MacArthur Park, mythologized in an improbable pop hit that said nothing about it, is a crowded immigrant portal plagued by homelessness, gangs and drugs. When Jesse Katz, a former staff writer for the Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles Magazine, moved next to the park in 2011, he knew its rep: bad, very bad.
Katz saw beyond the headlines. The Central American street vendors below his 13th story windows hustled to get by. Cops and robbers wouldn’t let them. The cops harassed, chased and fined them. The robbers — gangs — shook them down for a turf tax. Katz, who had covered gangs as a reporter, knew the deal: They were dangerous thugs. But they were also young and clueless about how to crawl out of the quicksand of poverty surrounding them. Not to mention that they, too, had a “tax” to pay — to the overlord who ruled them from a supermax prison 1,000 miles away. The story was complicated.
