Bringing L.A.'s alleys out of the shadows

At the southern tip of Los Angeles, stashed behind railroad cars and fuel depots, is a pillbox of a community center called Mahar House.

Inside, there is a tiny library for kids, with titles by C.S. Lewis and a biography of Paul Revere. In a classroom down the hall, equations used to teach parents the value of building credit are on a chalkboard. In the front room, volunteers give away food they've rescued from markets that were going to throw it away.

It's the kind of place you root for.

Behind it, almost inevitably, is the kind of place you try to avoid.

The alley smells like urine and is lined with cinder-block walls, some topped with razor wire that catches stray plastic bags on windy days. Brown weeds hide a strange array of items: a sock, a broken string of cheap, plastic beads. Someone has dumped a sagging, torn armchair and a filthy mattress.

Men stash stolen cars there, with wires poking out where the stereos used to be, but that's not the worst of it, said Paula Juarez, who raised two daughters here in Wilmington. Others have been caught peering into apartments, she said. The other day, one tried to talk a 5-year-old girl into taking her clothes off.

The alley, like so many others in L.A., is the scourge of the neighborhood. But a growing coalition of researchers, urban planners, public land advocates and government leaders say it doesn't have to be that way. Alleys, they argue, could offer enormous environmental and public health benefits -- if they could be turned green.

The alley, long maligned and neglected, is enjoying something of a comeback.

Urban designers who spend their days envisioning cities of the future have begun reincorporating alleys into developments. That's largely so they can banish garages to the back of lots in order to build more porches and yards out front -- to foster more interaction between residents and the streets they live on.

Older alleys, meanwhile, are undergoing a face-lift. The seeds of the Los Angeles alley campaign were planted elsewhere in recent years: in Seattle, for instance, where alleys have been overhauled to reduce polluted runoff; in Baltimore, where they've been rebuilt as pocket parks to combat crime.

But there are few cities whose alleys offer more possibility than Los Angeles. The USC Center for Sustainable Cities, which is leading the alley campaign here, found recently that there are 12,309 blocks of alleys in the city -- 914 linear miles' worth, roughly the distance between here and Portland, Ore., even if some are just 10 feet wide.

Particularly in older, poorer neighborhoods, where many of them are located, alleys are often dens of crime and blight. But the researchers see something else. They see, all told, more than three square miles of underused land -- about half the size of Griffith Park -- a precious resource in a region starving for vacant land and public space.

They propose lifting ideas from cities such as Seattle and Baltimore while incorporating new ideas to create the most innovative alley overhaul yet: ribbons of eco-friendly, civic-minded spaces coursing through neighborhoods like a spider web.

The new alleys would not all look the same, not by a long shot.

Some would be merely torn up, their old-fashioned concrete replaced with newfangled, permeable material. That would help absorb runoff and reduce the "heat island effect" -- the way the city's asphalt retains the heat long after the sun has set.