| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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overcrowded and faced great difficulties in teaching a population comprised mainly of new immigrants. Other public and social services in the area were also inadequate or lacking. There were no grocery stores in the neighborhood. The fire department serving the area was drastically understaffed, especially considering that the neighborhood maintained the highest population density in the city and that the conditions of the housing stock did not meet citywide safety and fire codes.
That was the dramatic picture of MacArthur Park that emerged during the early to mid-1990s: an immigrant area possessing such negative characteristics that it seemed almost certainly lost in a downward spiral of detrimental social conditions.
Yet, there was and is another side to that dramatic picture. The more positive picture focuses on the emerging community institutions catering
Plate 1. Informal workers in MacArthur Park during the late 1990s.
Source: Photograph taken by author.