Living in a Los Angeles Ghetto
// August 5th, 2010 // 6 Comments » // I Love LA.
- In Koreatown
I live in the ghetto right now. Not the word ghetto as it was originally used in Venice to describe the area where Jews were compelled to live. That was ghetto for real. But I do live in the ghetto as is now described as an overcrowded urban area often associated with a specific ethnic or racial population. I live in a sort of ghetto of Los Angeles’ Koreatown. The crime may be moderately high as I noticed when I searched on the LAPD website where you can type in your address and find the crime rate where each crime represents a dot on the map within a 3 mile radius of your address. Pink, yellow, blue. Colorful little dots they are. I don’t want to brag, but in my neighborhood it’s quite a lot.
Nothing bad’s ever happened to me, though. But it did happen to my brother, who in a drunken stupor decided to walk outside to buy liquor at 3 in the morning and got held up at gunpoint by two guys who took his ID, cigarette and lighter, but when they frisked him failed to notice he had a $20 bill scrunched up in his hand, which he didn’t divulge for fear of losing it. They let him go, keeping their findings. “Come on guys! At LEAST give me my ID back!” Kindly, they did.
In a few days I’m moving out of the ghetto and will no longer living in a ghetto.
What I’d like to know though, is where else can you find a bearded woman rummaging through garbage a block from your apartment? Not in the nice neighborhoods, I can assure you that! And what about all the couches and chairs people thoughtfully place at the edge of the curb so you can randomly take a lounge as you take a stroll on the colorful chewing gum ridden sidewalks, each wad of gum like a dot on a map.
Anyway, this is my little ode to my ghetto apartment on Mariposa avenue, one block south of Los Angeles’ Wilshire Blvd. Good bye my apartment.
