Susannah Snider

Downtown Los Angeles can be empty and uninviting. Instead of families and homes, it has office buildings and parking garages.

A growing group of downtown residents wants to change the face of downtown. With the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council and local activists, they are "taking to the parks" to advocate for more green spaces.

The members of Downtown Dogwalk walk their dogs together in Pershing Square each month to pressure City Council to build an off-leash dog park. Susannah Snider reports on what the dog walkers are doing and how their activism is building a community.

City officials gathered in front of the former Avenues gang headquarters, nicknamed the Satellite House, Wednesday morning to watch a CAT excavator demolish the gang's nerve center and symbolically restore the neighborhood to its residents.

"Today this symbol is not just a symbol of destruction--what we can take down--but what we can build up," Los Angeles City Council President Eric Garcetti said.
 
The modest one-story residence in northeast Los Angeles, which earned its nickname because it was the community's first house with a satellite, served as the Avenues gang's hub for 20 years.  

Sgt. Brian Fitzpatrick, a 27-year veteran of the Culver City Police Department, described Culver City as "the black hole of news coverage."  Although the media call every evening to ask if anything newsworthy happened, the tiny city gets little airtime.  Perhaps it is because they feel press-deprived, but scheduling the ride along with Culver City was easy.  I arrived at the station, signed some papers, and was sitting next to a police officer within minutes.

It was uncharacteristically cold in Los Angeles the night Sen. Barack Obama became president-elect.  I rubbed my freezing hands together as I waited to enter the pro-Obama rally at Century City's Hyatt Regency. 

As I watched the second presidential debates in a darkened USC auditorium, I was more surprised by the free pizza (pepper and onion!) than the candidates' answers.

Apparently, the best questions the entire nation and moderator Tom Brokaw could scrabble together were the tired inquiries about the economic crisis.  The time limits gave Sens John McCain and Barack Obama a few seconds to speed through a stump speech that rarely answered the question.  There was little interaction and even less improvisation.  Bo-oring.

The daily commute may be the quintessential LA experience.  Every morning, businesspeople leave their tidy bedroom communities and head to work.  In the financial district, bankers mingle with students, homeless people, and ice cream vendors.  For some, the financial district is just another spoke in their long journey on public transportation.  For others, its overpriced parking structures are their final destination.  For a very few--like myself--it is home.

The real presidential debates began after the candidates made their final remarks and walked offstage.  Cameras zoomed back to the newsrooms and pundits began to argue over who won.  No one could agree.  In a culture where hanging chads and "Dancing with the Stars" frustrate our attempts to identify real winners and losers, the debate left an unsatisfying, unsolved aftertaste in our mouths.