Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Victoria Park, Los Angeles

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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was speedy keep. SK#1: nom withdrawn, no deletion arguments (non-admin closure) czar · · 19:16, 1 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Victoria Park, Los Angeles[edit]

Victoria Park, Los Angeles (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)
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No reliable, independent sources. Citations go to a historical society. This is simply a small, gated community which can be Redirected to the larger neighborhood of which it is a part—Mid-City, Los Angeles. In fact, one of the graphics is already used there. GeorgeLouis (talk) 16:16, 25 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The venue is certainly historic, but it can be successfully covered as one of the topics within Mid-City, Los Angeles, GeorgeLouis (talk) 16:23, 25 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep The article seems fine and covers a bigger area than one far away might imagine. I seem to have started it back in 2009 in order to remove a redlink from National Register of Historic Places listings in Los Angeles, California, which identifies places by neighborhood. The Mid-City, Los Angeles article also properly links here, as it does to other separate neighborhood articles including Lafayette Square, Los Angeles and Wellington Square, Los Angeles. I suspect Mid-City neighborhood is bigger than many cities and counties elsewhere in the United States, and bigger than many U.S. territories and several countries, even. And, this article and the other ones are long enough articles already that they do not seem appropriate to merge into the Mid-City article. If the deletion-nominator wishes, they could add more to the Mid-City article about this neighborhood, but this article will still have more, and should be kept, IMHO. --doncram 17:07, 25 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
My guess is that Mid-City is bigger than 50 or more countries, and that Victoria Park is bigger than 10 or more countries (see List of countries by population).... --doncram 17:10, 25 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of California-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 18:43, 25 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Administratively close and re-list with the proviso that either it be re-listed with all of the neighborhoods in Mid-City, Los Angeles or that it be re-listed on the condition that if it can demonstrate notability at least to the degree as the most-deficient non-listed neighborhood in Mid-City, Los Angeles then it should not be deleted. On other words, don't pick on this neighborhood without being fair and dragging in the other neighborhoods to face the same scrutiny. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 19:45, 25 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: Many large cities have articles about neighborhoods large and small. In general, the questions raised at AFD should be 1) are neighborhoods in this city considered "presumed notable" much in the way that cities themselves are? This is going to vary from city to city. 2) If not, are there any particularly notable neighborhoods that should be excluded from deletion? davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 19:49, 25 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I don't fault GeorgeLouis for his neighborhood AfD nominations, although I take your point. The problem is that Los Angeles real estate agents manufacture neighborhoods like con-men manufacture gold bricks. The question is not whether real neighborhoods are notable, it's whether some neighborhoods are real at all. Many of them are not.— alf laylah wa laylah (talk) 21:11, 25 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep Clearly a notable neighborhood; the National Register of Historic Places does not list its properties as being located in insignificant neighborhoods. References could be improved and I'll see what I can do. --MelanieN (talk) 20:33, 25 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I added a couple of references showing that both the Los Angeles Times[1] and the City of Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission[2] believe the neighborhood to be real and significant. --MelanieN (talk) 21:00, 25 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep It was sufficiently recognized as a separate neighborhood in the 1920s to have organized its own streetlight design, which in Los Angeles is sufficient unto itself for conferring notability:
Virginia Comer (2000). Streetlights. Princeton Architectural Press. pp. 34–. ISBN 978-1-890449-10-0. Retrieved 25 May 2013.
And Roy Campanella slept there!
Neil Lanctot (8 March 2011). Campy: The Two Lives of Roy Campanella. Simon & Schuster. pp. 366–. ISBN 978-1-4516-0649-2. Retrieved 25 May 2013.
Finally, although I find it hard enough to follow the surveyerese to be 100% certain this is the same neighborhood, it seems to be mentioned in the amended city charter of 1913 (do a find on the page for "Victoria Park") as one of the delimiting landmarks of the city boundaries. I'm not 100% sure but I'm 99% sure. The language makes it clear that they're talking about a neighborhood Southeast of the intersection of Santa Monica Blvd and Seward Street and also adjacent to Crenshaw, which seems right. Thus it's real, thus it's an inhabited place, thus it's notable.— alf laylah wa laylah (talk) 21:06, 25 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Clarification When I said "inhabited" --> "notable" I was making a shorthand reference to WP:NGEO. I'm sorry if this wasn't clear to all.— alf laylah wa laylah (talk) 04:10, 26 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment To add to and support Doncram's hunches above about the size of this neighborhood: the Mid-City community, of which Victoria Park is a part, houses 10% of the population of Los Angeles,[3] in other words 10% of 3,800,000 or about 380,000 people. If Mid-City were a country it would rank 176th by population, out of 242 countries - larger than Bahamas, larger than Iceland. That 380,000 figure suggests that all neighborhoods of Mid-City hold (at a minimum) tens of thousands of people, maybe hundreds of thousands. I'm tempted to remove the word "small" from the lead sentence. These neighborhoods are "small" only by Southern California standards. --MelanieN (talk) 21:31, 25 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Mid-City has 55,000 residents. GeorgeLouis (talk) 22:50, 25 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Interesting. Your source is cited to the city planning department. My "10% of LA's population" quote is sourced to the city planning director - in a written report, no less. Your 55,000 figure is almost certainly correct; one wonders what the planning director was smoking. OK, so 55,000 people brings the Mid-City community in at # 208 out of 242 countries, just behind Greenland. My point and Doncram's stands: these are BIG communities by almost any standard. --MelanieN (talk) 01:10, 26 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I'm guessing that there is more than one meaning of "Mid-City" at work. Just try to figure out the difference between at the least two meanings of "West Los Angeles" and about sixty of "Westside".— alf laylah wa laylah (talk) 02:01, 26 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep per all of the lovely people who already advocated the keep. öBrambleberry of RiverClan 22:57, 25 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep As with the other comments. I'm a little puzzled at the nom complaining that the citation go to a historical society. That's exactly where citations for articles on historically important things go DGG ( talk ) 02:10, 26 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Riposte: I agree with DavidWR. The question is whether this Mid-City article will be continue to be relegated solely to the ghetto of Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles and Oki's Dogs and public transportation, which is snobbism at a most depressing level. ‪Wellington Square, Los Angeles‬, Victoria Park, Los Angeles, and Lafayette Square, Los Angeles, are as much a part of the Mid-City environment as the Crenshaw Light Rail Line, and people who read the Mid-City article should be made aware of that. There is precious little substance to the three subsidiary articles (much of it WP:Original research), like this one, but what there is could be trimmed to the essentials and easily placed into the Mid-City article where they belong. As for the citations to historical societies, OF COURSE a historical society will bend over backward to say that a particular place is Notable, particularly when it makes money from its home tours, when a truly neutral source would scratch its figurative head in puzzlement. Wikipedia readers, particularly Mid-City readers, deserve better. GeorgeLouis (talk) 03:41, 26 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with you in principle, even though I would like to keep this article. I think that DGG's remarks are founded in a lack of understanding of the incestuous relationship between historical societies and real estate agencies in Los Angeles. For LA neighborhoods, historical societies certainly cannot be considered reliable sources in general. I think that the best solution would be a level 2 subsection in the Mid-City article with a {{main}} link to the article under consideration, because, unlike many made-up neighborhoods in Los Angeles, this one seems real.— alf laylah wa laylah (talk) 03:50, 26 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
That Mid-City article makes me want to reconsider the use of the LA Times mapping LA project as a reliable source. MelanieN's larger number is almost certainly referring to the proper Mid-City. Ah, but what have we to do about it here.— alf laylah wa laylah (talk) 03:54, 26 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
About historical societies: It's true that a local or neighborhood historical society (like the one cited here) can pass along unreliable information and can take a promotional attitude toward the neighborhood. At the time of nomination the only references in this article were from a local historical society; IMO they were insufficient to establish notability, so I can see why the article was nominated for deletion. Reliable Sources have been added to the article since then. I think DGG was talking about region-wide historical societies, such as the Los Angeles City Historical Society or the Historical Society of Southern California; such societies and their journals are generally Reliable Sources as well as establishers of notability. --MelanieN (talk) 15:41, 26 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
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