Grace Simons, Defender of Elysian Park, Dies at 84

Grace Simons--who for 20 years fought the City of Los Angeles, its Police Department, an oil company, home developers and anyone else who tried to intrude on her beloved Elysian Park--is dead at age 84.

She died Friday in Barlow Hospital, near the 575-acre hillside park.

A journalist who worked for a French news agency in China and New York City, she came to Los Angeles in 1939 and reported for the old California Eagle, a black-oriented newspaper that failed in the early 1960s.

She first turned her attention to the park near her home when the city threatened to take 63 acres for what has since become the Convention Center on Figueroa Street.

Concerned about the inroads that Dodger Stadium already had made, she and a few neighbors in 1965 formed the Citizens Committee to Save Elysian Park.

Over the next few years she became the recurring president of the committee and headed a series of battles that it won against proposals for an airport, oil drilling by Occidental Petroleum, an Asian cultural center, a child care facility and several condominium projects.

There even was a treasure hunter who in 1974 claimed that there was gold under the park.

But the committee also experienced its share of losses, among them a move to expand the Los Angeles Police Academy.

Whatever the cause, Simons would argue that “eternal vigilance is the price of park quality” and she would offer statistics that Los Angeles had fewer per capita acres devoted to parkland than Calcutta, India.

Her most recent battle was as president emeritus of the committee when earlier this year she fought for improved irrigation facilities for the park’s trees, many of which were destroyed in a disastrous 1981 fire.

For her efforts, a new recreation facility at the park was named the Grace Simons Lodge.

She is survived by her husband, Frank Glass.