Beverly Boulevard is one of the main thoroughfares cutting through the Ambassador Hill neighborhood. It is an intersection of community and business, where neighbors meet for their morning coffee and news, buy their daily bread and milk, and catch their bus or walk to and from the metro.
For all that this section of the boulevard has brought to the community, it has also brought concerns. For years prostitutes loitered at night by the corner payphone conducting business. The bus stop was situated at the dip of an intersection between two major streets, indicated by only a sign – catching the bus meant standing on a glaring sidewalk with no shade by day, with no place to wait or throw away trash. The area was overflowing with refuse. Along the other side of the street was a block-long dirt hill where windblown trash would collect.
BC co-founded the Ambassador Hill Neighborhood Association to respond to this need. First on the list of goals: rid the corner of the payphone to alleviate the congregation of the prostitutes, accomplished within a matter of weeks. Next, team with Viacom/JCDecaux and apply for a Neighborhood Beautification Matching Grant from the Los Angeles Mayor’s office. We won a grant in the amount of $10,000 with Viacom/JCDecaux providing $14,000 of matching contributions in the form of a bus shelter with trash receptacle and trash pick up. Neighbors and local businesses were engaged in the allocation of the remaining funds to plant and care for trees in the sidewalks along both sides of the boulevard and to clean and landscape the block-long dirt hill. Today it is a street transformed, where blight has been replaced with green, shade and greater safety for the community.
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