who has taken Russia back to Empire building, the elimination of liberal forces, and, for the first time announcing: a first strike nuclear policy!.
    Why?  The alliance of Russia and China, against the perceived ‘American world hegemony’, their rearmament pact.  With Russia redirecting its economy to that military supply of advanced weaponry.
    Why? The ultimately minute states: Spain and, for heaven sake, South Africa, telling us to get out of the MidEast and leave it’s concerns to Europe and Russia!!!
    Why?  Europeans term us: “ the 800 lb. gorilla.”
    Why?  Would little Venezuela gleefully join with the other world oil producers against us, early this year.
    Tho, the recent assault on our soil has provided a sympathetic response, our stance with the rest of the world is mortally contended, friends.
    We embarked on the course of Empire, fully a century now, and it is incumbent on those who still advocate that diversion from our origin as a Republic, to concern themselves with its sensible management.  To do otherwise is to invite disaster.  There can be no security in a world allied against us...particularly, when, so, so lamentably, we don’t even know why!

J.E.