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Sherlene Taylor surveys her home of 20 years and the once-bustling block of Harcourt Street in West Adams with heavy sighs and an air of despair.
She points to the lopsided houses and empty plots of dirt and rocks-the remains of the thrashing this street and the neighborhood took in the Northridge earthquake.
In front of her own house, Taylor carefully steps over bricks, old lumber and trash strewn throughout the front and back yards. She peeks through a gaping hole to view what was once her living room, now a hollow shell of wooden beams and floors. Her driveway is a mass of gravel, dust and debris.
It's the middle of a weekday afternoon in an area dominated by retired senior citizens, but Harcourt Street is strangely quiet.
"It's depressing to see your house like this, all broken down," Taylor, 55, says in a low voice. "And the neighborhood, too. Old friends gone, their houses just sitting there with no one in them. You don't know if they'll move back. It's all changed."
Scattered along this block-long stretch of Harcourt-and two adjacent streets-between Adams Boulevard and Hickory Street are the quake's vivid scars: vacant houses, empty lots where homes once stood, skeletons constructed for new buildings.
Eight months after the temblor shook Los Angeles, the city is still plagued with single blocks and neighborhoods of vacant, wrecked buildings, dubbed ghost towns by the Los Angeles housing department because of the physical devastation and the increase of vandalism, theft and vagrants.
Though most of the 15 ghost towns in Los Angeles are in the San Fernando Valley, West Adams is the site of an often-overlooked designated area.
Bordered by Adams and Rimpau boulevards, Palm Grove Avenue and Hickory Street, this cluster of mostly single-family homes and duplexes was hard hit. Several dozen chimneys toppled. Hairline cracks created what looked like replicas of freeway maps on walls. About 10% of the area's 1930s-era houses were knocked off their foundations.
Plywood boards now cover windows and padlocks block the doors, while grass grows into tall weeds at some houses. On the corner of Palm Grove Avenue and Hickory Street, the shell of a duplex that burned during the earthquake stood precariously on one side while the...