L.A.’s Rampart District Gave Me the Life I Wanted to Lead

Novelist Judith Freeman Reflects on Her Three-Decades-Long Relationship With Her Neighborhood

When I first moved into the Rampart neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1986, the gunfire down the alley outside our bedroom often kept me awake at night—not just the pop-pop of single shots but the stuttering rat-a-tat of automatic weapons. Police helicopters beat the air overhead, seemingly for hours at a time, shining down bright conical beams that swept across the windows.

There was a kind of Blade Runner feeling to the neighborhood in those days, the sense that things had gotten out of hand, and the citizens were scuttling …