1974

by Phyl Diri

In the years since my childhood in the fifties, the farms at the north end of the San Fernando Valley had given way to subdivisions and the eastern part of the valley had begun to slough into urban decay. The eastern end of every city in California, it seemed, had become poorer, and the western ends richer, as if there were a natural force creating the distribution of wealth.

When I was eleven—in 1957—I had bicycled from our home in Silverlake to Highland Park and passed blond hills where firemen stood burning the grasses black. In 1974, when I returned to L.A., young men drove by the old houses and shot into them. The boys laughed when they saw families inside the houses drop to the ground behind their picture windows.

In the sixties, the city took the sweet rural village of Chavez Ravine through the power of eminent domain and gave it to Walter O’Malley as an inducement for him to bring out the Dodgers.

The city also took the Victorian houses on Bunker Hill. Old women—their cheeks rouged in magenta circles, their eyebrows penciled into black arcs—used to stand outside in the shade on Sundays wearing Sunday dresses and carrying patent leather Sunday purses. In 1974, the hill was bald dirt except for the phallic thrust of one multi-story bank building and a multi-level parking lot near the courthouse. The sweetly named funicular railway, Angel’s Flight, remained, and its cars crawled up and down the hill as they had for as long as I knew: the descent of one car pulled the other up.

While I had been away, my parents had moved from Silverlake to Los Feliz, not far from Griffith Park. In the way that the farm owned by a Dutch family, the Broncks, had become the Bronx, so the rancho owned by the Feliz family had become Los Feliz

My parents’ new house was larger than the one in Silverlake. The new neighbors were richer, although the very wealthy lived in mansions behind gates on Los Feliz Boulevard and in smaller houses on the lower hills of the Santa Monica Mountains

The neighbors in the big houses sat in chaise longues by their pools and watched brown men from Guatemala rake the violet jacaranda blossoms from the drives and cut back the red hibiscus and bottle-brush plants and toyons and the blue plumbago from the paths inside the gates. Sprinklers iced the air with tinsel water over delphiniums and hydrangeas and Midnight Blue roses. “Lazy people,” the neighbors said to each other. The neighbors rose and walked into their big clean kitchens with pine cabinets to hold dishes. They watched the brown or black women scrub the stainless- steel sinks. “Dirty people,” they said. The white children came downstairs wearing the clothes washed and ironed by those women.

The brown workers went home to guitars played on porches, to aunts and uncles at birthdays, to Gordito with his round head learning how to walk, to their daughters’ lacy white confirmation dresses, to welcoming new friends with a handshake and old ones with an embrace. The black women boarded buses for the long trip to Watts, a large neighborhood of small houses with corn and tomatoes growing in front gardens....

Phyl Diri lives in Salinas.