Florence-Firestone Will Not Be Forgotten

By ETHAN WARD | @imethanward

By ETHAN WARD | @imethanward

Ashley Orona was already at Roosevelt Park comfortably dressed in blue jeans, a gray sweater and sneakers. She smiled as she began to take me on a tour of the neighborhood where she grew up on an unusually warm Wednesday afternoon in February 2020.

Orona starts by pointing to a large bridge that residents affectionately refer to as their “unofficial monument” that allows pedestrians to cross over the Metro tracks at Florence Station, an above ground platform on the A line in unincorporated Florence-Firestone. Orona said residents take advantage of the stairs to exercise, but also serves as an unofficial gang boundary. Orona quickly points out that people rarely cross the tracks, which is known for being sketchy, she said. 

Orona points to an industrial area with abandoned warehouses that litter the lot on the other side of the bridge and how it attracts a lot of people experiencing homelessness. She adds that five people have died close to where we’re standing from either shootings or car accidents. 

“We have a history of gangs here,” said Orona. 

Orona said the violence in general is unsettling for many parents in the area who don’t think it’s safe. But still she wants you to know there is much more to Florence-Firestone than gangs and violence.

She recalled the first time her mother took her to get a library card at the now demolished Florence-Firestone library when she was 8 years old. 

“I would check out books for the reading logs they made us do at school,” said Orona. “As a teenager, I would rely on the computers a lot for class.”

Orona, now 23 and a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, said she was tired of the injustices happening in her community and turned to activism to show people they didn’t have to accept changes being “dumped” on them from outsiders. We’re standing in front of the temporary location for the Florence-Firestone library at Roosevelt Park.

Orona decided her focus would be finding a new location for the Florence-Firestone Library. What could go wrong? Everything.

LA County, which operates a $28 billion budget, still hasn’t found a location for a permanent home for the beloved neighborhood library leaving residents wondering where the support is for its community and raising concerns about accountability, transparency and conflicting interests in unincorporated neighborhoods. 

Florence-Firestone is a community located in unincorporated South Los Angeles surrounded by Huntington Park and South Gate. The neighborhood, which is 91 percent Latino and nine percent African American, falls under the oversight of the LA County Board of Supervisors. Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas oversees the neighborhood.

AMCAL Enterprises Inc. first pitched a new affordable housing building on the 1600 block of E. Florence Ave. with a new 10,000 square foot regional library on the ground floor in 2016, but Orona didn’t find out about the library closing until Dec. 2018. 

Shortly after plans were approved in January 2017, Orona said AMCAL and Mark Ridley-Thomas backtracked, claiming the new library would be a better fit at the Florence-Firestone Community Service Center. The temporary express library currently sits in a trailer with bars over the windows in nearby Roosevelt Park. 

The following month, Orona joined the executive board of Florence-Firestone Community Leaders, becoming the youngest board member in the group’s history, but left because she said the group was unwilling to be critical against the County regarding where the location of the library should be and was not very proactive in dealing with issues surrounding the library.

Much of that criticism was about the Florence-Firestone Community Plan which would “provide the policy framework to guide future development, maintenance, and preservation” in unincorporated Florence-Firestone, according to documents. Those policies covered mixed-use development like the affordable housing project AMCAL developed at the site of the now demolished library which saw an average of roughly 6,100 visitors a month from Feb. 2018 – Feb. 2019, according to data from the LA County Library. 

Orona said the Florence-Firestone Community Leaders do a lot of great work and the group holds a lot of power with LA County. She added whenever the County needs support from the community they seek out the FFCL’s first. 

In fact, at a Regional Planning Commission Public Hearing, a representative from the Florence-Firestone Community Leaders supported the proposed zone plan, according to a memo from the LA County Department of Regional Planning. 

Most of the leadership with Florence-Firestone Community Leaders are home and business owners and there is a disconnect with the rest of the neighborhood which is mostly renters, said Orona. It boiled down to a difference in opinion of how the community should engage LA County that ended with Orona and Saenz, who wanted to do more active work and protest, butting heads with the rest of the Community Leaders who wanted to use a more diplomatic approach. 

“Our leadership philosophy believes in using diplomacy and tact,” said William Allen, who served as Vice President of the Florence-Firestone Community Leaders for two years before becoming President in 2018. Allen is now the Public Safety Chair for the organization. “To accomplish good relationships, the lines of communication must always be kept open, but it can be difficult working with LA County.”

“People have good intentions, but have different ways of getting to the goals they want to achieve,” said Orona.

Staff at the LA County Dept. of Regional Planning held outreach events meant to get feedback from the community about plans for Florence-Firestone that were supposed to “reflect the community’s shared vision for future development,” according to the memo. But not everyone saw it that way.

“They were keeping us in the dark about a lot of things,” said Orona. “We’re afraid we’re going to be displaced.”

By summer of 2019, no longer reserved to sitting on the sidelines, Orona and her co-organizer Yanel Sáenz, decided to take matters into their own hands. They left Florence-Firestone Community Leaders to form Juntos Florence Firestone Together, a community-led organization dedicated to educating, empowering and fighting against gentrification in the community, according to the group’s Facebook.

Orona and Sáenz quickly got to work organizing a protest by putting the word out on Facebook, canvassing and starting a petition to save the library which collected over 7,000 signatures. The protest drew roughly 300 people from the Florence-Firestone community — many of them moms. 

“Having the library pulled from underneath you with the promise that you’ll get another one built, and then having them renege upon that promise…it feels like a betrayal from AMCAL and the Board of Supervisors,” said Erica Ortega, a mother and community leader who is active with Juntos Florence Firestone Together. “We don’t have a lot of resources in the community as is and you’re snatching another one away.”

According to a Global Communications Report released by the USC Annenberg Center for Public Relations, today’s activists aren’t interested in “lip service from corporations, politicians or peers.” Sixty-four percent of professionals believe activists will be more influential over the next five years citing declining trust in political institutions and lack of government action as the two dominant factors driving the growth of activism, according to the study. 

When Juntos Florence Firestone Together approached the LA County Board of Supervisors with the petition, they were told the decision was out of their hands and since it was AMCAL’s property, they had final say, said Orona. 

Mitch Glaser, Assistant Administrator for the Department’s Current Planning Division, said the approved Site Plan Review shows 1,950 square feet of open space on the first floor, but his office is not involved in determining how this office space will be used or finding a new location for the library.

AMCAL’s mission is to “build affordable, market-rate, student and workforce rental housing in California, Texas and Washington that improves the lives of residents and enhances their futures.” 

But when asked to respond to questions about the company’s responsibility to the community whose lives they want to improve, they declined. 

“Thank you, but we are unable to participate at this time,” said Jennifer Gordon, Director of Communications for AMCAL.

Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas has also been elusive. At a live AMA reddit to address COVID-19 last month, Ridley-Thomas skipped questions about the Florence-Firestone Library. One question was about how social distancing would work in the already cramped Florence Express Library once it reopens. 

A spokesperson for the LA County Library said they are currently planning for a gradual, phased reopening and are working with Public Health to ensure there are plans to provide appropriate social distancing. 

Sabrina Kelly, a new resident of Florence-Firestone who has taught for 25 years, said she hates the temporary bungalow the library is currently housed in and upset the County hasn’t already found a permanent location. Before COVID-19 forced the library system to close in Los Angeles, Kelly said the library was always packed so she could tell it was needed in the community. 

“It’s small and very noisy which libraries are not supposed to be,” said Kelly before the library closed. “It’s half library, half Chuck E. Cheese.”

“Though compact, the Florence Express Library is consistent with other temporary libraries used by LA County Library when sites undergo renovation or construction, and it offers a full array of programs and services,” said a spokesperson for LA County Library. 

There have been talks about locations for the library including building it inside Roosevelt Park where the express library is currently located. But Orona said the small park, which is just under 24 acres, is the only open space they have for Florence-Firestone and don’t want more space taken away to hold a library.

Orona said that a lot of people in the community go there for access to WiFi, air-conditioning in the summer, books and workshops that cater from children to seniors and taking away those resources ultimately hurts the community. 

“It’s a safe haven for a lot of people who can’t be at home,” said Orona. 

In a statement on his website, Supervisor Ridley-Thomas said he was “committed to finding a new library…to meet the needs of the Florence-Firestone community.” The Board of Supervisors approved a motion by Ridley-Thomas setting aside $5.7 million for a “prospective” new library.

But Ortega is skeptical after the original library deal fell through with AMCAL, adding it didn’t  feel like a success since a location hasn’t been approved the community agrees on.

“We’re still fighting for the library and County to give us a space we deserve,” said Orona.