Affluent Enclave Will Close Gates on the City : Neighborhoods: Residents of Whitley Heights area near Hollywood Bowl are erecting barriers. They say they’re not snobs, but are worried about crime and traffic.

At the bottom of “the hill,” as local residents refer to Whitley Heights, work has begun on tall, metal gates to keep outsiders from their Hollywood Hills enclave.

“It’s a shame we need to do it,” 80-year-old Richard Whitfield said last week as he spoke to a group of neighbors outside his home, a Mediterranean-style villa where Gloria Swanson once lived and William Faulkner wrote.

Many of the 200 homes on narrow, winding streets near the Hollywood Bowl have housed famous writers, movie stars or directors, and the 89-year-old neighborhood is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Now, homeowners have taken the unusual step of obtaining city permits to remove the streets in their neighborhood from public use and are shouldering the $250,000 cost to install eight electronic barriers. It has been a 10-year effort.

The residents say that they want to protect themselves from traffic, crime and transients from nearby Hollywood Boulevard and readily admit that they have taken an extreme action.

“We are sending a signal by having gates,” said Robert Higgins, a neighbor of Whitfield, “that says, ‘This community is alive and well and taking care of itself.’ We’re not going to move to Pacific Palisades or wherever it’s supposedly better.”

Some see the gates as a way of excluding the rest of Los Angeles from the neighborhood’s stately stucco homes, many with stained- or leaded-glass windows, glazed tile and iron balustrades.

“This is an elitist thing,” said Tom Bell, a film production assistant who lives in an apartment building just below the gates on Whitley Avenue. Because of parking restrictions there, dozens of tenants such as Bell often park their cars overnight on Whitley Heights streets. Now they wonder what they will do. “You shouldn’t be able to block off an entire street for their exclusive use,” Bell said.

“You hear it all the time, they want to keep the ‘riffraff’ out,” said Jerry Millman, resident manager of the apartment house where Bell lives. “This is a very divisive thing.”

Architect Jeff Chusid, who heads a nearby homeowners association in Hollywood Heights, said his hillside community has similar problems but has not contemplated installing gates. “We don’t want to give the sense of being an island of wealth in the midst of problems,” he said. “We don’t want to be an island.”

Whitley Heights residents say that they are bothered by Hollywood Bowl concert-goers who park in their neighborhood to avoid parking fees. Mostly, they say that they are “besieged” by crime, particularly burglaries and street robberies. One resident, Betty Beall, said she has been burglarized eight times in the last 10 years. Another, who asked that her name not be used, said the driver of a shuttle bus was robbed two weeks ago at gunpoint as he dropped her off. She ran up some steps and escaped.

Judie B. A. de Turenne, a resident for 10 years, said prostitutes from Hollywood often bring clients up to the neighborhood to take advantage of its quiet streets and dense foliage.

“One night I found one outside my home, all bloody from being pistol-whipped,” she said.

To officers at the Los Angeles Police Department’s Hollywood Division, Whitley Heights is hardly an urban battle zone.

“That is not a high-crime area,” said James Tomer, the lead patrol officer for the neighborhood. “They may think it is, but compared to other places in Hollywood, crime up there is almost non-existent.”

Whitley Heights is the third community in the city, after Hathaway Estates in Silver Lake and Layfayette Square, south of Hancock Park, to seek city permission to block off public access to their streets. According to Larry Burks, deputy city engineer for the Department of Public Works, two more communities, Los Feliz Estates near Griffith Park and Athens Park, southwest of Watts, have also applied.

Thirty-seven city neighborhoods have obtained “permit parking” to prevent outsiders from parking on their streets. Gating is a more severe restriction that has become “popular only in the last 10 years,” Burks said.

He noted that some private communities, such as Laughlin Park in Los Feliz and the Park La Brea apartment complex, have also gated their streets in the last year. Fremont Place in the Hancock Park area was built as a gated community in the early 1900s. Gates are increasingly common in new tract developments, he said.

From discussions with neighborhood groups, Burks said, the prevailing reasons are “traffic and crime control.” The main criterion for approving gates, he said, is whether the community has only local streets or contains a major thoroughfare.

One effect already felt in Whitley Heights is higher property values. Barry Sloane, a real estate agent who sells homes in the community, said selling prices have climbed 20% in the last 18 months as the gates come closer to reality.

The City Council voted to approve the community’s request in 1985, and the permit process has taken another five years.

“Prices have already gone up, and they will again after the gates are up,” Sloane said, noting that the average three-bedroom now costs about $500,000. “I’ve sold to speculators who’ve been waiting for this.”

Candace Barnhart, president of Whitley Heights Civic Assn., said the residents were not motivated by greed or elitism. “We’re not going to become the next Bel-Air,” she said. “Some might say we’re a bunch of snobs or elitists, but that’s not so. We were looking to make the streets safe.”

Whitley Heights was started in 1902 by developer H.J. Whitley, who laid out lots so each hillside home would have a view. In the 1920s and ‘30s, it was home to several film stars, such as Rudolph Valentino and Jean Harlow. Residents in recent years have included more middle-class professionals, although several actors and film production people still live there.

“The hill” is a close-knit place, with its own newsletter, as well as community functions such as an annual block party and an auction, Barnhart said. “You know your neighbors by their first names. It’s like a little town unto itself.”

Once the eight gates are in place at the community’s main entry points, residents and approved visitors will have access through electronically controlled codes. Police, fire and sanitation personnel will have special keys.

Apartment tenants who live nearby said they did not know gates were going up until they saw the foundation posts being built over the last month.

“I feel I’m being pushed out,” said Paul Candice, an actor who has lived four years on a section of Whitley Avenue where parking is prohibited. He said he may have to move--just to park his car.

Staffers for Councilman Michael Woo, who represents the area, said they have asked the Department of Transportation to relax parking restrictions or install angled parking as a way of accommodating more cars on streets below the gates.

Whitley resident Higgins said he hopes the gates will not be there forever. “In my dream, Hollywood will become a more vital urban area and there will be no necessity for gates. Then we’ll raise money and tear them down.”

WHITLEY HEIGHTS GATES

Gates are being constructed to eliminate public access to the historic community of Whitley Heights. Its Hollywood Hills residents fought for 10 years for the right to withdraw the streets from public use, to prevent crime and the use of its streets as free parking for patrons of the Hollywood Bowl.