How East LA’s Bodie Street Lost Its Name

I grew up in a street filled with kids with little or no inhibitions. There were about six or seven of us, which by today’s standards would be a gang, but back in the mid-1980s we were just trying to play some ball and burn some excess energy. We lived on Bodie Street and we were fortunate because all Bodie Street was just a long stretch of alleyway.

It looked quite intimidating if you were not a resident – especially at night since we did not have any street lights. But for a kid, it was paradise. The only cars you had to worry about were parked ones. That meant that you were more likely to hit a car than have a car hit you. At the same time we were quite unfortunate, since my family could not order a pizza because the driver could not find the street, let alone the house. We had to agree to wait at the local gas station in order to complete any kind of business transaction.

Then one day, Bodie Street suffered through its worst tragedy. We were a hotbed of traffic since the street ran parallel to both the entrance and the exit to 101 Freeway – and with freeways come drunk drivers. An anonymous member of the drunken driving community could not negotiate the right turn coming out of the freeway and plowed right into our street sign.

There he was, an inebriated George Washington knocking down a metal cherry tree. The whole neighborhood came out, and he entertained the crowd with his drunken shenanigans. He demanded to know who had put a sign in his way. Back then, drunken driving was not really seen as a crime, but rather a lapse of judgment. The police, paramedics, and fire fighters came. In the end, I did not see who left with neither the car nor the sign.

From that day on, we became known as the block without a name. Pizza deliveries became nonexistent, because although we could be found on a Thomas Guide, finding the street by any other means had become impossible. We became the ideal street to start dealing drugs. The park was too risky because the police would be waiting. No one suspected the badly lit nameless street, and if they did, they were certainly not coming in.

That was when the drugs began to flood the old neighborhood. The parents of Bodie Street were ill-equipped to battle the War on Drugs – namely because they felt they were all the same. Marijuana and heroin were the same. My father used to warn me about the consequences of being caught injecting marijuana into my body. He would have given me a beatdown. Unfortunately what parents like my father did not understand is that beatdowns do not deter things like crack and heroin.

Whether you want to call it Bodie Street or the nameless block, it matters little now. It has been torn down, repaved and become a property of interest for the Metro. I am sure whatever survived from my youth is buried underneath the ground alongside bad memories, fragmented highs and a tree stump that was once used in an unfinished game of stickball.