The Brief

When 12-year-old Wilber “Wilpower” Urbina saw two kids breakdancing for the first time in MacArthur Park back in 1982, he knew he had to get involved.

“It was the coolest thing I had ever seen, but I didn't know what it was because I had never seen it before,” Urbina recalls. “The music sounded very strange, but interesting. From then on, I was just trying to copy the moves that the kids were doing.”

About a year later, Urbina heard from other kids about a new place across the street from MacArthur Park where kids could breakdance for hours for less than 75 cents.

It was called the Youth Break Center, Inc. or better known as Radiotron.

The first Radiotron graphic painted for the 1984 movie Breakin'

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Carmelo Alvarez

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Carmelo Alvarez

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A space for LA’s nascent hip-hop scene

Before Radiotron opened itself to neighborhood youth, it was an avant garde, underground space called Radio Club. In Jonathan Abrams’ The Come Up: An Oral History of the Rise of Hip-Hop, rapper and actor Ice-T recalls Radio Club originally being a punk rock space where people would get on stage and practice their new work. Then the owner started bringing in hip-hop artists from the East Coast.

As New York City’s foundational hip-hop presence continued to develop, more people started experimenting with electro-music, funk and R&B as well as dance forms like popping and locking in Los Angeles. Radio Club became integral to that new movement in the city. It became a place for emerging artists to bring what they saw from the East Coast to the West.

LA Bazar Girl and DJ Antron were regulars at Radiotron

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Carmelo Alvarez

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Carmelo Alvarez

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At the same time, these culture innovators were mixing the East Coast style with the West Coast environment, aesthetics and attitudes, says Jonathan Calvillo, a sociology professor at Emory University, and author of the forthcoming book In The Time of Sky Rhyming: How Hip Hop Resonated In Brown Los Angeles.

Calvillo says when the owners brought in Ice-T as an emcee at Radio Club, it solidified the spot as a hip-hop space, and ushered in more people of color.

Before he was the original gangster rapper and before he became Detective Odafin Tutuola on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Ice-T appeared in early 1980s L.A. breakdancing films as an emcee and dancer — the documentary 'Breakin ‘n’ Enterin’ and the now classic movies Breakin’ and Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, which were all set in Radio Club.

“Ice-T brought in more local street credibility,” Calvillo says.

Kurtis Blow and Kid Frost also visited Radio. DJ Chris “The Glove” Taylor, who frequently deejayed there, wrote about how Michael Jackson recruited some of his dancers for Thriller from Radio. It was a place where even celebrities like Madonna would go to check out the latest trends.

Then in 1983, Carmelo Alvarez, a young Mexican American dancer who had dreams of opening up a performance arts center in his childhood neighborhood of MacArthur Park, decided to rent out office space from the owner of the building Radio occupied. As Alvarez tells it, the owner then asked him to manage the building. It was his opportunity to create that performance space for kids.

Radiotron begins

Alvarez was raised in the MacArthur Park area where he was influenced by gangs. He recalls an art teacher pushing him to try out dancing at the Barnsdall Art Center and Junior Arts Center. There he met veteran artistic director and choreographer Chester Whitmore, who invited Alvarez to be in his tap troupe. He was also a part of the L.A. Inner City Cultural Center and toured with Lula Washington in a dance company.

He recalls seeing breakdancing in New York City in 1980 as a pivotal time for him. “Hip-hop is the vehicle,” Alvarez explains. “The main important thing was the youth.”

Carmelo Alvarez, founder of historic hip hop youth center Radiotron, holds a photo of Radiotron in its former space near Park View and 7th in MacArthur Park.

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Alvarez says he originally had a whole other game plan for the youth center, but the kids had seen what was happening in Radio Club. The kids were itching to breakdance.

Radio was reborn into Radiotron in 1983 when the producers of Breakin’ approached Alvarez. They named the club in the movie “Radiotron'' and it stuck.

So did the art. The crew left behind the graffiti that was part of the film's set design. Alvarez thought it brought color and light to the space, so he kept it. “I said ‘no, no, no. Leave it alone’. Before that it was all dark and black,” Alvarez recalls.

Photograph caption dated July 5, 1985 reads, "Graffiti art decorates Radiotron's walls, adding to the atmosphere of this no-age-limit nightclub, where kids 6 on up can do their thing and prove their stuff till 3 in the morning."

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James Ruebsamen

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Tino Montelongo, then 18, of Fillmore's Radiotron Wizards break-dancing troupe dancing outside the Coliseum during the Olympics in the summer of 1984.

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Chris Gulker

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Herald Examiner Collection / L.A. Public Library

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A photo from June 1985 identifies the man spinning records at Radiotron as DJ Tony.

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James Ruebsamen

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Herald Examiner Collection / L.A. Public Library

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Then came the kids.

“So I get a knock on the door and it was a little kid and he said ‘Hey mister, can we break in there?’” Alvarez recalls. “And I said 'sure.’ And they said, ‘Hey! the man said we can break in there!’ And they called a bunch of kids together and they went in there and they started breakdancing.”

“It went from an after-hours nightclub to an after-school youth center,” Alvarez says.

Calvillo says when Radio Club did not agree to the conditions Carmelo requested, its managers moved the club to another location downtown.

A 'safe haven' 

When Radiotron opened, it quickly became viewed as a safe space for kids; a place where young people could fully express themselves and stay away from drugs and gangs.

“Radiotron presented an opportunity for young people to experiment and learn from folks who have been expressing themselves through the hip-hop elements,” Calvillo says. “For a whole generation, early West Coast innovators were being acculturated into hip-hop culture at Radiotron.”

Lifelong breakdancer Wilber “Wilpower” Urbina was one of them.

“All the kids wanted to go to this place,” Urbina recalls. “They knew that you could see some of the best kids, and when you see kids who are more advanced than you are, that makes you get better, you get inspired.”

Wilber 'Wilpower' Urbina as a kid circa 1984 Los Angeles

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Courtesy of Wilber 'Wilpower' Urbina

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Wilber 'Wilpower' Urbina

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He recalls Alvarez being kind and welcoming to all kids who wanted to do graffiti and breakdance at the center.

“He was kind of like a father figure,” Urbina says. “ In barrios or hoods, most people just grew up with just a mom. To see and hear a kind person say good things, that’s great. He didn’t want anything in return. He wants you to do good, to stay away from trouble. To do art. In this place, you could do graffiti, it was really a safe haven.”

The rise of L.A. hip-hop

Many people know about the day that hip-hop supposedly jumped off. Two teen siblings from the South Bronx — DJ Kool Herc and Cindy Campbell — held a back-to-school party in their neighborhood in 1973 and Herc tried something new on the turntables, dropping what many historians say was the first hip-hop beat. But there were other elements that came to define hip-hop.

It wasn’t just the MCing or DJing or the graffiti — it was also the movement, the breakdancing. While young people in New York were b-boying and doing more street dances on the floor, in L.A. and other California cities, Black and brown kids were creating more funk-style dance moves that were placed in a larger umbrella category called “breakin’."

Even before hip-hop took off, California was the place where both popping and locking were created by young people in the 1970s. For example, a 20-something-year-old Soul Train dancer named Don Campbell created locking, an early street dance that influenced breakdance moves in L.A., back in the funk era.

In MacArthur Park, young people from all different background were getting in on it.

“At the time, MacArthur Park was not a particularly safe place to be. But it was a place that was experiencing a lot of growth, a lot of movement, a lot of migration,” Calvillo says. “A lot of the early practitioners that were learning hip-hop culture, and experimenting and adapting it to their surroundings, many of them were Central American.”

The end comes too quickly 

In Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, the dancers team up together to do a benefit show to save their endangered community center.

Calvillo says the fictional story isn’t far from the truth.

“Much of the plotline of that story was based on what was happening with Radiotron,” Calvillo says. “The youth center was going to be closed, it was being threatened in terms of its location."

Radiotron eventually closed in 1985 due in part to development. The building was torn down for the construction of the Park View Mall. According to news reports, the developers needed a parking lot — right where the Youth Break Center stood. Before that, Radiotron's weekend dances, which brought in revenue, were shut down for code violations. Doctors across the country started pointing out the dangers of breakdancing.

“Kids get hurt in football,” Alvarez says. “Kids get hurt playing on the playground. You don’t take the playground out. No, you go fix it. You tell them to be careful.” Alvarez and the Radiotron kids protested in front of City Hall to get the attention of city council members in order to keep the building but, Alvarez says, there was no luck. The building was lost. Radiotron was only in existence from 1983 to 1985.

Alvarez was heartbroken.

“I purposely had it underage, because the kids didn't have anything,” Alvarez says, reflecting on the importance of the youth center. “They were dancing in the street for money and they were getting tickets. And this is the era of crack and gangs and drive-bys. They needed something.”

Urbina said that after Radiotron closed there was nowhere else to go.

“Sometimes friends would invite us to go there to their lobby... but sometimes the lobby was small and it was carpet,” Urbina says. “So it was like ‘F---! We really miss Radiotron.’”

Alvarez says he’s opened a dozen youth centers since 1978, but it’s been hard to sustain them. The now 66-year-old Alvarez is retired and is working on a project called Community Action for Peace.

Radiotron’s lasting impact 

Alvarez says there’s one major aspect of the Radiotron story that shouldn’t be missed:: just like there were kids that held a back-to-school party that launched hip-hop culture in the South Bronx, young people were also important in the hip-hop movement in L.A.

“Those kids were innovators,” he says. “They were the ones that created it.”

Radiotron launched the careers of a long list of dancers and artists. Alvarez says some of the graffiti artists he shepherded at Radiotron have had work featured in the Museum of Contemporary Art and in LACMA. He points out artists like Prime (who is known to be the founding father of stylized L.A. graffiti lettering), Shandu One and Zender, who all made names for themselves.

Carmelo Alvarez walks near a mural painted by fromer Radiotron memebr RETNA near Park View and 7th in MacArthur Park.

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Salvadoran American breakdancers like Urbina (aka Wilpower) and Cesar “Lil Cesar'' Rivas were a part of the trendsetting Air Force Crew, which was founded at Radiotron. After the youth center physically closed, Rivas helped Radiotron become a traveling dance competition. In the 1990s the Air Force Crew danced with Kurtis Blow, and became an inspiration for Korea’s b-boying scene.

“We don't often hear their stories in the same way as when folks talk about West Coast rappers because we think of the West Coast as mostly a movement of rappers,” Calvillo said. “But these are dancers that were actually going international.”

At 53, Urbina is still hungry for more. He wants to get the moves he had in his 20s and 30s. It’s hard work, but it’s fun. There’s just one caveat.

He’s not battling people anymore. He’s battling age.

Decades after Radiotron's closing, Wilber 'Wilpower' Urbina, now in his 50s, still finds time to breakdance.

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Wilber 'Wilpower' Urbina

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Wilber 'Wilpower' Urbina

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“You’re battling not getting injuries because breakdancing is very physical,” Urbina says. “Over 50, to be doing 20, 30, 40 headspins…it’s not so easy. I’m also a realist. There’s some moves where I’m like nah…my wrists aren’t the same any more.”

Practicing once a week is enough to keep him fit.

In June, Alvarez hosted a 40-year anniversary party for Radiotron. Urbina performed with the Air Force Crew.

“I want to battle myself to get better and get better in my last years,” Urbina says. “I want to go out hardcore.”

“It makes you feel like a kid again.”

A federal appeals court has upheld a court order requiring the Department of Veterans Affairs to build more than 2,500 housing units on its West Los Angeles campus.

The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday ordered the VA to construct 750 temporary units for veterans within 18 months and 1,800 permanent housing units within six years.

The ruling found the agency had “strayed from its mission” by leasing land to commercial interests like a UCLA baseball field and Brentwood School sports complex, instead of caring for veterans.

“There are now scores of unhoused veterans trying to survive in and around the greater Los Angeles area despite the acres of land deeded to the VA for their care,” Judge Ana de Alba wrote in the opinion.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs in the Powers v. McDonough case say the ruling could end veteran homelessness in the Los Angeles region, which is home to more than 3,000 unhoused veterans, according to official estimates.

"It's the most important ruling in the history of this country concerning the rights of veterans," said Mark Rosenbaum, lead attorney with Public Counsel, during a press conference Wednesday. “After this case, there should be no such thing as a homeless veteran.”

The VA did not immediately respond to LAist’s request for comment on the ruling.

‘Long overdue’

The appeals court affirmed most of U.S. District Judge David O. Carter's 2024 ruling, which found the VA discriminated against disabled veterans by failing to provide adequate housing on the 388-acre property deeded as a soldiers' home back in 1888.

The main plaintiff named in the class-action lawsuit, Jeffrey Powers, lived in a tent outside the gates of the VA Medical Center.

At a press conference Wednesday, Powers told reporters this week’s appeals court ruling delivers “about 80%” of what he wanted.

“We got the most important thing, which was to get veterans off the street,” Powers said. “And for that, I'm happy with the outcome.”

The case stems from a 2015 settlement in which the VA promised to build 1,200 housing units, with more than 770 completed by 2022. The department missed that deadline, prompting the new lawsuit.

Iraq War veteran Rob Reynolds came to the West L.A. VA for PTSD treatment in 2018, met veterans sleeping on the streets outside and began advocating for them.

During Wednesday’s press event, he called this week’s Ninth Circuit ruling “long overdue.”

"There should never have been a lawsuit filed in the first place,” Reynolds said. “ They were using the property for everything but what it was intended for, and that's housing.”

The veteran plaintiffs argued that lack of on-campus housing prevented disabled veterans from accessing physical and mental health services at the facility.

As of late 2024, the VA said there were 307 veteran housing units open on the West L.A. campus and 461 units under construction.

Robert Reynolds (right), a veteran advocate with AMVETS, walks with Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva as they tour the Veterans Row encampment along San Vicente Boulevard in November 2021.

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Al Seib

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Getty Images

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Commercial leases

The appeals court ruling invalidated most commercial leases on the property, including Brentwood School's 22-acre sports complex and an oil company's drilling license.

However, the court overturned the district court's previous invalidation of UCLA's lease for its baseball stadium. Rosenbaum said he plans to refile that portion of the case, which had been argued on different grounds.

Reynolds criticized local leaders for what he said was inaction at the West L.A. VA Campus. He said local officials’ personal connections to Brentwood School and UCLA played a role.

“ A lot of these special interest groups on the VA land have so much influence politically in Los Angeles,” he said. "That's why you've had a lot of our politicians remain quiet about this."

In May, President Donald Trump signed an executive order instructing the VA secretary to declare the West L.A. VA campus a national hub for homeless veterans and develop a plan to house 6,000 people there by 2028.

That housing goal is even more ambitious than the court order, but local advocates say they haven’t heard anything from the Trump administration since it was issued.

“They need to speak to the people that actually live on that property,” Reynolds said. “I'm hoping now that we have this Ninth Circuit ruling in, that we'll be able to have some more discussion with the administration and with the VA leadership to try to figure out what the next steps are.”

As a result of this week’s ruling, the case has been sent back to the District Court judge to implement the housing order and oversee construction

On a chilly December night in Sandy Spring, Md., dozens of people crammed into the Woodlawn Manor for a Victorian-era Yuletide dance lesson, the wood floors creaking under the uncertain steps of 21st-century people learning 19th-century English country dances.

"Every good party has dancing," said Angela Yau, a historical interpreter for the parks department who was teaching the dances — and the Victorians loved a good Yuletide shindig.

Angela Yau, a site manager for the Montgomery County parks department who also works in cultural and natural history interpretation, wears an 1840s-style dress while teaching Victorian dances to the room.

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The merriment was emblematic of how many think of Yule; today, it's synonymous with Christmas. But centuries ago, before crooners sang about carols being sung by a fire, Yule meant something different: a pagan mid-winter festival around the solstice, dating back to pre-Christian Germanic people.

It was particularly important to Scandinavian communities during that time of year, beset by late sunrises and early sunsets, according to Maren Johnson, a professor of Nordic studies at Luther College.

"All these kinds of winter traditions are tied very intricately into small communities," she said. "You develop between yourselves a folklore about this winter time and this period of darkness."

In this week's installment of "Word of the Week," we travel back in time to the origins of Yule festivals, and trace those earliest traditions to modern-day Christmas celebrations.

Feasting, drinking and animal sacrifices

Scholars of these early pagan festivals don't have much concrete evidence of what actually went on at them, according to Old Norse translator Jackson Crawford, because much of the written record comes much later from Christians. But what is clear, he said, was that feasting and drinking were abundant.

Terry Gunnell, a professor of folkloristics at the University of Iceland, agrees. Drinking copious amounts of ale was not only encouraged but required, he said, and animals were slaughtered as part of the sacrifices to gods and spirits typical of these early festivals.

"The snow is coming down the mountains and in a sense, the nature spirits are moving closer," he said — and people wanted to appease them.

And then, there was the oath-swearing. Crawford said this was one of the major hallmarks of early Yule celebrations as recorded in myths like The Saga of Hervör and Heidrek from the 13th century. In it, a man swears to the king of Sweden that he'll marry his daughter with no real prospects of doing so.

"But your oaths during Yule are kind of sacred, extra binding," he said. "So he has to try to fulfill it," even though he eventually gets killed.

Crawford thinks that this oath-swearing could be where the word "Yule" actually comes from. The earliest roots could come from Indo-European words for "speaking," he said, and then Germanic peoples came to use it for more judicial purposes like admitting, confessing or swearing.

There's other theories out there, though, the dominant one being that the word could come from the Old Norse word hjól, meaning "wheel" — as in the "wheel of the year" that keeps turning with the seasons, Gunnell said.

Yule gets co-opted into Christmas

Christianization of this part of Europe, however, changed how people celebrated Yule. The church began to align its own holidays with pagan celebrations, Gunnell said. Easter replaced the festival at the beginning of summer, for example, and St. John's Day replaced midsummer. "And then we hear in Icelandic source material that [Yule] was replaced with Christmas," he said.

"So what the church is really doing is to allow people to go on doing what they had done before, but now under a Christian name," he added.

Around the 900s, Crawford said, Scandinavians started saying "Yule" and "Christmas" interchangeably.

"I think it suggests that, fundamentally, both of them are basically parties," he said.

That's not to say that Christmas was the exact same as the Yule celebrations of old. There was a new emphasis, Gunnell said, not so much on winter spirits but "a period of joy with the birth of Christ." But much of the feasting and drinking spirit of Yule stuck around — and became Christmas traditions throughout much of Europe.

Fast forward to the Victorian era, where the spirit of merriment became embedded in English culture, thanks to two important cultural influencers: Prince Albert, who imported traditional Yuletide customs popular in his native Germany, and Queen Victoria.

The queen fell in love with the traditions, Yau of the parks department said. And since she was a fashion icon, "These Christmas traditions really spread from the royal couple out through England and out through the colonies and everywhere else." And, as cultural customs are wont to do, the traditions morphed — creating, among other things, Santa Claus.

Still making sacrifices — just sweeter

Although slaughtering animals to please winter spirits is perhaps less typical of modern Yuletide celebrations, the spirit of sacrifice still remains, according to Gunnell.

That's particularly true in Scandinavian Christmas folklore. People leave out porridge for nisse and tomte, small trickster spirits who live in local forests, around the winter solstice in hopes of placating them or receiving gifts. (Though these days, Johnson said, many Scandinavians also celebrate the Julenisse, more of a Santa Claus figure.)

In Iceland, there's not really a Santa Claus figure at all, Gunnell said. Instead, there's the "Christmas Men," also known as the Yule lads. As the stories have told it, the mystic men – with names like "Window Peeper," "Sausage Swiper," "Bowl Licker" and "Meat Hook" — come one by one down from the mountains by your community, play pranks and steal things from homes. (To be fair to them, they'll also leave presents in windows for children.) On top of that, they have an ogress mother, Grýla, who eats misbehaving children "like sushi for Christmas," Gunnell said.

And although he doesn't swipe sausages or eat children, Santa Claus is not a completely dissimilar figure.

"The idea of sacrifices remains in leaving out a little bit of sherry or whiskey for Santa Claus and some food for the reindeer," Gunnell said.

It's something to consider the next time you leave out cookies and milk.
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Carmen Peterson's son Ethan is a big fan of Elmo and Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. And although Ethan is nonverbal, he loves to sing along in his own way.

"He's a really fun-loving 8-year-old. He doesn't speak, but he gets his point across," Peterson says.

Ethan has a rare genetic disorder — Syngap1 — which, among other things, causes a kind of seizure that can make him drop to the ground without warning.

"Everything just kind of shorts out for a moment," Peterson says. "And the danger of that — and I've seen this — is him falling on hardwood floors, concrete, off of stairs, like all of these things."

She says he's gotten hurt and she's had to rush him to the emergency room.

Ethan takes a medicine called Epidiolex that prevents these seizures. But last holiday season, a thief stole it off the family's front porch in Charlotte, N.C.

Peterson remembers finding the empty box and then checking her Ring doorbell camera footage. "I see this guy walking off … and I am just livid," she says.

Then, she had to figure out how to get this medicine — worth $1,800 — replaced so her son didn't miss a dose. It turned out to be a challenge.

How many stolen packages?

December is a busy time for package deliveries and for porch pirates who steal them. Sometimes the thieves run off with mail-order medication instead of getting an iPad or a Labubu.

E-commerce took off during the pandemic, and December remains the busiest time of the year for package deliveries, according to the U.S. Postal Service.

Still, it can be tricky to get the whole picture when it comes to package theft.

As easy as it is to buy stuff online, getting it to customers is actually really complicated. That's because so many people and companies interact with a package before it's delivered, according to Ben Stickle, a professor of criminal justice administration at Middle Tennessee University.

"So it's really hard to get, you know, what happens from the point that you click a button to when it gets delivered, all put back together with enough detail to find out when and where these thefts are occurring and then actually do something about it," he says.

Stickle worked on a study with the Postal Service published earlier this year, and says that victims of theft wind up reporting it to different places that don't share information with each other or even necessarily record the missing package as "theft." And sometimes victims don't report it at all.

"There's a lot of packages stolen," he says, explaining that according to security research company SafeWise, it's about 250,000 packages every day. Stickle has worked with SafeWise.

The Postal Service report estimated that at least 58 million packages were stolen in 2024. "So what are the odds that one of those, unbeknownst to the thief, has some type of medication in it?" Nobody really knows for sure, he says.

Ways to lower theft risk

So what can you do? Stickle says scheduling deliveries for when you're home and having a delivery spot that's hidden are good ideas. Even a locker for your porch that doesn't lock is a good deterrent.

"If a thief can see that there's a package, even if it's an envelope on your porch from the roadway, it seems to be far more likely that it's going to be stolen," he says.

According to Express Scripts and Optum Rx, which are two companies that offer mail-order pharmacy services, medication theft is pretty rare.

CVS Caremark, another company that ships prescriptions by mail, said it offers customers package tracking to prevent theft, but didn't answer NPR's question about how common medication theft is.

Pharmacies, including Walgreens, say they offer order tracking and use discreet packaging to help prevent theft. Customers can also opt to require a signature when their medicines are delivered.

Making sure patients don't miss a dose is a top priority, says Stryker Awtry, the director of Loss Prevention and Transformation for Optum Pharmacy, part of Optum Rx.

"Especially during the holiday seasons when deliveries surge, we want to make sure we build in peace of mind for our customers," he says. "So if a theft were to happen, No. 1, contact the pharmacy right away."

He says to also report the theft to your prescribing doctor and local law enforcement.

A lost prescription replaced  

As for Carmen Peterson in North Carolina, when she called her insurer's pharmacy to get Ethan's medicine replaced, the answer was no. But Ethan missing a dose and having a seizure that put him in the emergency room again? Not an option for her.

"It's just like it's one of those things that you just don't have a choice," she says.

If forced to, she would have found the money to buy the medicine herself.

"It was just unfortunate that the … company was so ready and kind of willing to just wash their hands of it because they felt like they had done what they were contracted to do, which is deliver the medication."

That company, Liviniti Pharmacy, said it couldn't comment on the Peterson family's experience because of patient privacy laws.

Unwilling to give up, Peterson reported the theft everywhere and made noise about it — including on her local news stations. That worked. Jazz Pharmaceuticals, the company that makes the drug Ethan needs, saw the stories and replaced it for her within a week.

Now, she recommends getting important medicines delivered to a P.O. box, a workplace or just going to the pharmacy to pick it up yourself.

Copyright 2025 NPR