Latest news with #Yaroslavsky
Los Angeles Times
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
A tale of two parks: One was a ‘poor boy's Disneyland,' the other had a Cobra Woman who was really a man
Here's a little story for summertime, a tale of two seaside amusement parks of days of olde: One eventually got itself a reputation as a rackety, unsavory hangout where you didn't have to look hard to find gambling, dive bars, tattoo parlors (back when nice people didn't go near them), and 'soiled doves,' what the Victorians called prostitutes. Notoriously, someone once found a corpse there — as a sideshow exhibit, not a murder victim. More about him presently. The other park, not far up the coast, was as perky and clean-cut as a barbershop quartet, painted the colors of sand and sky, with shipshape and jaunty ocean-inspired adventures, and zippy, futuristic, razzle-dazzle rides. Now, which one do you think lasted longer? It was the first one, the older one — the Pike, in Long Beach. It opened in 1902, when the electric cars first brought sweaty, landlocked Angelenos to the beach breezes and the Pike's carnival delights, like the fabled Cyclone Racer roller coaster that swooped its riders fast and furious above the water. It was finally done, and done in, in 1979, replaced by shops set among the Long Beach Convention Center and the Aquarium of the Pacific. The other one, Pacific Ocean Park, straddled the sand of Santa Monica and Venice. It opened in 1958, three years after Disneyland, and didn't last even 10 years. Santa Monica has seen amusement parks come and go over more than 120 years, but POP is of fairly recent and fond memory. That place should not to be confused with the much smaller Pacific Park that operates now on the Santa Monica pier, the heir to L.A.'s long beachfront amusement park heritage. POP was a creature of Cold War America. Westinghouse Electric Corp. built one display, a replica of the hull of the atomic-powered Nautilus submarine, with sound effects like an actual submarine at sea. A 'spaceship' theater 'took' the audience to Mars, to see the Red Planet and its imagined Martian residents. A 'house of tomorrow' [sound familiar, Disneyland fans?] ran on 'electronic age' conveniences with an 'artistic representation of the atomic city of tomorrow,' as the old Pomona Progress-Bulletin newspaper wrote in September 1958. An 'ocean skyway' ride took visitors in clear gondolas out over the Pacific surf. Zev Yaroslavsky, the L.A. native, longtime county supervisor, and city council member, still misses the place, even all these decades later. In elementary school, in junior high and high school, 'me and my buddies would take the bus out there, and we'd spend the day having fun. It was a great place to go with girls on whom we had a crush. It was the poor boy's Disneyland.' You entered through the watery darkness of the aquarium, and when you came out the other side, Yaroslavsky remembers, you were 'greeted by the bright sunshine on the pier with the attractions and the Pacific Ocean in my line of sight,' like being wafted from the humdrum to 'the exciting fantasy land of a shoreline amusement park.' 'I felt wronged when it closed, and I have missed it ever since.' In 1960, an FM station, KSRF – K-Surf – began broadcasting from POP, but it was POP's live dance shows that brought in big names and the crowds that followed them – Ritchie Valens, Sam Cooke, and the Beach Boys. Brian Wilson wrote a short foreword to the lavishly illustrated 2014 book 'Pacific Ocean Park.' The 1950s and '60s gave us a glut of amusement parks, and as with any boom, there was a bust. POP became one of the busted. Competition from that place in Anaheim was unrelenting. So too is sea air, and its assault on wood and metal and human-crafted things in general, and the price for keeping all of that at bay was untenable. Rides broke down and went un-repaired. City building projects messed up the roads into POP. By the autumn of 1967, POP was closed – ostensibly for repairs but in fact for good. The apocalyptic forces that work against amusement parks, neglect and fires, did their handiwork. As The Times wrote in February 1975, as the last of POP was being demolished, 'Sooner or later all dreams come to an end.' Yet the Pike soldiered on — rather, sailored on. In 1919, Long Beach became the home port for the nation's Pacific fleet of battleships, and in time, more ships followed. The Navy was big business for Long Beach, and for the Pike, where thousands of Navy 'gobs' stationed here spent some of their shore leave and their earnings. Like Las Vegas, the Pike, too, underwent an identity shift, if not a crisis. It too suffered from competition of more family-focused resorts. As parents took their kids holidaying at Disneyland or Knott's Berry Farm, the Pike was left more and more to grownups like boisterous sailors and footloose Angelenos and their tastes for pool rooms, bars, dance halls and sideshows. In 1946, a sideshow fixture billed as 'Miss Elsie Marks, the Cobra Woman,' died after her seven-foot diamondback rattlesnake bit her. That was the first big headline. The second was that 'the Cobra Woman' was in fact a 6-foot-3-inch man surnamed Nadir, who had traveled in circus sideshows over the years as, serially, 'the dog-faced boy,' then 'the monkey man' and 'the bearded lady.' The Pike's louche doings made for great newspaper copy. In 1914, the 'Duke of the Pike' — a debonair character who lived large, mostly on brash cheek and bad checks — finally got caught when his car broke down in Compton. He was asking the police chief to lend him $10 for repairs when a sergeant recognized him as a wanted man. The next year, a businessman who said he had simply wanted to show a young girl the sights on the Pike was arrested for breaking a local law delicately phrased by The Times as being 'in a certain state of mind when approaching an apartment house' where the girl was living on his largesse. In 1943, at the height of World War II, Deputy Dist. Atty. Ted Sten announced that gambling was going on on the Pike: 'I personally counted eight last night. There are wide-open crap games, and the only police down there are watching the merry-go-round.' In fact, the Pike was probably the most heavily policed part of Long Beach, but players will be players. In the 1950s, the Pike rebranded itself Nu-Pike, in a makeover that tried to snag more families as customers. That didn't rescue the Pike, nor did another new name for the area: Queen Park, after the ocean liner RMS Queen Mary, permanently anchored on the Long Beach landscape. Geography itself worked against the Pike, too. Beyond its actual borders, unsavory operations sprang up, but the whole stretch was identified as 'the Pike.' In 1965, as Long Beach began sprucing up the harbor, a dredging operation piled up a landfill at the edge of the Pike. In short order, the Pike was no longer at the beach. A man who ran a grill restaurant in the Pike's 'Fun Zone' told The Times in 1979 that 'they pushed the beach back so far they killed business.' By 1967, a columnist at the Long Beach Independent had to defend his town to an anonymous letter writer demanding an expose of Long Beach's gay bars and brothels, including the Pike, 'that nightmare alley with its rock-bottom characters and perverts in plain view … ' The columnist's retort was valiant but rather weak sauce: There are only three gay bars in Long Beach — down from nine two years before. At the 'notorious hotel' occupied by prostitutes, there was only one arrest there in the last six months. In 1979 the city had big plans that did not include the Pike. 'Nu-Pike May Be No Pike,' ran The Times' headline. Leases were not renewed. Attractions that hadn't already fallen down were knocked down. (A small museum of Pike artifacts survived in the Lite-A-Line game arcade in Long Beach, operated by the Looff family, which had run the same attraction at the Pike for decades. But even that closed, in 2022.) By 1979, too, one of the Pike's foremost attractions was already gone, first to the L.A. County coroner's office, and then to a graveyard in Oklahoma. In 1976, a wax dummy painted Day-Glo red was being moved around in the Laff in the Dark attraction when an arm fell off. Underneath was not more wax, but a human bone. The dummy was a mummy — the desiccated corpse of Elmer McCurdy. McCurdy was a B-list, turn-of-the-century outlaw, a ne'er-do-well train robber who was so lousy at his craft that he held up virtually empty trains instead of the gold-toting ones he thought he was targeting. He once blew up a train's safe that was full of loot, but the 'bang' fused all of the coins to the safe's inside walls. He was shot down by a sheriff's posse in Oklahoma in 1911. After that, his unclaimed body began its wanderings: as a greeter for an Oklahoma funeral home, as a sideshow attraction for touring carnivals, and even in a titillating 1933 pre-Code film, 'Narcotic.' (It wasn't a speaking role.) Once out of the carny racket, McCurdy became more famous in death than he had been in life. Times columnist Steve Harvey christened him the King Tut of the Tumbleweeds. McCurdy's post-posthumous credits: a BBC documentary, two biographies, a Celtic folk song, and a murder mystery weekend. He was buried in a historic cemetery in Guthrie, Okla. — under a two-foot layer of concrete, lest anyone be tempted to take him on tour again.
Los Angeles Times
22-06-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
L.A. city leaders look to file lawsuit over ‘unconstitutional' immigration enforcement
Faced with a wave of immigration arrests, the Los Angeles City Council is looking to sue the Trump administration to secure a court order prohibiting federal agents from carrying out any unconstitutional stops or arrests of city residents. Seven council members signed a proposal asking City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto to prioritize 'immediate legal action' to protect the civil rights of Angelenos, arguing that such a step is needed to keep their constituents from being racially profiled or unlawfully detained. A lawsuit would almost certainly intensify the tensions between the city's elected officials and the federal government over the ongoing raids, which have been carried out in Hollywood, Pacoima, Cypress Park and many other locations. Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky, who co-authored the proposal, said she and her colleagues have received reports of residents who were stopped, questioned and detained by individuals claiming to be federal immigration agents but did not display an official badge or government identification. Yaroslavsky said she was personally informed about a Latina who was recently walking on Westwood Boulevard and was approached by several men in masks who demanded that she show a valid ID. 'She produced identification and they let her go,' said Yaroslavsky, who represents part of the Westside. '[But] you can't do that under the 4th Amendment. It's not reasonable suspicion that they're noncitizens just because they're brown.' The proposal, which was co-authored by Yaroslavsky and Councilmember Ysabel Jurado, now heads to three council committees for consideration. Asked about the city's efforts, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers act 'with the utmost integrity and professionalism.' She also pushed back on the assertions made by Yaroslavsky and her council colleagues — and chided The Times for reporting on their claims. 'Attacks against ICE officers have increased 500% because of this unhinged, extremist rhetoric from Democrat politicians — that the LA Times is apparently happy to amplify,' Jackson said. 'The LA Times should do some real reporting, instead of just regurgitating Democrat propaganda.' The city's preparations for legal action represent the latest in a series of confrontations between the Trump administration and the city of Los Angeles. On Friday, during an appearance in Los Angeles, Vice President JD Vance ripped into Gov. Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass, accusing them of endangering the lives of federal law enforcement officers by speaking out against the immigration sweeps. 'What happened here was a tragedy,' Vance said. 'You had people who were doing the simple job of enforcing the law, and you had rioters, egged on by the governor and the mayor, making it harder for them to do their job.' Bass shot back hours later, saying Vance was 'spewing lies and utter nonsense' and attempting to justify the waste of taxpayer dollars on the deployment of the National Guard and the U.S. Marines to Southern California. L.A. neighborhoods are indeed experiencing fear and terror, but the kind caused by men in masks carrying guns and rifles who are pulling people off the street, she said. 'They refuse to give ID. They're driving regular cars with tinted windows and in some cases out-of-state license plates,' she said. 'Who are these people ... are they bounty hunters? Are they vigilantes? If they're federal officials, why is it that they do not identify themselves?' A decision by the city to go to court would offer only the latest example of California elected officials taking on the Trump administration. Newsom is locked in a legal battle with the federal government over the deployment of the National Guard in Los Angeles. Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta has filed more than a dozen other federal cases dealing with tariffs, federal employee layoffs, LGBTQ+ rights and other topics. On Friday, the council voted 9-1 to provide Feldstein Soto up to $250,000 to bring on an outside legal team to respond to any actions taken by the federal government over the next month, when the council is on its summer recess. Yaroslavsky said that council action is not connected to her proposal, which could receive a vote from the full council by the end of next week. The city's potential legal filing could be modeled after a federal lawsuit filed by United Farm Workers in the state's Central Valley earlier this year, Yaroslavsky said. In that case, United Farm Workers alleged that border patrol agents stopped, detained and arrested dozens of people of color who appeared to be farm workers or day laborers, 'regardless of their actual immigration status or individual circumstances.' ' 'Operation Return to Sender' tore families apart and terrorized the community,' the lawsuit states. 'It also violated the law. The Fourth Amendment prohibits Border Patrol agents from detaining a person, whether in a private vehicle or on foot, without reasonable suspicion that the person is in the country unlawfully.' In April, a federal judge ordered federal authorities to halt illegal stops and warrantless arrests in the Central Valley. In an 88-page order, U.S. Dist. Judge Jennifer Thurston said the evidence presented so far by the American Civil Liberties Union, whose lawyers represent the farm workers, showed that Border Patrol agents had engaged in a 'pattern and practice' of detaining people without reasonable suspicion and executing warrantless arrests without determining flight risk. 'The evidence before the Court is that Border Patrol agents under DHS authority engaged in conduct that violated well-established constitutional rights,' Thurston wrote. Lawyers for the federal government said the allegations cited by the plaintiff were 'disparate examples' and did not constitute systemic behavior. They also argued that the court lacks jurisdiction to take up the case, which was filed as a class action lawsuit against Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and officials with U.S. Border Patrol. Yaroslavsky said she wants the city to seek the same type of order that was issued by Thurston in the Central Valley. The city, she said, needs to help residents who may be too frightened of retaliation by federal law enforcement to file a challenge directly. 'Even if they're here legally, they're afraid,' she said. 'Because the Trump administration has shown it's willing to detain and deport people who are here legally. So if ever there were an instance where it made sense for local government to step in on behalf of our people, now is the time.'
Los Angeles Times
17-05-2025
- Business
- Los Angeles Times
L.A. council panel votes to save 1,000 city jobs, reducing layoffs to 650
A key committee of the Los Angeles City Council voted Friday to cut the number of employees targeted for layoff by Mayor Karen Bass by more than half, bringing the total down to an estimated 650. The council's budget committee took steps to save more than 1,000 jobs by pursuing an array of cost-cutting measures, such as hiring fewer police officers and scaling back funding for Bass' Inside Safe program, which moves homeless people into temporary or permanent housing. Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky, who chairs the committee, said those and many other moves would help the city protect core services, including tree trimming, street resurfacing, street light repair and sanitation teams that address illegal dumping. 'We looked for ways to save positions — not for the sake of job counts only, but to make sure the departments can still do the work our constituents need them to do for their quality of life,' said Yaroslavsky, who represents part of the Westside. The committee's recommendations for the proposed 2025-26 budget now head to the full council, which is scheduled to take them up on Thursday. Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, who sits on the committee, expressed some optimism after the vote. 'We were in very rough waters, and a very different landscape, when we started this process,' said Hernandez, who represents part of the Eastside. 'And now there seems to be some light between the clouds.' As part of Friday's deliberations, the budget committee voted to recommend a slowdown in sworn hiring at the LAPD, which would leave the agency with 8,400 officers by June 30, 2026. That represents a reduction of about 300 from the current fiscal year and 1,600 compared with 2020. The budget committee also agreed to eliminate 42 emergency incident technicians at the fire department, a move opposed by interim Fire Chief Ronnie Villanueva, while also canceling Bass' plan for a new homelessness unit within that agency. In addition, the five-member panel recommended a hike in parking meter fees, which is expected to generate $14 million in the upcoming fiscal year. Yaroslavsky said the changes endorsed by the budget committee on Friday would save about 150 civilian workers in the police department. Chief Legislative Analyst Sharon Tso, who advises the council, said she believes that city officials will keep finding ways to reduce the number of layoffs, by transferring workers to vacant city positions or to agencies that are unaffected by the budget crisis, such as Los Angeles World Airports and the Port of Los Angeles. 'I think we're going to be able to truly get that number down to less than 500,' she told the committee. Bass, faced with a nearly $1-billion shortfall, released a proposed budget last month that called for the layoff of about 1,600 employees, a fourth of them civilian workers at the LAPD. Some of the largest reductions were planned at agencies that handle sanitation, street repairs and maintenance of city facilities. Friday's deliberations set the stage for many positions to remain intact, particularly at the Department of City Planning, which had been facing 115 layoffs. Kevin Keller, executive officer with that agency, said the committee found the funding to restore more than 100 of those positions. 'I know there's a lot of city workers that are breathing a big sigh of relief tonight,' said Roy Samaan, president of the Engineers and Architects Assn., whose union represents planning department employees. L.A.'s budget crisis has been attributed to a number of factors, including rapidly rising legal payouts, lower-than-expected tax revenue and a package of raises for the city workforce that is expected to add $250 million to the upcoming budget, which goes into effect on July 1. Bass and the council have been hoping to persuade city labor unions to provide financial concessions that would help avoid more cuts. So far, no deals have been struck. On Friday, before the committee began its deliberations, Bass said she is optimistic about avoiding layoffs entirely. At the same time, she spoke against a budget strategy that pits the hiring of police officers against the preservation of other jobs, calling it 'a Sophie's Choice.' If the LAPD slows down hiring, it will have fewer officers in the run-up to next year's hosting of the World Cup, she said. 'I'm not going accept that as my choice,' she said. During the final minutes of Friday's five-hour meeting, council members made some last-minute restorations, identifying additional funds for youth programs, tree trimming and fire department mechanics. Hernandez pushed for the committee to restore $1 million for Represent LA, which provides legal defense of immigrants facing deportation or other enforcement actions, and $500,000 for graffiti paint-out crews. Hernandez said the city needs to stand by immigrants amid a harsh federal crackdown. And she described graffiti removal as crucial for public safety in her district. 'Getting graffiti down quickly prevents a lot more people from getting shot, prevents them from getting killed,' she said.
Yahoo
14-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Los Angeles considers package to create domestic violence task force
The Los Angeles City Council will vote Friday morning on a domestic violence services package that would include the creation of an enforcement task force. 'This is the largest investment in domestic violence services in Los Angeles history, expanding shelter and housing support for survivors who too often have nowhere to turn,' Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky said. The proposal brought by Yaroslavsky would also create the Domestic Violence Restraining Order (DVRO) Enforcement Task Force to remove firearms from abusers and strengthen restraining order enforcement, a news release from the councilmember's office stated. 'This package is about making sure survivors have both the resources to escape abuse and the enforcement to prevent further harm,' Yaroslavsky said. Her office provided the following statistics regarding domestic violence in Los Angeles: Last year, 15,851 survivors reached out to DV hotlines for shelter, yet only 10% were able to access a shelter bed. Over 40% of unhoused Angelenos have experienced domestic or intimate partner violence, making this a key driver of homelessness. The DVRO Enforcement Task Force will formalize coordination between LAPD, the City Attorney, and other law enforcement partners to ensure restraining orders are enforced and guns are removed from abusers. The City Council meeting is scheduled for 10 a.m. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
