Letters

—Jason Saunders
Los Angeles

DEAR EDITOR:

Joseph Treviño’s article failed to mention that the Bus Riders Union’s conflict with the E.L.A. Light Rail is about more than civil rights. It’s about money. The E.L.A. Light Rail will, in large part, be funded by money — from the feds and the state — that has been earmarked for rail use only, money that cannot be used to buy more buses, or for housing, or for health care, etc. (It was earmarked before the BRU’s consent-decree lawsuit.) Therefore, if the BRU was successful in halting the E.L.A. Light Rail project under the guise of civil rights, that money, somewhere in the range of $400 million, would be taken away and used in another city. East Los Angeles would be left with nothing — no light rail, no improved bus system. Sure, the BRU would have another feather in its cap. But it would not have won the heavily Latino Eastside anything tangible, and it’s nearly impossible to see a civil rights victory in that.

—R. Daniel Gutierrez
Los Angeles

BRICKBAT

DEAR EDITOR:

Re: Brendan Bernhard’s “The Ad Campaign That Would Not Die, 2001” [June 22–28]. Has anyone noticed that Church With Red Ribbon, 2001, referring to the First United Methodist Church, designed by architect Thomas B. Barber (1929) at the top of Highland Avenue, is not “bricks, stucco,” as the label claims, but an unusually fine example of exposed reinforced-concrete construction? This is somewhat like a museum mislabeling an oil painting acrylic. MOCA should get its facts right before presuming to label the city.

—Jack Burnett-Stuart
Los Angeles

DON’T MESS WITH MY INNER CHILD

In your July 6–12 issue, you published a review of the play The Book of Esther. Please note that the performance your reviewer attended featured Liza Kaplan, not Allyson Ayalon, as Young Mindy.

—Deborah Sale Butler (Adult Mindy)
Studio City