Nevertheless, a Superior Court judge, in the case of "People v. Richard Green and others," held the city law to be valid. By 1900, however, it was found that oil production in Westlake had been, in effect, "pumped dry," and the situation ceased to make news. Residents were alarmed in May 1919 by a petition being circulated by entrepreneur Arthur Evans to build a "high-class," six-story building on the southwest corner of Westlake Avenue and Orange Street "for the manufacture of women's apparel." Supposedly having the backing of 85% of property owners adjoining the site in the affected Lazard tract, the promoters said they wanted to build in the Lakewood District because they could not get the kind of women workers they sought if they built in the city's industrial district, with its associated smoke and dust. They promised the employment of 1,000 workers, mostly women, as well as a school to teach "the finer grades of needlework" and a permanent exhibition space devoted to showing how garments are made. A "mammoth petition of protest" was presented to a City Council committee on June 12 by a throng of opponents and the applicant, identified and the Brownstein-Lewis Company, withdrew the plan and never resubmitted it. In its early years, Westlake was considered one of the most desirable residential areas in the city – "the new gathering place for the city's carriage trade," as one observer recalled in 1997. With time, though, as another put it, "The white gentry fled to Encino and Westwood, leaving their ghost buildings behind them." In the 1980s the neighborhood was infused with refugees from Central American countries like El Salvador, where a civil war had displaced a million people. In time, young Salvadorans formed a gang called Mara Salvatrucha, meaning, roughly, Gang of the Salvadoran Guy; for short, it was labeled MS-13. In time, the gang had spread to 33 other states and five countries. By 1990 Westlake had become a grim area "where heroin addicts and youthful gang members control the public alleyways and clamber across people's rooftops to elude police." An alley had become a refuge for the homeless, with no toilets, and piles of garbage were accumulating. The neighborhood was replete with sidewalk vendors in 1993, from whom sometimes gang members, called "cholos," were demanding "rent" to use the public sidewalks, which were bustling with refugees from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and other Latin American countries.