Nearly 15 years and O.C. Great Park is still not so great

They never should have called it the Great Park.

It was the largest piece of prime, undeveloped flatland in Orange County, the largest opportunity for greatness, and they had to jinx it.

Any 13-year-old with a smartphone will tell you that if you want buzz, play it cool. Make it last for 30 seconds and let others do the work. Whisper and see people lean in. Let the understatement win hearts and minds.

Instead, Irvine has a lofty park with barely three stars.

Go on Yelp and read the scathing reviews from people who feel cheated — tourists from San Diego, Washington, Montana.

Somewhere, they saw a glossy flier with smiling kids, balloon rides and pristine open space.

“It’s a horrible park,” wrote Henry S. from League City, Texas. “No shade, no mature trees, a bunch of gimmicky stuff about El Toro Marine Base that doesn’t interest me at all. Just all around lame.”

“Great park you say? More like great mistake,” said Raul P. from Orange.

The park would probably rank lower if it weren’t for the mountain of dubious virtual cheerleaders who clearly have never been to the former El Toro Marine Corps Air Station.

From the late 1990s, developers have salivated over the 4,500 acres of nothingness in the heart of Orange County. So when Measure W passed in 2002, expectations were high that the Great Park would be something special.

But after so many years and so much money, it’s still just a flat, hot, dusty strip of dirt with slapped-on soccer fields.

There are other amenities. They shine bright in marketing brochures, but in person they seem misplaced, as if the park is a random collection of lost toys.

The children’s carousel, for example, looks like a miniature replica. You have to remember that the park proper, at about 1,350 acres, is huge with nothing much in it, so everything seems small. In fact, from a distance the carousel looks fake.

To make matters worse, as you get closer, you realize that it doesn’t even look as good as the one in the Irvine Spectrum, just a few miles away.

But it’s still $2 to ride it.

Despite the scale of the park, the farmers market is oddly cramped and sits on a parking lot just feet from belching car exhaust — hardly a fresh, healthy oasis.

The park has an oppressive county fair feel, without the crowds. In other words, lots of black asphalt parking and a been-there, done-that, get-me-out-of-here vibe.

Even on weekends, not many people are there. If it weren’t for soccer, the whole place would seem closed.

You can easily get on the $10 balloon ride, which is less a ride and more like a perfunctory elevator. In so many ways, it symbolizes the park: a beacon of overpriced underachievement.

Meanwhile, park officials and politicians spent more than $260 million on getting to where we are so far.

Renowned New York designer Ken Smith has watched his innovative dream die by a thousand cuts.

The creek canyon, once a visual anchor and cultural spine to the park, was axed for more homes.

Hasty additions were bolted on as if panicked politicians feared a coup.

As a result, everything looks slightly askew and out of proportion, with too much wasted space. Even future building maps look lopsided and tilted toward homes and golf courses.

Gone is the life of the park, throttled and hemmed in by development.

Within the park, inexplicable blank orange circles — signs apparently waiting for instructions — dot the landscape as if reminding visitors that the park is not defined.

Even when you try to drive to the park, you circumnavigate a maze of construction roads. Wrong-way signs point you past busy subdivisions in progress. Bulldozers make flat dirt even flatter as housing pods rise like perfectly square cookies.

Soon those will rise into beautifully appointed, color-correct homes, surrounding the park like a fortress.

What was supposed to be liberating is becoming increasingly claustrophobic. Despite its vastness, the Great Park is eerily small.

It will never compete with New York’s Central Park, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park or San Diego’s Balboa Park.

Great titles need to be earned.

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DAVID HANSEN is a writer and Laguna Beach resident. He can be reached at hansen.dave@gmail.com.