Few places in Los Angeles hold as much beauty and desperation as MacArthur Park, 35 disheveled acres in one of the West Coast’s most densely populated neighborhoods.

Every morning, crews of service workers walk through the park to hand out naloxone, a drug that reverses overdoses, and to dispose of used syringes left in the grass the night before.

The scene repeats daily. They patrol the park throughout the day, checking on the dozens of people smoking or injecting drugs at nearly any given time, ready to intervene when the next person inevitably begins to overdose.

Last year, 74 people died from drug overdoses in MacArthur Park’s ZIP code, according to the L.A. County Department of Public Health. That is an area smaller than 1 square mile around the park. Nearly 300 people died from overdoses in the five years before that, with only Skid Row losing more people to drug overdoses since 2020.

Those who come to MacArthur Park to use drugs typically gather near Alvarado Street, or half a block east in what locals know as “Fentanyl Alley.”

Across the park to the west, children play on soccer fields and playgrounds while parents look out for any spark of violence.

The need to keep watch is real — the blocks around MacArthur Park have some of the highest rates of violent crime in L.A., according to an LAist analysis of crime data from the Los Angeles Police Department.

As with overdose deaths, the only area that had more reported violent crime in 2025 than MacArthur Park was Skid Row, LAist found.

Some people who live nearby told me they rarely or never go to the park out of fear for their safety. Others are careful about which parts of the park they go to and when.

One father, Luis Escobar, said he feels safe taking his 6-year-old daughter to a playground in the park during the day. Nighttime is a different story, he said, as the park is filled with “zombie people,” what he calls the park’s many fentanyl users because of the way using fentanyl can cause people to hunch over at the waist and move slowly or not at all. Escobar said sometimes he’s seen people in the park get into fistfights or even pull guns.

More than 100 crimes have been committed near the park with knives or guns each year since 2023. Records from the L.A. County Medical Examiner show there were nine homicides within half a block of the park through 2024 and 2025. Four of the victims were stabbed; four were shot. One man was pushed into the lake and drowned.

For more than a decade, there has been an average of at least one new victim of violent crime every day in the park and surrounding blocks. Most crimes in 2025 happened on the east side of the park near Alvarado Street.

I spent more than a year talking to residents, business owners, aid workers and government officials to better understand the issues troubling MacArthur Park.

It quickly became clear that there was more to the story than just drugs and violence.

“Every challenge that urban America has faced is so visible and clear in MacArthur Park,” said Fernando Guerra, founder of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University. “The history of displacement, the history of movements, all are visible there.”

Many people in the area were hesitant to talk with me because of longstanding fears of retaliation from the gangs in the area. Of those who were willing to speak, some told me they didn’t want to use their names or be seen in front of a microphone or camera. They told me speaking out publicly could bring unwanted trouble, and some knew people who had been threatened or beaten by gang members.

City officials have made multiple attempts at reducing pervasive crime at and near the park, with mixed reviews and success.

A man smokes from a glass pipe in MacArthur Park on Apr. 13, 2025.

(

Jordan Rynning

/

LAist

)

A man smokes from a glass pipe in MacArthur Park on Apr. 13, 2025.

(

Jordan Rynning

/

LAist

)

Men prepare to smoke drugs in MacArthur Park on March 24, 2025.

(

Jordan Rynning

/

LAist

)

A young man offers a torch to another man holding a pipe at MacArthur Park on March 24, 2025.

(

Jordan Rynning

/

LAist

)

Men make an exchange at MacArthur Park on Apr. 19, 2025.

(

Jordan Rynning

/

LAist

)

A man crouches near a small fire while others walk away in MacArthur Park on Apr. 19, 2025. People stay in the park late into the night.

(

Jordan Rynning

/

LAist

)

People gather across Alvarado Street from MacArthur Park on May 18, 2026. Drug sales and use are often seen at the intersection of Alvarado Street and Wilshire Boulevard.

(

Jordan Rynning

/

LAist

)

A young woman smokes from a pipe at MacArthur Park as DEA agents and LAPD officers conduct a drug enforcement raid across the street on May 6, 2026.

(

Jordan Rynning

/

LAist

)

People stand on the sidewalk on Wilshire Boulevard on Sept. 2, 2026. As drug enforcement operations increased in MacArthur Park, more people have begun gathering on the nearby streets to use drugs.

(

Jordan Rynning

/

LAist

)

One man talks about the pull of fentanyl

Standing in Fentanyl Alley in February of this year, I spoke with a young man who feels the pull of the drug. He goes by the nickname Deuce.

As we chatted about his favorite foods to buy from street vendors, he casually took out a thin, straw-like pipe, held the flame of a butane torch against a plastic bottle cap with a tiny dab of white powder inside and began to smoke it.

“I'm smoking fetty,” Deuce said when I asked what it was. “Fetty” is a common street name for fentanyl.

Deuce said getting high on fentanyl gives a sedating effect that feels different from other drugs he’s tried.

He said that people become dependent on fentanyl and feel they “gotta do it.” Even though he knows others are regularly falling into overdoses around the park, Deuce said he’s not afraid that it might happen to him.

“I know what I'm doing,” Deuce said.

On the walk with Deuce back toward the park, he talked about how he gets the money he needs to pay for drugs.

He said he just asks people for money sometimes, and he tries to be honest about what he’s going to use it for.

“If I want food, I'm gonna let them know that I’m gonna get something to eat,” he said. “But sometimes I might be like, ‘I’m just trying to get some drugs, would you be able to spare any change?’”

After walking around the corner to Alvarado Street, Deuce stopped at a storefront and motioned to an employee to ask how much he could get for a watch he had been carrying in his hand.

The employee took the gold-colored watch and handed him a few dollars in return.

“Good sell,” Deuce said.

Along with selling a jacket earlier in the day, he said he’d made $15 — all the money he owned.

According to court documents in a drug enforcement case that details drug prices at the park, that was enough for him to buy around a quarter-gram of the same powder he had just smoked. A recent study by Drug Checking Los Angeles and UCLA found that people who use fentanyl in L.A. County consume, on average, about 1,000 milligrams a day — four times what Deuce could afford that morning.

Far less could kill someone who is not used to the drug.

According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, just 2 milligrams of fentanyl can be lethal to someone who has not built a tolerance to opioids. Even people who use the drug regularly are at risk of fluctuations in the illicit fentanyl’s potency, which can vary wildly.

Within minutes of Deuce trading the watch, two young men came by. One muttered “fetty, fetty, fetty” under his breath, just loud enough for us to hear.

Deuce didn’t buy any this time. Instead, when one of the men saw my camera and accused me of being a snitch, Deuce came to my defense.

How it got so bad

The challenges facing MacArthur Park are complex, and longtime observers say no amount of government effort could solve them overnight.

Guerra, who is a professor of political science and an honorary life trustee on LAist's board, told me that issues at the park are deep, driven by immigration policy, land use, access to resources and political representation.

By the late 1990s, the area had long been a notorious underground market.

That evolution, Guerra said, was driven in part by the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. That Reagan-era law granted amnesty to about 3 million undocumented people living in the U.S., putting them on a path to legal status. It also required all workers to provide their employers with proof of their immigration status. That new law spurred a busy fake ID industry at the park.

Then MacArthur Park was hit hard by the crack epidemic. The neighborhood's reputation took more damage during LAPD’s Rampart scandal, in which officers responsible for patrolling the area were found to have framed people and stolen drugs. The scandal led to criminal prosecutions of officers, a consent decree with the Department of Justice and the creation of a special review panel. The takeaway for many observers at the time: At MacArthur Park, even the cops were criminals.

Altogether, Guerra said, the negative perception of the area led local governments and businesses to begin a “complete and total disinvestment” in the community.

It wasn’t just luxury retail stores and restaurants that closed their doors, he said. Local entrepreneurs took their businesses out of the area when they became successful, and even nonprofit organizations turned their attention elsewhere.

Opportunities for local communities to build their economic and political power were pulled out of reach, while the illicit market remained.

For decades, Guerra said local politicians knew about the area’s problems but could ignore them with little political backlash.

What the city is doing — and what residents say hasn’t been enough

For nearly four years, the task of making the park a welcoming place for residents and their families has fallen primarily to Mayor Karen Bass and Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, who have each committed to making health and safety issues around the park a priority since taking office in December 2022.

Some residents have voiced their frustration with the officials’ lack of progress, and anger that the majority-Latino neighborhood has been left to face dangerous and unsanitary conditions they say would never be tolerated in other parts of the city.

Bass and Hernandez have acknowledged that a strained city budget has made it harder to provide all the services the area needs — even as they’ve promised to find a way.

The mayor’s office has continued to direct LAPD to increase the presence of uniformed officers in the area. Bass has also worked with Hernandez to provide social services and city infrastructure, including streetlight repair, in an effort to make the park safer.

“I wish we had the resources for it to be done overnight,” Bass told me in a February interview this year. “If we had had the resources, much more would've been done, but we are going to continue until the area is completely transformed.”

Hernandez told me she has gathered $27 million of city, state and other funds to support efforts in the park ranging from medical and overdose prevention services to street cleaning and infrastructure improvements.

In a controversial move, the Recreation and Parks Department also plans to start building a wrought-iron fence around the park this November in order to close it at night, which it says will allow city crews to keep up with necessary repairs.

“We can only keep one bathroom open at MacArthur Park at a time,” Hernandez told me, pointing out one example of the kinds of repairs the city has struggled to keep up with. “What tends to happen is that they break into it, so we close it down, and we open up the next bathroom.”

The wear on the park is constant, with new trash and graffiti quickly returning each time it's removed. Hernandez says the park doesn’t get a moment to rest. Fires and overdoses continue through the night, she said, and sometimes people overdose with no one around and are found too late.

“The fence is meant to just give the park a moment to breathe,” Hernandez told me, “so that every day in the morning when the park opens up, everybody — everybody — gets access to a clean, healthy park.”

Cleaning up in an 'underworld'

A short distance from its open-air drug market, MacArthur Park and the surrounding streets are full of restaurants, shops and public events that draw crowds and give local communities’ vibrant cultural and historic roots a chance to shine through.

People come from across L.A. to enjoy free concerts ranging from cumbia to punk rock at Levitt Pavilion, to taste Honduran flavors at Doña Bibi's or wrap their hands around the famous “Number 19” pastrami sandwich at Langer’s Deli.

Others told me they travel to MacArthur Park for help. Like Skid Row, MacArthur Park is a location that offers reliable free services that help provide basic necessities, including medical care and connections to housing. Several community and faith groups regularly offer free meals in the park, another draw in a county where researchers estimate about 22% of unhoused people get four meals or fewer a week.

People stand in line in MacArthur Park during a heat wave on Aug. 23, 2026, to get free food and water from a community organization.

(

Jordan Rynning

/

LAist

)

Jaime Ramos told me it means a lot to have a hot meal and to meet people who want to help. He has been coming to the park during the day looking for housing, after a previous program he was in fell through.

Jaime Ramos stands in what some locals call Fentanyl Alley, near L.A.'s MacArthur Park, on Feb. 28, 2026. Ramos keeps a broom on his cart to help clean the area.

(

Jordan Rynning

/

LAist

)

Like about 78% of unhoused people who come to the park, he spends his nights somewhere else.

Ramos said the park is an “underworld” that becomes too dangerous at night to stay nearby.

People gather next to a chain link fence along Alvarado Street on April 19, 2025.

(

Jordan Rynning

/

LAist

)

He talked about how he got to where he is, and the challenges he hopes to overcome to pursue a better life.

While other young men his age were going off to college or starting careers, Ramos said he was serving an eight-year sentence behind bars.

Life on the outside didn’t stop while he was away, and when he was released, he could see how much he had fallen behind.

"From the age of 18 to now, I don't know how to be a grown man,” he told me. “I don't know how to manage my money, I don't know how to take care of basic necessities that other young men did have the opportunity to — and it's my fault.”

Service workers in the area say it's common for people recently released from jails and prisons to come there, looking for work, housing or other support when a criminal record makes those things much harder to find. Service providers worry that if there isn’t enough support when they get out, more people will return to the dangerous lives they lived before their incarceration, possibly falling even deeper into organized crime or addiction.

Ramos said he’s trying to take ownership of his future. He puts in the extra effort to keep himself clean — washed, shaved and off drugs — even though his surroundings are far from it.

He carries a broom to help with that too.

Ramos said he dreams of becoming a barber, but that’s a lot harder when you’re living on the streets.

“I've gotten my equipment stolen maybe like four times now,” he told me.

Phones, IDs and other valuables are regularly stolen from unhoused people who come to the park, several people told me, and losing your phone or ID can derail attempts to get approved for government housing programs.

Ramos has also kept an eye out for people who may be falling into an overdose. Even with overdose response teams patrolling and Los Angeles Fire Department paramedics regularly responding to calls in the park, it often falls to people like him to step in and help.

“I don't know how many times — numerous times — I've saved people's lives,” Ramos told me.

He recalled a day not long before when he missed his bus and was waiting for the next one to come, when he saw a teenage boy start to overdose.

“I missed my bus for a reason, you know, thank God,” Ramos told me, saying he was able to keep the boy alive.

It was common in conversations with people in the park for them to tell me they had reversed multiple overdoses.

It feels good to bring someone back, Ramos said, but jumping in to give so many people naloxone, rescue breathing or CPR has taken its toll on him.

“I might go sit down somewhere and cry for 10 minutes, because it's emotional,” he said. “I just gave, you know, 10 minutes of my time — my breath — to see this person come back.”

Still, Ramos said that’s not the hardest thing he faces.

“At the end of the day, the biggest thing that I go through is the battle of showing people that I'm still human,” he told me.