HOLLYWOOD — The following letters respond to recent reporting in The Times. They have been edited for length and clarity.
Your story on the cooling centers (“When the Thermometer Reads 104,” July 22) described the library reading room as though the surprise were that people used it. The surprise is that we only open four rooms. I manage a building on Cherokee with eighteen units and no central air, and I can tell you exactly which of my tenants got through last week and which did not: the ones with somewhere to go, and the ones who would not go. An old man on my third floor sat in the dark with a wet dish towel for four days because a recreation center is “for kids.” Send somebody to knock on his door next time. He will not walk to you, but he might walk with you. — Odell Marchetti, Hollywood
I read that a City Council committee split 2 to 2 on the Vine Street bike lanes and sent the plan away for a study that has no author and no due date, and that the committee then went home until the last week of August (“The Vine Street Bike Lane Deadlock Will Stand for Five Weeks,” July 23). I have been riding Vine to work for nine years. I have been hit once. I do not need the study and neither does the committee — the collision reports are in the file. What I need is for four adults to vote. Vote it down if that is the honest position. A no I can organize against. A hold is just a way of never having said anything. — Baptiste Aurand, East Hollywood
The cyclists in your pages talk about that mile as though nobody else uses it. I own a salon on Vine and the majority of my clients drive, park at a meter, and come in with wet hair afterward — you cannot walk out of a color appointment onto a bus in August. Your reporter has quoted my association’s objections accurately every time and I want that on the record. I also want to say plainly what nobody at the dais will: the ninety spaces are not an inconvenience, they are the business, and a study that finally counts them properly is not a delaying tactic. It is the first honest thing this process has produced in seven years. — Nadia Constantino, Hollywood
Your July 25 story about Marisol Quintero’s newsstand made me angrier than anything you have printed this year. Twenty-two years on that corner, a stand her uncle bolted down in 1981, and the obstruction that will get her cited is a bus bench the city installed in 2011 — nine years after anyone last measured her. She is four inches short of the wheelchair clearance and neither the bench nor the stand can move. Fine: move the bench. It belongs to an advertising contract, not to the neighborhood, and if that contract is the reason a wheelchair cannot pass and a newsstand must close, then we have learned something important about the contract. — Cornell Biggs, Hollywood
I want to correct one impression in your story on the vending overhaul (“Two Weeks Into the New Vending Rules,” July 26). Your reporter wrote that the city built the front door and forgot it does not own the hallway, quoting the councilmember, and the line has been repeated to me four times this week as though it were an excuse. I have sold fruit on Selma for nine years and I have my city permit in a plastic sleeve. It is a better permit than I have ever had and it cost me a third of what the old one did. The county inspection is the twenty-eighth of August. I am not angry at the city. I am telling the people who wrote the law that they are two-thirds finished, and that the last third is the part where I can legally work. — Efraín Cordero, Hollywood
Thank you for the piece on the pickup games moving to six in the morning (“The Heat Pushed the Poinsettia Games to Six,” July 24). I am the baker who starts at four. I have driven past those courts for eleven years on my way home and assumed the game was closed to me, because six in the evening might as well be midnight for a person in my trade. Last week I played for the first time. Whoever left the cooler of water at the fence: I know it was not the city, and I would like to buy that person bread. — Casimiro Undurraga, East Hollywood