Sabine Phillips’s first stop on her three-hour inspection of her neighborhood was Fountain Avenue and St. Andrews Place, where individual pieces of sofa were laid out on the sidewalk as if it were an outdoor living room.
Phillips unloaded his yellow Huffy Cruiser, grabbed a pen and recorded the discovery in his spiral notebook.
“This area is a typical dumping ground,” he told me, eyes hidden behind sunglasses beneath a floppy sun hat.
His part-time assistant, Keith Johnson, was wearing a “Trash Club Hollywood” T-shirt. He pressed the handle of his trash-catcher device to trap cookie and chip wrappers, which were floating near some empty Pacifico beer bottles and a drum-shaped Big Gulp container. When they report neighborhood problems to the city, Johnson said, “sometimes they are helpful and sometimes not, so we act on our own.”
Sabine Phillips, 66, and Keith Johnson, 71, right, ride their bikes while documenting debris left on the sidewalks of their East Hollywood neighborhood on April 15.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
Phillips said much of the furniture and other items left on the streets are used to build homeless camps. This often leads to more trash, fires, drug activity and other nuisances that threaten public safety and put residents at risk.
Phillips doesn’t just take notes. She reports her findings to the city MyLA311 system on Wednesday, so city crews can do pickup Thursday and Friday. And they usually respond, Phillips said. But the cycle is quickly repeated, and he typically reported 50 or more additional items week after week, month after month.
In a quarter century of writing about the many plundered pieces of heaven, I have been impressed again and again by those who step forward and make change out of some combination of pride, desperation, and a sense of volunteerism. But I also understand the anger of taxpayers who wonder why Los Angeles City Hall is so incapable of managing basic things.
In the race for city leadership, Mayor Karen Bass and Council Member Nitya Raman also say things have to change, which isn’t necessarily the best comment on their leadership.
“Unfortunately, it has become pretty much universal across all 99 neighborhoods in this city that L.A. government is not working,” mayoral candidate Adam Miller said at a recent West L.A. appearance, where I visited, and he said he would use his business and nonprofit experience to tackle homelessness, housing and public safety challenges, among other issues. “We pay the highest taxes in the country, to the point where people feel we are no longer getting value for our money.”
Last week, following my column about the substantial list of damage around City Hall — including a graffiti-ridden fountain that has been out of operation for most of the last 60 years (no lie) — I heard from readers about their own problems.
Richard Vasquez wrote that Plaza de Mexico in Lincoln Heights is still a graveyard of missing statues. Richard Zaldívar wrote that a nearby AIDS memorial was vandalized and that numerous calls for help had gone unheard. Estela Lopez of the Downtown Industrial Improvement District, where garbage is regularly dumped illegally, wrote to say county report It was warned that typhus levels in the city had reached an all-time high.
Sabine Phillips documented discarded furniture and debris found on the sidewalks of her neighborhood in East Hollywood on Wednesday.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
I also heard from Stephanie Keenan, who had a clever idea a few years ago that was born out of being angry at City Hall. She hired her housekeeper to help patrol and clean up the neighborhood where they both lived – that would be Phillips – and Phillips’ work was featured. nbcla and substacker Sam Quinones.
“It’s not being done otherwise, and our neighborhood would have burned down,” Keenan told me.
Keenan, who has been patrolling her streets for several years, is paying Phillips $100 for Wednesday scouting missions and an additional $100 to fill four or five large bags on Saturday trash patrols. Photographer Keenan told me he spent thousands of dollars out of his own pocket.
But Keenan doesn’t have unlimited money, and this was Phillips’ last week on the job. God only knows what the neighborhood will look like without him on patrol. As she was pedaling her regular route Wednesday, Phillips found several more couches, among other things.
A freezer. A refrigerator. Carpets. Chairs. feces. Dresser. shelf. Bed frames. Mattress. Box Springs. A printer. Electronics. Television.
and piles of garbage, some of which blocked sidewalks and some spilled onto sidewalks and streets.
On Lexington Avenue she stopped to make the following entry in her log:
“3 toilets.”
Nothing surprised him, and nothing slowed him down. At a home where a construction worker had dumped wood on the sidewalk, Phillips walked over and asked what would happen to the scrap pile. He said he had no information; He made an entry in his log.
Phillips takes a break from documenting the addresses of abandoned furniture and debris.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
I tried to recruit Phillips to run for mayor, but the native of Germany was not interested. However, she said that she was “Berlin’s first female bouncer” and that she was “at the Hells Angel discotheque”.
The Berlin bouncer kept going, and kept dragging. He filled three pages in his notebook with over 60 notations, including sidewalk graffiti.
“I’ve seen some strange things,” Phillips said. “Twice I found safes outside, right at the edge.”
The studio-surrounding area she patrols is a diverse mix of expensive homes and apartment buildings on block-long stretches, with people moving in and out and leaving their possessions on the curb as they come and go.
It’s not the city’s fault. But the city could do a better job of educating residents about arranging for pickup, and cracking down on them when they don’t. I reached out to Council Member Hugo Soto-Martinez’s office, but we weren’t able to connect until my deadline passed.
At the Lexington Avenue pocket park, Phillips told me he had never seen children in the field.
Pointing to the sandbox she said, “I’ll show you why I’ll never let kids play here again.” “There’s glass…needles, and…you’ll see human waste over there in the corner.”
A temporary house next to the sandbox was covered with a blue tarpaulin. Someone was sleeping on the bench. A gang tag was painted on the slide, and two people were huddling under the slide at the edge of the sandbox. Phillips said she has seen homeless people use the water fountain to shower, and a 15-year-old student from a nearby high school died in 2022 after buying drugs there.
Jenny Carpio and her dog, Skye, walk past debris on the sidewalk in East Hollywood.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
While Phillips and Johnson were at the park, a city Rec and Parks employee arrived. He said he was there to check out the condition of the park, where a new playground was to be built that would cost about $300,000. He said that a dead body was found in the park some time ago. He estimated that about 30% to 50% of the city’s parks have similar problems.
I’m reminded of Kurt Vonnegut’s quote in “Slaughterhouse-Five.”
so it goes.
The madness of investing in a new playground when a dozen problems make the park unsafe should be crystal clear to everyone. There is certainly more to the plan, one can hope – something solid and sustainable. But this is a risky bet.
It might be better to admit defeat for now, close the park, and do something else with that $300,000.
Use it to recruit Phillips and the team trained and supervised by him into a fleet of yellow Huffys.
I guarantee it will be money well spent.
steve.lopez@latimes.com
