Billy Land

For some reason the L.A. Times has a piece on making the Quarter more "family friendly" following on the heels of Billy Nungesser's park proposal a few weeks ago that didn't go anywhere. Anyway the part worth mentioning is at the end.

Many locals say that when it comes to making the quarter family friendly, the focus shouldn’t be on tourists but on residents of the city.

A century ago, 20,000 families lived in the quarter. Today that figure is 3,300, and only 1 out of 70 residents is aged 14 or under. Many of the historic homes have been turned into condominiums and sold to outsiders as vacation properties.

“It’s mostly an absent neighborhood,” Louis Matassa, the 67-year-old owner of Matassa’s Market, said as he walked outside his corner grocery store, founded in 1924 by his grandfather Giovanni, and surveyed the stretch of Dauphine Street he grew up on.

A block that once bustled with Sicilian and Filipino kids was still, except for a few retirees.

“Now it’s all about the tourists,” Matassa said. “The lieutenant governor might as well put a wall around the quarter and charge admission.”

And that process has pretty much been the story throughout the past three or four decades. It's what the hoteliers and the real estate people wanted. Hope they're happy.