Outside Disneyland’s Door Is Wicked Reality : Crime: For 4,000 residents who live in an apartment ghetto behind the Disneyland Hotel, the innocence and escapism of the Magic Kingdom are a million miles away.

The red neon sign atop the Disneyland Hotel flickers on at twilight, about the same time the taco truck pulls up a block away at the curb on Lynne Avenue.

In the hotel courtyard, hundreds of camera-toting tourists gather before silent fountains that will soon spring to life for the hotel’s nightly “Dancing Waters” show. On Lynne Avenue, the taco truck draws a crowd of Latino men eager for a quick dinner and some conversation--what happened that day at the factory, how busy it was in the restaurant kitchen, whose car was broken into last night, which neighbor was shooting up in the laundry room again.

Disneyland is just down the street, but for the 4,000 residents of a five-block apartment ghetto directly behind the Disneyland Hotel, the innocence and escapism of the Magic Kingdom are a million miles away. For in the shadow of the Matterhorn, at the heart of Orange County’s richest tourist area, lies a crime-ridden, drug-infested pocket of poverty.

The irony does not escape Father John Lenihan, pastor of the nearby St. Boniface Catholic Church.

“You’ve got Fantasyland and then this place on earth--the true Frontierland across the street,” Lenihan said.

The neighborhood is dominated by unskilled laborers who are the backbone of Anaheim’s biggest and best-known industry--hotel maids, dishwashers, janitors, restaurant workers, gardeners and others.

Their home is a place they call Tijuanita--a little Tijuana, a smaller version of the border town linking San Diego and Baja California. City officials call the place Jeffrey-Lynne, named for the intersection of Jeffrey Drive and Lynne Avenue in the heart of the area. The police call it simply one of the toughest neighborhoods in town.

That image was reinforced early Sunday morning when Anaheim police, responding to reports of a man firing a gun into the air and knocking on apartment doors, shot the suspect in the abdomen, side and back. He remains unidentified, in stable condition at UCI Medical Center in Orange.

Residents of the neighborhood said they didn’t bother looking outside when they heard the gunfire because that sort of thing happens all the time. Anaheim police would not dispute that.

“We spend a lot of time down there,” said Lt. Bob Puckett of the Anaheim Police Department. “It’s been that way for years.”

Publicity about the area’s problems has sparked the interest of city officials, resulting in improved police protection and a $50,000 study that examined ways to improve the neighborhood. In June, the City Council approved spending $68,000 to establish a mini-community center in Jeffrey-Lynne, but the facility has yet to open because city officials can’t find a private agency willing to operate the center.

The ways of City Hall--the bureaucracy, the studies, the rules about how taxpayer money can be spent--make no sense to frustrated Jeffrey-Lynne residents. A study doesn’t affect the gunfire that rings through the streets nearly every weekend night, they say. Time-consuming city procedures mean the drug dealers will have longer to work the neighborhood, they believe.

If the bureaucrats would spend some time in Jeffrey-Lynne, where Guadalupe Esquivel has lived for the last eight years, she thinks plans to clean up the neighborhood would be further along.

“If they listen to us about what the problems are, they can be fixed,” Esquivel said. “We feel that they don’t listen.”

Esquivel, a Mexican-born mother of three who speaks no English and is unemployed, has emerged as a neighborhood leader of sorts. “My husband didn’t want me to get involved at first, but now he doesn’t say anything,” said Esquivel, a stocky woman with bronze skin and shoulder-length black hair.

She gathered some neighbors in the living room of her apartment to sit on a crimson velvet sofa-group and share their experiences about living in the area. They looked out a sliding glass door at the grimy apartment buildings and told stories of violence, drug abuse and fear in a tone of resignation.

“One time I was washing clothes in the laundry room and these people asked me to leave for a few minutes so they could go in there and inject themselves,” said a woman who lives a couple of apartment buildings away. “I left.”

Another neighbor remembers being shocked the first time a junkie asked for his assistance with an injection.

“I helped her,” said the man, who moved to Jeffrey-Lynne from Mexico three years ago. “I didn’t know what else to do. . . . It was so strange to me.”

“I spent the night on the floor of the closet because they were shooting outside the window,” volunteered a woman who lives in an apartment a couple of buildings away.

“There is a woman who comes here with her baby and walks the baby around in a stroller and sells drugs from the diaper bag,” another neighbor said. “Incredible, no?”

Occasionally, Esquivel said tourists too cheap to pay for parking at Disneyland leave their rental cars down the street in Jeffrey-Lynne. “When they get back, the stereo is gone and I’ve seen the tires slashed,” she said with a sheepish laugh. “It’s embarrassing.”

According to a survey of 100 Jeffrey-Lynne households presented to the Anaheim City Council this summer, 55% of the residents don’t feel safe in the neighborhood and 53% say drug abuse is the area’s biggest problem.

The police have increased car patrols and added occasional foot patrols, but Lt. Puckett said the problems won’t stop until Jeffrey-Lynne residents report more of the crimes they complain about. This, despite police receiving nearly 3,600 calls from the Jeffrey-Lynne area last year--about 10 calls a day from a neighborhood of five city blocks, according to police statistics.

“They don’t have the faith to come and tell us,” Puckett said. “We need to get them to believe that we’re not down there to haul them in because they don’t have a green card.”

The residents say that police underestimate what it takes to report a crime in Jeffrey-Lynne. First, dialing 911 is impossible for many residents. They can’t afford telephone service. If they do make the call, the dispatcher may not speak Spanish, resulting in a delay in police response time. And those who report crimes risk retaliation from drug dealers and gang members in the neighborhood.

“They ask you for your name and address and then they come and talk to you to take the report,” one resident said. “Everybody sees you talking to the police. Who wants to get involved?”

That lack of trust is acknowledged by the Police Department, which last month met with Jeffrey-Lynne residents to unveil a plan calling for more police protection and better service from city departments that handle graffiti removal, building violation codes and recreation activities. Puckett said the Police Department may even open a small office in a Jeffrey-Lynne apartment.

“We want to improve the entire quality of life in the community,” Puckett said.

Esquivel said the response from municipal workers has been uneven. Three Jeffrey Drive street lamps were dark one night last week. And until a few months ago, street-sweeping was next to impossible because both sides of the streets throughout the neighborhood were scheduled to be swept the same day. Residents, left with nowhere to park, didn’t move their cars. The city has since switched to sweeping alternate sides of the street on different days.

Irene Martinez, who assisted in the Jeffrey-Lynne study, said city workers may neglect the area because its customs are unfamiliar and thus intimidating. Residents congregate in front of apartment buildings during the day, speaking in rapid-fire Spanish, while vendors park their vans in the street to hawk fresh vegetables and other goods.

“People who aren’t raised in that environment cannot understand,” said Martinez, marketing director for the Orange County Community Consortium Inc. of Santa Ana, which conducted the Jeffrey-Lynne study. “They are just out there socializing. People are afraid of that.”

Several residents said police protection has improved recently, and they are encouraged. But when children sound the alarm as soon as a police cruiser rounds the corner and drug deals happen in the blink of an eye, residents know the criminals still have the edge.

“They seem to always get away with it,” one woman said.

Though Jeffrey-Lynne residents rate crime as their top concern, other important needs are also going unmet, said Mary Ann Salamida, director of the consortium.

* Jeffrey-Lynne residents often go without health care and other services because of their inability to speak English. Spanish is the primary language in 83% of the homes, the survey said, and 80% of residents are Mexican immigrants.

* The cost of housing--upward of $500 a month for a one-bedroom apartment--means rents are out of reach for a family earning minimum wage. Many families double up to meet rent payments, which results in overcrowding. There are also families living in garages and, occasionally, businesses that are operated out of garages, police said.

* About half of the maintenance requests to landlords made by residents went unanswered, the survey reported, and 24% of those surveyed complained they did not have hot water. As part of the study, about 50 Jeffrey-Lynne landlords were invited to participate in plans for improving the area, but only nine responded, Salamida said.

* More than half the residents don’t have health insurance.

* Dental care is needed by 60% of residents.

* Literacy is also a problem; 75% of residents reported having a sixth-grade education or less.

The report summed up the attitude of the neighborhood in one word: Fear.

“The residents, because of limited language skills, do not speak up publicly for many of their everyday needs,” the study said. “The residents fear reprisals from gangs and drug users if they report problems. They fear eviction or an increase in rent if they report or complain about any apartment problems, and they fear to ask for help because they cannot be understood.”

Steven Swaim, community services manager for the city of Anaheim, acknowledged that the city could do a better job of informing its Spanish-speaking residents about services.

“I don’t think we’ve been effective in letting people know what we offer,” Swaim said, adding that the city is printing more of its literature in both English and Spanish.

Swaim said the community center planned for Jeffrey-Lynne will address the communication problem directly by having a bilingual staff familiar with services in the area. The trouble is, the city can’t find anybody to run the center.

After the City Council approved funds for the center, Swaim advertised for an agency to operate it. The deadline expired Oct. 13 and nobody applied, Swaim said. But the city hasn’t given up its search, he said.

“I’m sad the whole thing has taken so long,” Swaim said. “It’s not a complicated issue to start providing services to people. The complications lie in who has what role.”

Father Lenihan said the hotel operators should have a larger role in cleaning up Jeffrey-Lynne. “It is precisely because they are feeding the work needs of that area that they are there,” Lenihan said of the Jeffrey-Lynne residents. “It’s no coincidence.”

Joe Aguirre, senior public relations manager for the Disneyland Hotel, said the hotel provides health-care information in Spanish to its workers, offers English classes and has provided meeting space for Jeffrey-Lynne residents. But the neighborhood’s problems, Aguirre said, are the city’s responsibility.

“The hotel is not a social service agency,” he said.

After a couple of years of talking to people from the city, the hotel, the Police Department and others, Esquivel has concluded that the neighborhood cannot depend on anyone from the outside. “They make promises, and sometimes they keep them and sometimes they don’t,” she said. “We have to do it ourselves.”

And so this summer, through an organization called Padres Unidos en Acciones Comunitarios (Parents United in Community Action), Jeffrey-Lynne has started its first boys’ baseball team. The boys played their first game a couple of weeks ago and beat the team from Chevy Chase, another central Anaheim neighborhood.

“We’ve got some good ballplayers here,” Esquivel boasted. Uniforms for the team cost $400, and Esquivel is organizing a food sale on Nov. 4 to raise money. “I’m getting lots of the parents involved,” she said. “I think we can do this.”