Cruising Highland Park

I thought I'd take this opportunity to give a pictorial tour around Highland Park, the community that sits to the north east below Mt. Washington —home of the notorious Avenues gang—in order to answer a question posed in an earlier post as to the whereabouts of the wicked looking Micky Mouse.

Micky is on the back wall of The Highland, the oldest movie theater in the area, at Figueroa and Ave. 56, on the south side of the street...

...across from a community garden called Milagro Allegro. The director Nicole Gatto and community members broke ground in February of this year.

Micky is part of a series of murals by various artists, in the alleys and parking lots off Figueroa. If you drive down the alley behind the theater and look to your left you'll find Micky.

Other murals can be found in a continuous row from Ave. 57 to Ave. 60 on both sides of the street.

 

     

This last mural is painted on the wall of Monte Vista Elementary, at Monte Vista and Ave. 54, a school in the middle of the 'hood, where children are trained to hit the ground on hearing gunfire from feuding gangs. The intrepid reporter Steve Lopez wrote that the children at the school have been caught in the middle of such madness "far too often." I believe though this is a mural of hope and endurance.