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New Hopes Raised at Marlton Square

CRENSHAW DISTRICT — After several setbacks, residents residing near Marlton Square expressed mixed emotions about the demolition of city-owned properties in the area, saying they are glad to see a step forward but are not convinced that developers or city officials will rebuild in a timely manner, based on past experiences.

“I have lived in this area for over 30 years when this was the Santa Barbara Plaza. This used to be a place that I was proud of. It seems like every year Marlton Square has gone down,” said Tamika Johnson. “If you look, there are a number of vacant properties. They do nothing but bring down our property values and make those who have to walk by or drive by feel hopeless. It’s a shame because if you look at areas like Beverly Hills, the buildings are kept up and the streets are clean. The medians have flowers and grass. When you live somewhere like that you feel good about life and its possibilities. Now look at Marlton Square, you see nothing like what you would find in suburban areas. It does nothing for the [morale] of this community.”

Jeffrey Holmes is delighted “that they are finally tearing down some of these buildings. They look ugly,” he said. “The paint is peeling, the grass and weeds are overgrown. There is nothing pleasant about this place. For years I’ve been looking at these empty buildings.”

Still, he wants to know: What’s next? “They promised for years that they would rebuild this area and nothing has happened for one reason or another,” Holmes added. “I hope they don’t tear down these buildings and leave the [rubble] behind for years until they find someone to come in and do something with it. We deserve better and want better.”

Janet Taylor-Dupri didn’t know how to interpret the demolition, she said, adding that “it seems as though when something is torn down here it takes years for something to replace it. Sometimes we get better than what we had before, and sometimes we don’t. I think that newer, more modern buildings will really help this area and the community. We have all the construction going on with the mall. Why not have something that is just as nice?”

Last Thursday marked the beginning of demolition of city-owned properties in Marlton Square. With Rep. Maxine Waters, Los Angeles City Councilman Bernard Parks and other officials on hand, a group of about two dozen people celebrated as an excavator destroyed one of a number of blighted buildings that have plagued the area.

“The community has watched for nearly two decades, as Marlton fell into despair and became an eyesore, attracting a variety of problems like illegal dumping, arson and vandalism,” Parks said. “Today, we can finally turn the page on the problems of the past [and] begin a new chapter as we clear the way for future development.”

Moving forward with the development of the 20-acre shopping center on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard has been a major priority for local elected officials, including former Mayor Tom Bradley, who sought to redevelop the property — then known as Santa Barbara Plaza — as far back as 1984, said Waters. She praised the work of Parks; Christine Essel, CEO of Community Redevelopment Agency of Los Angeles; Kenneth Fearn, Chairman of the Board of Commissioners of the Redevelopment Agency; Douglas Guthrie, General Manager of the Los Angeles Housing Department; Richard Benbow, General Manager of the LA Community Development Department; and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

“I know that it took us a while to get here today. I was very disappointed when developer Capitol Vision Equities defaulted on its loan and then stopped work on this development,” Waters said. “The ensuing bankruptcy litigation left the families who live in this community in limbo. And it left Buckingham Place, which would have provided much needed housing for the elderly, incomplete.”

According to city officials, the Buckingham Place Senior Apartments was the only segment of the originally planned mixed-use development project that commenced construction. The anticipated three-building complex with 180 apartment for low-income seniors saw the first of three phases begin, but work halted when at least three companies forced the property into involuntary Chapter 7 bankruptcy after developer Chris Hammond of Capital Vision Equities stopped making payments to the hired construction companies in May 2007.

Currently, the building is over 90 percent complete; appliances, carpeting and cabinets are installed, but work remains to be done to the hallways, stairwells and trash facilities.

The tumultuous history of Marlton Square dates back to 1984 when Bradley sought to turn the shopping center around. Former Los Angeles Laker-turned-real estate entrepreneur Magic Johnson won the negotiation rights in 1996, but after spending five years working through the City of Los Angeles’ planning and entitlement process, lost the battle when the development deal was given to Hammond’s firm. However, the development group was unable to carry out the project and defaulted in 2004.

Adding further delay, Capital Vision’s bank went bankrupt two years later. According to city officials, Las Vegas-based USA Capital had loaned Capital Vision Equities $36 million to acquire approximately 50 parcels of land, but when USA Capital dissolved, it left behind over $962 million in assets and more than 6,000 investors.

Unable to move forward while the properties were tied up in bankruptcy court, Parks said he spent half a decade trying to secure funding so that the Community Redevelopment Agency of Los Angeles (CRA/LA) could purchase most of the remaining buildings.

“If there’s one lesson to take away from the past decade, it’s the importance of attaining site control before undertaking a project of this magnitude,” Parks said. “It was unrealistic to expect a lone developer to negotiate with over 40 property owners and 300 tenants. This clearly demonstrates the important role of CRA/LA in assisting and nurturing private investment in our communities.”

A breakthrough was not reached until late 2010, when a settlement agreement was reached, leaving one owner, Commercial Mortgage Managers, in control of roughly 80 percent of the total property, with nearly 20 percent of the land in the possession of CRA/LA.

Having the CRA/LA involved will speed up redevelopment, Parks said, because the agency will omit the need for a new developer to negotiate with multiple parties and aid the city in determining what will eventually be built on the site. The original vision included commercial retail stores, sit-down restaurants and condominiums.

Source: The Wave


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LA EVENTS: Beats Rhymes & Life Doc in LA!!!!

The eagerly anticipated documentary Beats Rhymes & Life : The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest will be showing this weekend at the Arclight Cinemas in Hollywood. The documentary, directed by Michael Rapaport, i about one of the most influential and groundbreaking musical groups in hip-hop history. Having released five gold and platinum selling albums within eight years, A Tribe Called Quest has been one of the most commercially successful and artistically significant musical groups in recent history, and regarded as iconic pioneers of hip hop. The band’s sudden break-up in 1998 shocked the industry and saddened the scores of fans, whose appetite for the group’s innovative musical stylings never seems to diminish. A hard-core fan himself, Rapaport sets out on tour with A Tribe Called Quest in 2008, when they reunited to perform sold-out concerts across the country, almost ten years after the release of their last album, The Love Movement. As he travels with the band members (Q-Tip, Phife Dawg, Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Jarobi White), Rapaport captures the story of how tenuous their relationship has become; how their personal differences and unresolved conflicts continue to be a threat to their creative cohesion. When mounting tensions erupt backstage during a show in San Francisco, we get a behind-the-scenes look at their journey and contributions as a band and what currently is at stake for these long-time friends and collaborators. Check out the trailer here and get a glimpse into the journey of one of the most legendary groups in hip hop.

 

 

 

 

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Perception is Reality: Weight Wars

Looking through some of my old Facebook pics I realized that in each of the pictures I remember thinking I was fat. Now, I wish I looked like that! At that moment, I realized that somewhere along the lines my body image was warped. In what world have I ever been an obese person? Granted, there have been times in my life that I have had extra weight but feeling obese–unwarranted.

 

Living in LA is another dynamic. I went on a date here with a 6’4″ black man who sat across a dinner table from me and said, “I usually don’t date women your size.” WTF!!!! I was thinking, “It is so time to book a one  way ticket to anywhere East of here!” I live in a place where skinny is in. That is not and never will be me. The compromise is taking the healthier lifestyle that exists here and adapting to that, but to tune out the cockamamie BS about the beauty of seeing bones.

As I am once again embarking on a weight loss journey, I am going into it this time with a totally different mindset. I’m not losing weight to look like someone I’m not but rather to attain optimal health. I read a book over the summer that changed my eating habits DRASTICALLY! I became vegan for about 20 days and loved it but it’s way too expensive for my blood right now to eat that way.  Although I reintroduced chicken, seafood and dairy, I never went back to eating red meat or pork. I recently dropped chicken again because I absolutely can’t stand the thought of eating it (read Skinny Bitch and then tell me how you feel about it).

At 27, I am the most confident in myself and my body as I have ever been. I am very secure with who I am and what I look like. We all have our days but all-in-all loving the skin/body I am in gets better every day. Doing a little bit each day to reach my goal is my strategy. 10x10x10 is my motto. Focus on losing just 10 pounds at a time until my goal is reached. Exercise has been the DEVIL but it is a necessary evil that I have actually come to enjoy on some rare occasions. Ultimately, looking great will be a bi-product of feeling great!

Happy Living!

Mikki Bey is a Los Angeles-based makeup artist who believes in the power of the universe to bring her all the desires of her heart. Fearless, determined and capable – she’s a bad mamajama! She can be reached at mikki@mikkibey.com.

 

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Black History: The African-American Firefighters Museum

The African-American Firefighters Museum in Los Angeles is the only museum that preserves the legacy of America’s pioneer black firefighters. These are men like Sam Haskins, the first black fireman in the Los Angeles Fire Department, who served for three years then died in a boiler accident in 1895. Also among the list of firefighters were many former Tuskegee Airmen.

The museum’s curator is Arnett “The Rookie” Hartsfield. He is 92 years old and was one of the first black firefighters in the LAFD. Hartsfield was among the group of forerunners called the Stentorians. Though he and others faced extreme discrimination, according to Hartsfield, no one quit their job.

The museum, which is Fire Station #30 on Central Avenue, holds the many stories of racism that firefighters endured.


When the fire houses were integrated in 1955, the African-American firefighters were forced to sleep in the same beds because the whites refused to sleep in the same location as blacks. The men were also forced out of the station kitchens when white firefighters entered and were required to bring their own cooking utensils, pots and pans. The sign posted read “Colored served in rear.” Many times, they weren’t allowed to speak to their fellow white fighters, and if they put their food in the refrigerator, it was destined to be contaminated. In one instance, white fighters took the pillowcase of a new black fireman named Ernie Roberts to the bathroom and used it as toilet paper, then returned it to his bed and turned out the lights.

The African-American Firefighters Museum opened its doors in 1997 and is now lead by black fireman Brent Burton. Inside the museum lies a memorial tribute to the firefighters that perished during the 9/11 attacks. The museum also honors female firefighters who continue to make their mark in history.

The stories of America’s black firefighters are told in a documentary film by Trevor Hansford called “Ashlands” and in a DVD series called “Engine Company X.”

For more information on the African American Firefighters Museum, please visit http://www.aaffmuseum.org.

Source: www.blackamericaweb.com

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An Anthology on Black Los Angeles

From the LA Times:

When Darnell Hunt and Ana-Christina Ramón tell people that Los Angeles has the second largest black population of any U.S. county, the usual response is raised eyebrows and blank stares.

“They’re shocked,” says Hunt, a sociology professor and director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. “Most people say, ‘No, you’re making that up, that can’t be true.'” In fact, Hunt says, only Cook County in Illinois, which takes in a large swath of metropolitan Chicago, is home to more black Americans.

The list of things that most people, including many Angelenos, don’t know about black L.A. could fill a book. So Hunt and Ramón, the Bunche Center’s assistant director, decided to put one together: “Black Los Angeles: American Dreams and Racial Realities,” just published by New York University Press.
The book brings together the research interests of what Hunt describes as an “all-star team” of contributors, most but not all of them academics with strong California connections. Comprising 17 short to medium-length essays, it pivots from data-rich analyses of how the black community’s 20th century demographic center gradually has shifted from Central Avenue to Leimert Park, to interview-driven, anecdotal accounts of the rise and decline of Venice’s Oakwood neighborhood and a revealing chronicle of the black-owned SOLAR (Sounds of Los Angeles Records), a late ’70s-early ’80s R&B hit-making machine for groups including the Whispers, Shalamar and Klymaxx.

It also includes multidisciplinary, L.A.-centric essays on incarceration’s impact on black families, the relationships between gay African Americans and their religious communities, and the ethnic-minority admissions policies of UCLA, among other thorny topics.

More than half a dozen years in the making, the roughly 430-page volume is believed to be the first such project of its kind. Despite its formidable size, the authors say, L.A.’s black population has been relatively under-analyzed in comparison with New York, Chicago and other northeastern and Midwestern centers of black population..

Part of the reason, Hunt and Ramón say, is that Los Angeles in certain key respects doesn’t fit the nation’s dominant “race” narrative. To begin with, L.A.’s founders were mixed-ethnic Spanish colonial settlers, not white New England Puritans or Southern slaves and slave-holders, so the city’s ethno-demographic profile differed sharply from that of the United States east of the Mississippi River. Just as significantly, the city’s major growth spurts occurred decades after the Civil War. The large numbers of blacks who migrated to Los Angeles after World War II arrived in a city whose ethnic contours were in some ways already well-defined.

“Black people never really threatened to be like a majority or a plurality of the population here, in the same way they do in some of these other American cities that have been studied,” Hunt says.

To some observers, L.A.’s singularity offered blacks a plausible chance at a better life. When the legendary author and civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois visited the city in the early 1900s, he recommended it to black migrants precisely because he saw it as an anomaly, a rare enclave where African Americans might be relatively free of the economic constraints and racist violence of the Jim Crow South.

“There was always this perception that L.A. was kind of like the oddball,” Hunt says.

Yet “Black Los Angeles” makes the case that, today, L.A.’s black population offers many crucial insights into the lives of African Americans in general.

“Everyone talks about Harlem of course because of the Harlem Renaissance and what was happening during the period,” Hunt says. “But we argue that as the 20th century progressed, L.A. really becomes like the new Harlem in terms of setting the terms on which people talk about black America.”

Gerald Horne, a history professor at the University of Houston, said in an interview that the new book advances an evolving understanding of L.A. “as the northern-most capital of Latin America,” a metropolis whose identity owes a great deal to its ethnically and culturally hybrid origins. Horne, the author of a book about the 1965 Watts riots and a participant in a May 25 UCLA symposium tied to the publication of “Black Los Angeles,” says that the new book points to the need for more works that “give Southern California its due” in the nation’s historical narrative.

One particular focus of “Black Los Angeles” is how Hollywood and the area’s major news media have constructed images and ideas of black Los Angeles that have reverberated around the world. Hunt acknowledges that his own views of black L.A. were heavily molded by Hollywood until he moved here to attend USC as a student in the early 1980s.

One essay, titled “Playing ‘Ghetto,'” by Nancy Wang Yuen, an assistant professor of sociology at Biola University, examines African American actors whose real-life experience as L.A. residents sometimes bears little or no resemblance to Hollywood caricatures of black L.A.

A number of essays also take up, or at least touch on, the role of the Los Angeles Times in perpetrating stereotypical views of the region’s African American populace, culture and institutions. Because of its size and the virtual daily print monopoly it enjoyed for many years, The Times disproportionately swayed the way that black L.A. was depicted and perceived, particularly through such watershed events as the 1992 civil disturbance.

“It [The Times] becomes an actor in the story,” Ramón observes, “so instead of it just reporting, it actually becomes part of the story in a way.”

Ramón and Hunt hope that the book will appeal to general readers as well as scholars. To that end, they solicited input from a wide cross-section of individuals and community groups during the book’s planning stages. They also encouraged non-academics to attend and participate in the May symposium, intending to help foster an ongoing community dialogue.

“Black Los Angeles” ultimately raises the question of what the term “black” will mean in Los Angeles in 20 or 30 years from now, as new waves of Caribbean, African and multiethnic Latino immigrants continue to reshape the region’s ethnic profile.

“We wanted [the book] to be a picture that wasn’t so much about sort of glamorizing black L.A. as much as looking at the faults, as well as the beautiful and wonderful things in black L.A.,” Hunt says, “and to present a realistic portrait that may provide some lessons about where we go next.”

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Ron Artest: Crazy or Misunderstood?

We all knew Ron Artest as a crazy, Rodman-like player in his career with the Pacers, Kings and Rockets, with the brawl at the Auburn Palace only solidifying that reputation.

As he made his move to the Lakers, the fans questioned the Lakers front office for letting a working piece, in Ariza, go for a lunatic, in Ron Artest. Critics and analysts said Ron would destroy the chemistry and the Lakers wouldn’t be able to repeat with him on the team.

But in his first year with the Lakers, Ron proved those critics wrong. He has been the exact opposite of what the critics said. He gives out tickets to games, has breakfast with fans and goes bowling with fans. He made appearances on the Jimmy Kimmel show, George Lopez show and he has proven to be funny in those appearances, always seeking to have fun. There is also a rumor that the so-called “bad boy” NBA player is to develop and produce the “They Call Me Crazy” show with E1 Entertainment and Tijuana Entertainment(yes, Tijuana Ent). The series will document the ups and downs of Artest’s life, allowing him to “make amends for past transgressions,” according to E1 Entertainment. Some say he is the most down to earth player. But with that being said, is Ron really crazy or just a misunderstood person?

Watch Ron Artest interview, Ron Artest here, where he answers some questions about himself. This should answer this question.

-Mr. CEO

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LAKERS vs. CELTICS: Rivalry Renewed…Part Deux

LAKERS vs. CELTICS: Rivalry Renewed…Part Deux

A rivalry is two competing people, companies, teams, cities, or other organization. The rivals are not always similarly matched, but they are well known to each other.

Of course they remember the last time they faced their rival. Anyone with self respect would remember, the way their bus got rocked and their hearts got removed with a bare-handed clutch followed by a hard yank, how they were left not simply in defeat but in humiliation.

The Lakers do not forget 2008. The Lakers cannot forget that Finals. The Lakers will not forget what the Celtics did to them — what the whole city of Boston did to them, really — the last time the teams met for the championship. And the Lakers couldn’t even if they wanted to, not when everyone is tossing the memory back at them this week as the rematch approaches and the chance for revenge is at hand.

With that said, the time has come to separate the great from the good, the winners from the players, the CHAMPIONS from the contenders. Today a new chapter begins. How will it end? With tears of PURPLE & GOLD joy. My beast-mode has reached its boiling point, tonight WE feast on retched green flesh! NO MORE TALKING, game time….LAKERS, LAKERS!!! I say again, LAKERS!!! LAAAKKKKEEEERRRRSSSS!!!!!!!!!