| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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Plate 2. Mama's Hot Tamales Café, a community-based organization and restaurant, helped in formalizing street vendors around MacArthur Park.
Source: Photograph taken by author.
of a metro subway station in the middle of the neighborhood. Figure 1 shows the proximity of the subway station site to downtown LA. The new subway station would be the last station built in the first segment of the red line from downtown Los Angeles to MacArthur Park.
The city's initial vision was to use the subway station as the catalyst for neighborhood revitalization, as the subway would pave the way for a large-scale, mixed-use retail and office complex. This was clearly a top-down, large-scale redevelopment project that did not take the local context or population into account and, instead, catered both to the transit riders and to outside business interests. Hence, the neighborhood, with its complex institutional apparatus, was placed in a contentious struggle for survival as the city's formal institutional apparatus aimed to change the neighborhood.