Pershing Square Plans : The Street People Have Their Doubts

Some worry that they are trying to drive the street people out of one of the only patches of green left in downtown Los Angeles.

Others simply do not want Pershing Square to change.

And there are some who think it might be one of the most exciting things to happen downtown in decades.

But no one was neutral in Pershing Square on Friday over a proposed $11.9-million overhaul of the city’s oldest park, where revitalization efforts have been almost as commonplace as the pigeons that skitter about the square’s near-empty pathways.

The Pershing Square Management Assn.--a nonprofit business organization that operates the park under a city lease--has proposed a massive revitalization of the historic green that would include restaurants, a water sculpture, an entertainment area, a large crystal-like building and a nighttime laser show.

For ‘All the People’

The idea, said association director Janet Marie Smith, is to open the park up to “all the people” of downtown Los Angeles--to create a showplace, where business people from nearby offices can hobnob with the downtrodden.

But many are skeptical. The reason there are so few people in the square today, they say, is because security guards who work for the management company are driving the street people out.

As they lazed in the sun or ate lunch--or stumbled down the pathways in search of another split of wine--the street people of Pershing Square worried Friday about where they would go if their “backyard” was suddenly transformed into some fancy new civic attraction.

Nine-year-old Marvin Emile, who lives in a nearby Skid Row hotel, would rather have swings for kids.

“They should put in things for little children,” he said as his mother

looked on. “I’m bored in my house.”

James Houston, 42, who works in a downtown mission for the homeless, griped that “they’re trying to make this a rich people’s park.”

“I think they should leave the park for the people, not create restaurants for the rich,” said Houston, 42, who does social work at the Gospel Mission of America. “These people haven’t anyplace to go now, and this is designated for the people of Los Angeles, aren’t I right? All the people.”

Houston suspects the proposed renovation is a subtle way of ridding the park of the downtrodden in favor of downtown office workers and tourists. He said the homeless, many of whom spend the daytime hours in the area, would be left to wander the streets.

Motives Questioned

“I don’t think (the street people) would be welcome anymore. I think they’re trying to run them away,” Houston said. “Even today, security guards walk up to people sleeping here and hit them with night sticks. That’s not what a park is all about.”

A woman named Mary, who wore a ragged turban on her head and tattered pink leg-warmers around her knees, said she wouldn’t know where to go if the square was transformed.

“I guess I’d just go to hell,” said the soft-spoken woman, who lives on Los Angeles streets. “I’d just have to fly around, I guess. I don’t like fancy places. I might just have to stand outside and look in. Filthy people, you know, like to hang around outside fancy places.”

Roy Robin Jacobs, 39, who sat on a park bench with a rag tied around his head and three watches on his arm, said he sleeps on Skid Row and comes to the park “three or four times a day . . . for a place to sit down and watch the girls.”

“We wouldn’t have enough park left if they did all that,” he said. “I don’t think we have enough parks.”

And there was “Doc” Barnes, who calls himself a “professional panhandler” and claims to have appeared in movies with Charles Bronson. He says he has ridden the rails from one end of the nation to the other.

More the Merrier

Barnes, who said he lives on the streets, was in the park Friday “because it’s one area where I can stand in the sun.”

The new park plan sounds fine to him, however. The more middle-class people, the better, the panhandler said.

“Kitty cat,” he told a reporter, “I’m always going to be where the money’s at.”

The new proposal--which would require a combination of public and private funds--is still in the final planning stages and must be approved by the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency and the Recreation and Parks Department. Construction would not begin until 1988.

“The goal is to develop a park that’s safe and attractive for the 95% of the downtown population not using it now,” Smith said, scoffing at suggestions that the plan is designed to run the street people out. “They would not be displaced. They’re as much a constituency of the park as anyone else.”

In fact, Smith said, several Skid Row agencies were asked for their input before the plans were announced.

Still, among what remains of the park’s denizens, there is doubt. They wonder why, if they’re welcome, security guards poke them in the feet when they’re snoozing.

“The purpose is not to push them out, the purpose is to put everybody else in,” said Roger Langner, a former Los Angeles police narcotics detective who now operates the park’s security service.

Langner, whose beat was once Pershing Square, admits there are fewer hobos and street gang members in the area now. but he said his security force runs out only the trouble makers. One of his guards, Langner said, was stabbed two months ago by a drug dealer.

“If they don’t want to be here because of security, then they’re the kind of people we don’t want in the first place,” he added.

The $11.9-million proposal is the latest--and most ambitious--of many efforts to try to open the park up to middle-class downtowners.

In the 1960s, the city hacked down the gardens in Pershing Square to try to prevent crime in the shrubbery. But the derelicts returned. In 1979 the city put up banners and balloons and brought in mimes and Ukrainian dancers for noontime variety shows. But office workers failed to visit the park in great numbers.

Then came 1984 and the Summer Olympics. Los Angeles’ persistent eyesore got a hurried, $1-million sprucing up--complete with an outdoor cafe, kiosk and band shell. But as soon as the Games ended, the street people returned and the office workers didn’t.