Elysian Park: Battered but Still an Oasis

From the dusty hilltop roads of Elysian Park, the views of the surrounding cityscape are spectacular. Those vistas enthrall but also worry the park’s guardians.

To the west and south are the new glass towers of downtown Los Angeles and a seemingly unending grid of urban sprawl. To the east and north, the concrete banks of the Los Angeles River and nearby rail yards underline the densely populated foothills leading up to the San Gabriel Mountains.

Dodger Stadium and its parking lots border the park. The Pasadena Freeway cuts right through it and the Golden State Freeway hugs another side, while the Police Academy stands near its center.

The overall impression is of the city pushing hard up against and through a somewhat battered oasis. As urbanization increases, the need for the 585-acre park becomes greater, but so does the amount of urban stress on it, officials and naturalists say.

That struggle--trying to preserve a pocket of nature about a mile from the hub of downtown--is rarely out of mind of the people now celebrating Elysian Park’s centennial.

“There is much more of an awareness of downtown than there was five years ago. So there is more awareness of the park. That’s good, but it’s also scary because I get worried that the park is going to be sopped up by developers,” said Sallie Neubauer, an official of the Citizens Committee to Save Elysian Park.

That group, which is leading the park’s 100th birthday festivities, has been a fierce advocate of the park’s right to be left alone. Over the last 20 years, the committee has helped fight off proposals for a convention center, oil drilling and condominiums in the park. It is now battling to keep the Department of Water & Power from putting an aluminum roof over the seven-acre Elysian Reservoir, which is surrounded by parkland. The DWP staff says the drinking water needs extra protection from the elements; the park committee says such a roof would ruin a sylvan setting and bring another incursion of the city into the park.

“There is an incredible expanse of concrete in this city. So, the park is a good thing to fight for,” Neubauer said.

According to some of its fans, Elysian Park had been the Rodney Dangerfield of city parks. It just hasn’t gotten much respect, they claim, even though it is the third-largest park owned by Los Angeles, after 4,107-acre Griffith and 714-acre O’Melveny Park above Granada Hills. Elysian ranks fifth if the city-run federal properties at Sepulveda Basin and Hansen Dam are counted.

Only within the last couple of years, Elysian Park’s fans say, has the city begun to do something about the park’s problems, such as adding to and repairing the irrigation system in the wake of a 1981 fire that ripped through half the park and left a legacy of blackened tree trunks still visible. Crime, graffiti, litter and traffic remain constant worries.

Complaints about the park are not new. In 1894, the California booster magazine Land of Sunshine said: “Even by our own citizens, it is little known and appreciated except by a few at a distance who are taken to visit this park, see its natural beauties, and express astonishment that it is so much neglected.”

The magazine went on to breathlessly proclaim that Elysian “is capable of being transformed into the most unique and beautiful park in the United States, if not in the world.”

City officials strongly deny that the park ever received less than its fair share of funds and attention. But they concede that perception may have been fostered by the fact that many people--especially middle- and upper-middle class Anglos--do not know much about Elysian Park other than from using it as a shortcut to and from Dodger games.

The park’s maintenance supervisor, Stephen Carleton, said he gets a puzzled look from a lot of people when he tells them where he works. Not until he explains that the park surrounds Dodger Stadium do they understand, he said.

“I think most people only know about Griffith Park and their little neighborhood park,” Carleton said.

Elysian (the word is borrowed from the ancient Greek name for “paradise”) is what recreation planners call a passive park. There are no golf courses, no carrousel, no pony rides, no pools there. Just picnic tables, steep hiking trails, four tennis courts, three softball fields and a lot of brush and woods.

The head of planning and development for the city Department of Recreation and Parks, Joel Breitbart, can see Elysian Park from his office on the 13th floor of City Hall. “It’s nice to have such a large holding in a very natural state. It tells you, right in the heart of the city, how the city was 100 years ago, as opposed to the traditional recreation center or small city park which are man-made,” he said.

Quiet on Weekdays

On weekdays, Elysian Park is fairly quiet. Cadets from the Police Academy jog up and down its hills. Young lovers park on the ridges. Office workers eat lunch.

The youth recreation center at the Solano Canyon section of the park has been little used since the late 1950s when what was a poor Latino neighborhood across the way in Chavez Ravine was demolished to make way for Dodger Stadium. The parks department is planning to turn it into an athletic facility for handicapped youth from around the entire city.

But weekends are very different in Elysian Park. As many as 3,000 people are there--mainly Latino and Asian families from Echo Park, East Los Angeles and Chinatown. The Grace Simons Lodge, a banquet hall and lush picnic facility named after the woman who founded the park’s Citizens Committee (and who died last year), opened in 1983 and is booked months in advance for weddings and company parties. At less glamorous picnic areas along Stadium Way, parents come early in the morning to stake out a table for a child’s birthday party by hanging colorful streamers and pinatas from trees.

“Elysian Park is a facility for people who don’t have a lot of money,” explained Sheldon Jensen, a parks department official.

Less a ‘Paradise’

Elysian becomes less a “paradise” during weekend Dodger games and when Stadium Way becomes a drag strip for thousands of low-rider automobile cruisers who have invaded the park on Wednesday nights and Sunday afternoons. After a police crackdown last month and the arrests of as many as 200 low riders in one weekend, nearby residents say the cruiser problem has eased.

Elysian Park has had its share of robberies, shootings and rapes, mainly after dark, “but nothing in an unusual, alarming amount,” Capt. Ted Kozak of the Police Department’s Rampart Division said.

“I personally think it is one of the nicest parks in the city,” Kozak said. “Knock off the palm trees and it reminds me of the hills in Pennsylvania where I was born and raised.”

Vandalism and litter also take their toll. However, officials insist that upkeep has improved recently, with the park’s maintenance staff back to 45 full-time workers, up from the 30 to which it had been cut after passage of Proposition 13 in 1978.

Despite those problems, park-goers say they like Elysian because its terrain offers a more natural setting than many other city parks.

‘Kick Back and Relax’

“Nobody hassles you here, except maybe the ice cream man,” said Eddie Esquerre, a beer salesman from East Los Angeles who goes to Elysian about twice a week “to kick back and relax.” He said Hollenbeck Park is closer to his house but is too crowded and has too much trouble with gangs.

A 24-year-old mechanic from Burbank, Jose Flores, said he takes his Chow dog, Mugsie, for a run in Elysian Park several times a month. “There’s a lot of space here and I like the views in the hills,” he said.

The park is the last large parcel of open space left from the King of Spain’s original bequest of land in 1781 to the pueblo that grew to become Los Angeles. The hills had been used for a stone quarry and were fairly barren in 1886, when the city set them aside as park land. Some historians say that the City Council considered the land worthless and only wanted it as a park to increase the value of surrounding property.

Whatever the motivation, the city planted 37,000 eucalyptus trees on the hills the following year. And, in 1893, the Los Angeles Horticultural Society began the first botanical garden in Southern California in a frost-free, rich-soiled ravine near what is now Stadium Way. Many exotic plants remain there, including rubber trees, Cape chestnuts and Tipuana tipus. A stately row of Indian Palms, planted before 1900, now line the southern stretch of Stadium Way.

120 Species of Birds

As a result of those trees and natural chaparral, an estimated 120 species of birds live in the park, ranging from quail to owls and hawks.

“Perhaps the most significant feature of the park is the mild climate to be found in the sheltered valleys,” wrote landscape specialists in the 1971 master plan for the park. That plan recommended against any intensive development of facilities and said that the park should be “a haven for flora, fauna and those people who are seeking forms of recreation other than highly organized sports or concessions.”

The plan called for the introduction of many more and different plants and trees over 15 years. Echoing the 1894 magazine article, the 1971 plan said the park could become “world famous as one of the great botanic collections.”

The recommendation was not followed. But, after some controversies, the general philosophy against development seems to have been. The Citizens Committee keeps a vigilant watch even over the relatively inaccessible parts of the park, cut off by the Pasadena Freeway from the main picnic areas. For example, protests helped kill a proposal to build a large restaurant on Radio Hill, which borders North Broadway and is topped by a police communications tower. And the committee convinced the Department of Water and Power not to build a new pumping station on the little-used Buena Vista section right next to the freeway.

Centennial Plans

So, instead of unveiling any new building, Elysian Park’s centennial is being marked by the planting of trees and the improvement of the irrigation system in the Solano Canyon area.

On Aug. 2 and 3, a fiesta will be held in the park in honor of Gaspar de Portola and Father Juan Crespi, the Spanish explorers who camped in 1769 on the river bank opposite Buena Vista hill and admired the vistas.

“The main thing,” said Judith Jamison of the Citizens Committee, “is to get the public to understand this treasure.”