Party Set in Shootout Area to Awaken Sense of Community

NORTH HOLLYWOOD — She could chart constellations of bullet holes.

She could point to the cracked patch of sidewalk where she took frantic cover with her son. She could trot out strapping teenage neighbors who now flinch at fireworks.

But more than three months after the Bank of America shootout, Gloria Martino has decided to move past the haunting physical reminders and focus on something inaccessible to looky-loos: a sense of community.

She has spent the past several weeks going door-to-door in a roughly 20-block section of North Hollywood, advertising a block party today that will celebrate the famous neighborhood’s endurance.

Streets will be blocked off, politicians are expected in full force, and Humvees and other military vehicles will roll through the neighborhood that came under siege when two bank robbers fled their heist gone awry. Both were killed before residents’ eyes during a barrage of police fire.

The bank itself even plans a booth at the all-day event to woo former customers scared off by the Feb. 28 confrontation.

“This is what a community does in the summer,” said Martino, who said she is trying to replicate gatherings she recalls from her childhood in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, N.Y. “Even people jammed into apartment buildings would bring tables out to the street and there would be lots of music and food. Everybody got to know each other.”

Beyond the booths and games and watermelon, though, lies a much more precarious mission. Working with Los Angeles police, Martino has breathed new life into a Neighborhood Watch group that has been inactive for at least a decade. In July, the group will hold its first monthly meeting.

Most neighborhood crime has been dropping this year, as it has elsewhere in the city, though rape and burglary have risen slightly--about 1%. Still, the Bank of America shootout was a stark reminder of the random nature of violence in a big city.

Martino insists the watch, whose jurisdiction runs from Laurel Canyon to Lankershim Boulevard and Kittridge Street to the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks, already has made a noticeable impression.

Signs have been posted advising passersby of its presence. Word has spread. Neighbors who once were isolated now are talking to each other.

“This is an area where people move in and out, in and out,” she said. “People didn’t care who was living next to them. Now, after all we’ve been through, we’re trying to help people feel like they’re not alone.”

Residents felt plenty of solidarity at Thursday night’s monthly meeting of the Police Community Representatives at Victory Boulevard Elementary School, the site of counseling sessions and police briefings since the shootout, which has become the community’s town hall.

Police officers took turns discussing crime in their assigned portions of the North Hollywood Division. They drew loud, frequent laughter with uproarious stories of nabbing escaped prisoners and subduing car thieves during the recent heat wave without leaving the air-conditioned comfort of their cruisers.

As a colleague bantered with the crowd, Larry Taylor, a senior lead officer in the division, whispered, “This just keeps everybody loose.”

Moments later, Senior Lead Officer Mike Jensen introduced North Hollywood’s new sergeant in charge of community relations, Dean Haynes.

“He got shot up in that bank shootout, so they gave him an easy job,” Jensen quipped.

Everybody laughed.

Martino appeared at the meeting wearing a T-shirt that read, “NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH: We’re building an army.” She plugged the block party, and Taylor mentioned the budding group. Despite a warm reception from the crowd of about 60, only one person signed a sheet soliciting party volunteers.

Nor is there an exact count of participants in the watch. Volunteers have gotten verbal commitments from several dozen residents, but no one will be sure of the degree of support until the July 9 meeting.

Proponents of the Neighborhood Watch realize that persuading residents of the bank area to channel their anxiety into action will not be easy. Even as the shootout has brought people closer together, it has heightened sensitivity to crime.

“Now people are scared,” said Harry Abrahamyan, a 20-year-old Pierce College student and a captain of the Neighborhood Watch.

“This area isn’t exactly the Ritz-Carlton,” agreed Frank Beer, Martino’s brother-in-law and a nearby Gentry Avenue resident. “We hear gunshots. We hear helicopters. And immediately we’re looking up, trying to find out where it’s coming from. . . . Feb. 28 got us thinking.”

A native of the San Fernando Valley, he contrasted the shootout’s aftermath with that of the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

“After the earthquake, you saw a lot of people you never saw before saying, ‘Hey, you need some bottled water? Here you go,’ ” he said. “But here it was kind of eerie. After they cleared all the visitors away, it took some time” before people could connect with each other.

Beer said the best antidote to uneasiness is knowledge.

“If you know where somebody lives, you have their phone number if anything happens, it’s so much better than just waving at them and moving on,” he said. “When you feel like you know them, now you’re waving for real.”

Through the entire ordeal--televised images of the armor-clad gunmen wounding 17 police and bystanders before dying on their street, crowds combing their shrubbery for spent ammunition--residents of the bank area have clung to the average quality of their neighborhood. At first, that quality accelerated the fear that no one is immune to crime. Now it has helped them rebuild.

People filing out of Thursday’s meeting chatted about their children’s bedtime and soccer games or a new car they had their eye on.

“You know, that thing with the bank could have happened anywhere,” Martino said.

Abrahamyan nodded. He said he couldn’t wait for the block party, that he planned to rise at 6 a.m. to help set it up.

He has lived with his family since 1980 on Archwood Street, in a house at the heart of the bank robbers’ path.

At the last block party a decade ago, he and his brother were kids who didn’t quite understand what that event meant.

“They held a huge party here. They blocked off the streets, they had a pinata,” he said with a nostalgic grin. “We were small then. Now it’s years later and we’re involved.”

To neighbors once imprisoned in their own homes, he added: “It means something different.”