Editor reevaluates downtown after getting mugged

Dan Evans, the editor of the Times Community News papers, moved downtown from the Burbank area about six months ago to try living in the Arts District. Sounds like he mostly liked it until last Sunday night, when he was mugged about midnight near Sci-Arc. Now he caries a socket wrench.

He writes about the mugging today in the Glendale News-Press. Excerpt:

I live in the Arts District in downtown Los Angeles, and two guys dressed like gangbangers robbed and beat me just past midnight a week ago Sunday. The wrench is for protection, and I wish I had it that night. I won’t make that mistake again.

When the sun goes down, I get tense. I can feel the veins in my jaw pulsating whenever I reach a dark corner, especially the one where Traction Avenue turns into Merrick Street. It was near that corner that two Latino guys with shaved heads, dressed in white T-shirts and beige pants, hit me on the back of my head, took my phone, wallet and keys, and left me bleeding on the sidewalk.

Except for the fact that it happened, it would be almost funny. They looked like ’bangers out of central casting, pure stereotyped evil, down to their dress and diction.

They hit me with the butt of a gun. As least, that’s what I think: Police say two similar-looking dudes robbed a pair of students from the nearby Southern California Institute of Architecture by gunpoint the following evening....

Donna and I moved downtown about six months ago, tired of suburbia, tired of neighbors who were closed and insular, and tired of feeling like we didn’t quite fit in. I don’t mean to say all of Burbank is like that, as many in the Media City live in close-knit communities. But it wasn’t like that on our street, and wasn’t likely ever to be that way.

I know my neighbors now. I like them. I spend time with them, and feel the commonality that only comes from living in a dystopian paradise....

Dan and Donna, you might remember, wrote in 2011 about competing against each other on the community news beat.

Arts District photo: LA Observed