A cramped, aging fire station jammed up against MacArthur Park has been brought into a street war it never asked for — operating like a triage unit in the middle of one of LA’s nastiest fentanyl zones.
LAFD’s Station 11 keeps 14 firefighters on duty daily, often bumped to 16 to staff an ambulance and a pickup-style fast-response truck loaded with paramedics. The pace at which the firehouse must keep up with calls is almost incomprehensible.
11 has been crushed under an extreme medical load: 8,568 EMS runs and only 55 structure fires in the first eight months of 2025, according to records reviewed by The Post. These numbers make the firehouse among the busiest in the country.
MacArthur Park extinguishes “rubbish” fires — almost always started by the homeless — at a breakneck pace, forcing crews to douse one fire and race straight to the next, a member of the LAFD told The Post.
MacArthur Park has established itself as a destination for LA’s hardest drug addicts — a chaos-soaked corridor where overdoses hit by the hour and crime crews muscle in on the trade.
The district’s largest green space has mutated into a sprawling encampment, with hundreds of people in and around the park on any given day.
When The Post walked the park Friday and again on Monday young users, many appearing to be in their 20s, shot up with needles or smoked from glass pipes. Some pipes were fashioned to look like shotguns. Other addicts were passed out, or simply waiting on their next free meal.
The Post also witnessed straight-barrel versions of crack pipes getting handed out in “safe smoking” kits by city and county-backed programs.
Surprisingly, not all of MacArthur’s daytime inhabitants actually spend the night in the park. Several people told The Post they have rooms or apartments elsewhere but come to MacArthur Park daily because this is where the handouts are.
On both visits made by The Post, lines formed for food, medical vans and “safe use” supplies — an assembly line of aid operating in the middle of a park that’s visibly coming apart.
City officials say more than $27 million has already been poured into “revitalizing” MacArthur Park — paying for overdose response teams, “peace ambassadors,” USC and LA Care street-medicine teams and dedicated cleanup crews.
While City Hall has bragged the multiple programs are working — Station 11’s run sheets tell a different story — the overdoses keep coming.
The Post has reached councilwoman Eunissis Hernandez — who oversees the community and the park it sits in — multiple times since diving into the issues plaguing MacArthur, and have yet to get a response.
Los Angeles has amassed a $22 million Opioid Settlement Trust Fund, expected to grow by another $4-5 million a year for the next two decades.
A major slice of that pot is headed directly into MacArthur Westlake.
The City Council set aside $3 million to build a Westlake Area Harm Reduction Services Drop-In Center: a full-scale site offering naloxone distribution, wound care, test strips for fentanyl and xylazine, mental-health assessments, referrals and treatment.
City budget records viewed by The Post show the Department on Disability is expanding contracts for syringe exchange, overdose education, safer-smoking kits (crack pipes), wound-care kits and medication-assisted treatment referrals — all eligible for opioid-settlement reimbursement.
Public health leaders insist the investment is paying off in aggregate, but the numbers out of Station 11 tell another story, one where statistics and street reality refuse to match.
After a multi-victim shooting in January, Mayor Karen Bass ordered an LAPD surge into the area, more foot beats, targeted gang arrests and temporary fencing along key blocks to choke off open-air markets for drugs and stolen goods.
By March, LAPD was touting a 34% drop in violent crime in the MacArthur Park zone and more than $350,000 in stolen retail merchandise recovered from crews using the park as a fence.
“We know there is still much work to be done in the MacArthur Park community but over the past month, progress has been made in returning the park to the community. Crime in the area is down – theft and organized retail crime will not be tolerated in the City of Los Angeles,” Mayor Bass said at the time.
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