Streetsblog Los Angeles

If there is a lot in CD 9 that is vacant, foreclosed, abandoned, or in severe disrepair, you can bet either Ana Cubas or Curren Price (especially Price) has found it and stuck a sign on it, like this lot (above) on Broadway and 48th.

Or this one just up the street, at 45th.

Cubas’ and Price’s staffers are to be commended for their intrepidness — tracking down the many vacant lots across the district is no small feat.

While intensely park poor, South L.A. has an abundance of empty spaces. So many, in fact, that the city doesn’t actually know how much land is out there. For some time now, organizations like Community Health Councils (CHC) have been working to get support for their effort to catalog vacant and foreclosed properties in South L.A. so that residents could start organizing for access to unused parcels.

The highlighting of the sheer number of lots gathering dust (and garbage) in CD 9 alone couldn’t come at a better time.

Why? Because the recently released proposed budget does not include funds for the park and tree master plans for South L.A., despite the fact that these were conditions of the Mayor’s Memorandum of Understanding with the parties involved in the Space Shuttle Endeavour Transport settlement agreement. Read more…

The semi-parklet at 96th and Central that the East Side Riders cleaned up on MLK Day (photo: sahra)

When is a public park not open to the public? Or even a park?

Apparently, when it is owned by the Department of Water and Power (LADWP).

This little plot of land on the corner of 96th and Central Ave. in Watts was one of the many vacant lots that Ted Watkins helped turned into a park in 1968. In the years following the 1965 Watts Riots, Watkins, a labor leader, civil rights activist, and founder of the Watts Labor Community Action Committee (WLCAC), put youth to work converting blighted spaces into pocket parks.

The dedication of the "beauty spot" to workers everywhere in 1968 (photo: sahra)

According to the dedication on the cornerstone, the park was intended to serve as a symbol of unity and hope to the weary and oppressed.

Over the years, however, it has fallen into disrepair. Earlier features have been paved over or covered with dirt upon which sad patches of grass grow. Not only are there no places to sit, a large and heavily tagged “No Trespassing, Parking, or Dumping” sign tacked to a tree warns you shouldn’t have bothered thinking about getting comfortable in the first place.

A few years ago, the East Side Riders bike club took on the task of trying to keep the site up so elderly neighbors could have a place to sit. They planted some trees and got a letter of reference from the WLCAC recommending that they be allowed to take over upkeep of the park. They wanted to plant flowers, put in benches, fix the sidewalk where tree roots had buckled it, and paint a mural on a wall across the street from the park to beautify the surrounding area.

Unsure of who could grant them that authority, they started reaching out to city officials.

Janice Hahn’s office told them it was County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas’ territory. Ridley-Thomas’ office told them it was city property (Central Ave. is city-maintained on one side and county-maintained on the other in some areas of South L.A., which can make things confusing for everyone). So, they reached out to the mayor’s office and were told it might be something they needed to take up with Bernard Parks’ office. Parks’ people told them it was LADWP-owned.

The LADWP told them that they needed to have insurance in order to be able to take care of the park, something which was beyond the budget of a completely volunteer-based community bike group.

But the LADWP didn’t seem to be taking care of the property; it continued to accumulate garbage and debris. Read more…

L.A. Taco finds a squirrel trying to beat the summer heat in his apartment complex (photo courtesy of L.A. Taco; click on photo to see original post)

While hiking in Griffith Park, my friend remarked that he found it refreshing to be surrounded by so much wildlife.

“What wildlife?” I hadn’t spotted any yet.

“All the squirrels.”

“The squirrels…?”

Yes, the squirrels.

A ubiquitous chattering presence in some areas of town, they are a rarer sight where my friend lives in South L.A. Fewer trees line the streets there and the numerous and largely treeless vacant lots are strewn with garbage and overgrown with weeds. It’s not exactly prime habitat.

It is also incredibly park-poor — on the whole, South L.A. averages about 1.2 acres of park space per 1,000 people. Broken down by race, African-American, Asian-Pacific Islander, and Latino communities receive .8, 1.2, and 1.6 acres per 1,000 persons, respectively, while white-dominated neighborhoods average 17.4 acres per 1,000 residents (partly due to many being near the Santa Monica Mountains). These figures present a stark contrast to the median of 6.8 acres in high-density cities and the recommended ratio of 10 acres per 1,000 people.

It’s tough out there for a squirrel, in other words.

Which means it’s not great out there for people, either.

Over the past decade, study after study after study has found that limited access to parks/green space and limited physical activity correlate with higher incidence of health risks in lower-income communities of color.

Park access and child obesity rates by State Assembly District (source: The City Project; click on map to visit site)

In South L.A. this translates to one in seven people suffering from diabetes and 1/3 of the children being overweight, increasing the likelihood they will grow into adults with chronic conditions, including diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, high blood pressure, lung disease, asthma, cancer, and depression.

Yet, for years, the city did little to tackle the disparity in access to parkland. Spaces smaller than 5 acres seemed unworthy of time, effort, or investment. And, as little of the available land in  South L.A. came even close to 5 acres, the area continued to go without.

It did not help that Proposition K funds for park construction and improvement were unevenly distributed, with “South Central, the subarea of the city with the second highest poverty rate, highest share of children, and the lowest rate of park acres per 1,000 population within easy access to a park, receiv[ing] only about half as much as affluent West LA in per child Prop K funding” or that Quimby park funds — fees developers pay to build park space within two miles of their developments — were disproportionately distributed among communities. District 11 got $11.9 million to invest in parks in 2007, while Bernard Parks’ District 8 received only $58,000 because there had been so little new construction there.

And, even though the Quimby funds were available, Steve Hymon reported, the city was slow to turn them into actual park space. Some council members struggled to find available land within the mandated two-mile radius. Others were unaware of how much money they had at their disposal. Worse still, the city didn’t have a viable method for matching up projects with needs. Read more…

The unofficial entrance to the South L.A. Wetlands Park. That's Maya Angelou High School in the background. (photo: sahra)

The South Los Angeles Wetlands Park located at 54th and Avalon is having a rough go of it these days.

Earlier this year, officials had to drain it in order to replace the leaking ceramic basin with plastic liners. It remained dry as a bone until the recent drizzling rains. But those have left it looking more like a fenced-in mud pit than a park. It appears to have even depressed garbage-eating seagulls and other fowl. None were to be found when I stopped by yesterday.

It wasn’t particularly beautiful to begin with — to passersby, it resembled a lot of dirt sparsely sprinkled with plants. The water often resembled more of a big puddle or muddy pond than an oasis, and there was no real place for kids to play or people to sit.

Still, it was a major improvement over the 9 acres of trash-collecting blight that it had been before. The abandoned former bus and rail yard now cleans the runoff waters that flow through it with native plants, offering area schoolchildren firsthand lessons about how ecosystems work. And, the looping trails provide a peaceful spot for joggers, elder residents who enjoy a stroll at sunset, and mothers out for a walk with young children.

Even knowing that neighbors had been slow to embrace it, I was genuinely surprised at how empty it was yesterday afternoon. The high school across the street had just let out and the students that I had seen cutting through the park when it first opened were nowhere to be found.

Taking a loop through the park, I realized that all the exits were locked with rusty padlocked chains. The only open entrance was the one to the parking lot, off Avalon. There would be no passing through the park — you only entered it if you specifically wanted to spend some time there. Read more…

Yesterday's ribbon-cutting for the grand opening of 49th Street Park. Front row left to right: Councilmember Jan Perry, Housing GM Mercedes Marquez, Maria Flores, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Parks Commission President Barry Sanders, and Parks GM Jon Mukri. Photos by Joe Linton

Yesterday, Los Angeles Mayor Villaraigosa formally announced that the city’s “50 Parks Initiative” is underway. The city’s Recreation and Parks Department is acquiring land for fifty new parks, predominantly in park-poor population-dense neighborhoods.

The announcement took place at grand openings for two new parks in South Los Angeles: 49th Street Park and McKinley Avenue Park. Both small parks are located near the intersection of 49th and Avalon, just over a mile southeast of Exposition Park and USC. Both parks are on sites formerly occupied by blighted dilapidated housing.

Neighborhood kids didn’t wait for a mayoral announcement before playing and smiling and running around in McKinley Avenue Park. Dozens of young Latinas and Latinos swung from bars, climbed on and played with new exercise equipment.

The mayor briefly toured McKinley Avenue Park, showing off the new exercise stations, before walking a half-block to 49th Street Park, where ceremonies and announcements took place.

Villaraigosa appeared genuinely enthusiastic upon entering the newly-opened 49th Street Park. He remarked excited about how bright the colors are and bounced a bit on the spongy rubber playground surface.

After a brief ribbon-cutting, city and community representatives expounded on the two small new parks and the broader 50 Parks Initiative that they represent. Recreation and Parks commission president Barry Sanders outlined the new initiative. Despite city budget shortfalls, the down economy presented an important window for acquiring land. Under the city charter, park land  acquired is permanently dedicated to park uses.  Sanders touted these new acquisitions as an important opportunity to ending the injustice of unequal park distribution, with fewer facilities in L.A.’s densest communities of color. Read more…

One step closer to reality. Rendering from the Friends of the Hollywood Central Park

Friends of the Hollywood Central Park (FHCP), a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating a 44-acre street-level park over the Hollywood Freeway in a densely populated and park-poor area of the city, accepted a $1.2 million gift today from the Aileen Getty Foundation. The donation, combined $825,000  from the city fully funds the park’s environmental study, a study needed before fundraising can truly begin for design and construction.

Young men play soccer in a parking lot at the Coliseum. photo: Sahra

RIDING BACK FROM an interview at a school garden off King Blvd., I came across a dozen guys engaged in a serious game of fútbol in a Coliseum parking lot. Curious, I plopped myself down next to Oscar Villatoro, a sweet guy in glasses who was sitting out the game because of a bum knee.

Why play here? I wanted to know. Asphalt is flat and fast, sure, but pretty unforgiving on the body.

There was nowhere nearby to go, he told me.

“There are fields over there,” he pointed behind the swim stadium, “but since they don’t play on a team, they can’t use the fields.”

They’ve tried playing on grass around Exposition Park, but security usually shows up pretty quickly to shoo them away, he said. So they just meet here. And they’ve been meeting here for a while — Oscar started joining them here last August, but they had been playing here well before then.

“In August?” I asked, surprised.

It was one thing to play there on a warm spring afternoon, but another entirely to play on sun-baked, shoe-melting asphalt in the dead of summer.

“Yeah,” he laughed. “Some of the guys get holes in their shoes and all that. But they like it.” Read more…

The Pacoima Wash Vision Plan doesn't choose between modes, but seeks to accommodate all of them. That's one reason that the rift between cyclists and horse riders that was so apparent during the Bike Plan process is not even on the map. All renderings via Mia Lehrer and Associates.

One of the lessons that the world’s great cities learned is how to use natural and man created landmarks to strengthen and create great places. This is one area where Los Angeles still lags, and nowhere is this clearer than in the case of the Pacoima Wash.

The Wash is a tributary of the Los Angeles River (actually a tributary of a tributary, but who’s counting) that runs through the San Fernando Valley from the Pacoima Dam southwest through Sylmar, the city of San Fernando and eventually Pacoima. Instead of being a vibrant open space designed to connect disparate communities and bring people together outdoors, the Wash is a physical barrier as real as a freeway or freight rail line. The land surrounding the Wash is kept behind fences, the trail running parallel is closed to the public and behind bars, instead of people, the Wash’s greenspace is a resting ground for weeds.

But a non-profit environmental justice organization known as Pacoima Beautiful wants to change all that. And with the help of the L.A. County Department of Public Health’s Policies for Livable and Active Communities and Environments (PLACE) Grant they will soon have an official plan to help do so. The first step in the process of turning the Wash from eye sore to community anchor is to create a vision for the area, a vision that is informed by representative of the community, and that’s what Pacoima Beautiful and its allies are trying to do.

“Pacoima Wash is a very important natural, open space to the community so we’re protecting it,” supplies Anita Cerna with the City of Los Angeles Department of Planning. “Now we’re also studying the Wash to see if there’s a way we can use it beyond being a place to collect water”

And help for the community can’t come soon enough. Pacoima is a desert when it comes to open space, even with the large Ritchie Valens Park located just off the 118 Highway. Pacoima has 54.3 acres of park space. According to the LA City General Plan, the ideal ratio of park space is 4 acres per 1,000 residents. Because Pacoima has over 100,000 people its ideal ratio,is close to 400 acres of park space. Read more…

According to the Project for Public Spaces (PPS), Portland, Oregon's Pioneer Courthouse Square is one of the Top 10 greatest public spaces in the U.S. & Canada. I couldn't agree more. Affectionately referred to as the city's "living room" the charming and versatile block was once slated to be a parking garage in the 1960s. Thankfully the residents didn't let that happen.

Recently while grabbing lunch in Portland, I wandered into the "Festival of Flowers" - a beautiful urban meadow installation that was so pleasant and comforting, I just had to shoot some video. Ethan Kent from PPS has often said to me that the key to the success of Pioneer Courthouse Square (and many public spaces) is its amazingly diverse programming. He's right, I've been to Portland a dozen times and there always seems to be something wonderful going on there.