Sepulveda Basin Puts Thousands in Play Every Day

For what is, in bald terms, the drain at the bottom of a giant bathtub, the Sepulveda Basin has a cornucopia of uses and a vast and eclectic fan club.

So many people use the basin for so many activities that it could star as the locale for a TV series or novel. Pain and gain, crime and punishment, war and peace, all are reflected by the thousands of people who work or play--mostly play--in the basin.

Runners and walkers, skaters and Frisbee tossers, picnickers and cricketers, dog trainers and archers, cops and crooks, illegal horsemen and hunters, peace marchers and military installations--they all find the room they need in the 2,097-acre basin, originally designed to control and channel away the floodwaters that once sloshed destructively at the bottom of the tub-shaped San Fernando Valley.

“It’s just a madhouse on weekends,” said Jim Duran, recreation director for the Balboa Sports Complex, run by the Los Angeles Department of Parks and Recreation. The city parks department leases 1,527 acres of the basin from the Army Corps of Engineers, which is responsible for flood control.

“Once we get a building, holy Toledo, we’ll really be busy,” Moran said of plans to build an indoor recreation facility, complete with weight rooms and stage.

As it is, he estimates 15,000 people a week use the basin for sporting activities--”not including the picnickers and spectators, just the people doing active things.”

About 5,000 of these, he guesses, are joggers. According to a parks department employee who walks against the traffic flow, which enables her to spot new faces and keep track of the joggers, who sometimes pour onto the 11 miles of paths around and through the basin at a rate of more than 100 an hour.

Some 3,000 children and teen-agers play soccer in a Saturday league and 1,500 adults play the game in a Sunday league, he said. There are 278 teams--with more than 3,300 members--in municipal baseball and softball leagues, and another 500 or so play on 36 independent teams. The game’s English ancestor, cricket, fields 22 teams with about 1,000 players.

About 50 teams play football, and there are about 80 people competing for at least six Frisbee teams, he said.

Reservations for the park’s 16 tennis courts average 75 a day on weekdays and 100 on weekends, and its three golf courses--Balboa, Encino and Woodley Lakes--send out 5,000 to 6,000 players a week.

More esoteric sports have their niches. Two clubs run a two-acre airfield for radio-controlled model airplanes, with a 600-foot runway. “There are about 400 to 500 people who use the field,” said Vick Martin, a retired Encino electronics technician who is president of the San Fernando Valley Radio Controlled Fliers.

“This is one of the finest fields in the Western United States. People come from all over California to use it.”

Like other groups with special uses for the park, the model-airplane fliers bear much of the cost for their areas. Martin said his club and the San Fernando Valley Giant Scale Squadron--which requires members’ planes to have a wingspan of at least 5 feet--have spent about $15,000 on the field in the past four years.

Similar financial arrangements apply to the archery range. The Easton Sports Development Foundation--an arm of the Easton Aluminum Co.--has spent about $100,000 on the range since 1982, said Lloyd Brown, the foundation director.

The company, which he described as the largest manufacturer of arrows in the world, became involved as an Olympic archery sponsor. He said several hundred archers a week use the two ranges--one 20 yards and the other 100 yards long. Twenty to 30 would-be archers show up for the beginners’ safety class each Saturday morning given by the foundation and the Woodley Park Archery Assn., which the foundation supports. Fifty to 60 compete in the groups’ summer competitions.

Not all of the park’s users are welcome, Duran says.

“We have a constant problem with illegal vendors,” he said. “They make the place look like a border town on Sunday afternoons. There’s usually 12 or 13 of them, selling stuff out of mobile units--clothes, vegetables, shoes, wall hangings, you name it.

“They drink beer and get testy.”

It’s not always possible to get a police car, he said, but “I tell them to just stay right there, be my guest, and I go phone my wife and ask what’s for dinner, and they all leave because they think I called the police.”

There are also drug problems.

“People show up stoned on grass or coke or heroin to play tennis, and I go out and tell them, ‘Look, gentlemen, you’re not well-coordinated, you’re going to get hurt.’ ” In case of trouble he calls park department rangers, he said. He added, “But we’ve only got two rangers for all the parks in the Valley. We need more rangers.

“We did have a drug-dealing problem on Woodley Avenue, but the Van Nuys division of the LAPD has mostly cleaned that up,” he said.

The major drug dealing was in a dirt parking lot in the 6300 block of Woodley between the street and the water recycling plant, said Van Nuys Division Sgt. Tim Day.

“We had a terrible problem there for a while--a drive-through supermarket for marijuana sales,” he said. “One guy told me he came up there from Buena Park because the word was all over that the park was wide open.”

An officer who happened on a drug deal in the park in the summer of 1984 was run down and dragged when he tried to halt a dealer’s car by standing in its path, Day said. The officer fired his revolver before losing consciousness. He was not seriously hurt, and a suspect was arrested nearby.

A crackdown was launched in 1985.

The situation was so bad, Day said, that when Deputy Police Chief Dan Sullivan drove up to the site in an unmarked car to see how officers were handling the problem, a dealer tried to sell him drugs and had the unusual fortune of being arrested by a deputy chief.

“We made a concerted effort to simply arrest everyone who went there with drugs--everyone,” Day said. “We were making hundreds of arrests, sometimes 15 or 20 a day.”

The effort paid off, and although officers still patrol the parking lot heavily, only 46 arrests were made for marijuana possession in the park last year, and “about as many” for trafficking, he said.

By its nature, the park is the scene of crimes that are rare elsewhere in the city.

Like hunting and illicit horseback riding.

Duran said that years ago, there was an equestrian trail through the park, but horses were banned and the trail allowed to grow over before he began working there in 1978.

“But still, every now and then we find some cowgirl flying through the park on a horse, scaring the ball players,” he said. “I have to go out and tell them they can’t do that anymore.”

Hunters, some of whom prowl the river bottom of the basin’s wildlife refuge in search of ducks and Canada geese, are another kind of problem, he said: They have guns, so he calls the park rangers or the police.

A Reseda man who state Fish and Game officials said had been seen periodically shooting birds in the refuge was sentenced last April to 90 days in jail and to perform 150 hours of taxidermy for a county museum. Officials said they found the bodies of 21 legally protected birds in his apartment, including herons, a kingfisher and a great egret.

Hunters are difficult to track down, Day said. “You can hear the report from shots being fired in there, but it’s hard to find them because there are lots of places to hide and they can plainly see an approaching police car. But we do get some, every now and then, and charge them with violating the state fish and game laws.”

Transients occasionally set up housekeeping in the park, Day said. “In 1982, there were about 20 people living on the model-airplane field, until one night in February there was a real deluge and they almost drowned” as water backed up behind the dam, he said.

“A police officer helped them swim for their lives. Since then we haven’t seen many of them there for more than a day or two,” he said.

“But we wouldn’t be surprised if there isn’t someone living in the bird sanctuary. We see evidence now and then of people living there, but of course they avoid us.”

One group that lived in the basin temporarily, eventually growing to about 1,000, were participants of The Great Peace March. In February of 1985 they gathered for three weeks on a field at White Oak and Victory boulevards before embarking on an 8 1/2-month walk to Washington to call for nuclear disarmament.

Next to the field, in counterpoint, were the camouflage-painted trucks of the 3rd battalion of the 144th Field Artillery of the California National Guard, one of five military installations in the basin, which is under the ultimate authority of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The 600-person National Guard artillery battalion is headquartered in an armory dedicated in 1965, where some of its jeeps and trucks are kept, along with offices for a 24-man full-time staff. (Its 155-millimeter howitzers are kept at Camp Roberts, near Paso Robles.)

Farther east along Victory Boulevard are the headquarters of the California Air National Guard’s 261st Combat Communications Squadron. A full-time cadre of 25 persons run offices and workshops for the 200-person squadron. Their 27-acre base was once the headquarters for Army Nike anti-aircraft missile sites that ringed the Valley. Its two underground missile-launching bunkers were converted more than 15 years ago to workrooms and storerooms.

On a nine-acre site on Balboa Boulevard is a Navy-Marine Corps reserve training center, staffed by 27 full-time Navy personnel, who train 468 reservists in 15 units, and 18 Marines, the nucleus of the 300-man 2nd battalion of the 23rd Marines.

The Navy facility includes a mock-up of a small ship, complete with gun turret and cargo-handling boom, and the Marines have an obstacle course alongside Victory Boulevard, which is occasionally run by reservists, ROTC students and would-be Marine recruits awaiting induction orders.

Officers of all the units say they like their Sepulveda Basin locations and have no plans to move, especially because of the recruiting potential the location offers.

“What we have here is essentially a small-town telephone company on wheels,” said Maj. Rick Testa of the Air National Guard communications squadron. “Most of us are very technical people--computer technicians, electronic maintenance. We have no foot soldiers. In this area, we can draw on the communications and aerospace companies. If we had to move to some rural area, we wouldn’t be able to find people with the backgrounds we need.”

One thing the basin has much less of than in the past are the cornfields that were once its biggest and most prominent feature. The Cicero family, who for 40 years grew corn and other crops on land leased from the Corps of Engineers and sold fresh produce from a stand at Balboa and Victory boulevards, has packed up and moved on.

With their departure--the family now helps run the farm at Pierce College--an era closed. The Tapia family still farms 185 acres alongside the Ventura Freeway, which is due to be decreased to about 100 acres by July to make room for park improvements. But according to county agriculture officials, the Cicero farm’s 200 acres had accounted for about a third of what little remained of farming in the Valley, a primarily agricultural area only 50 years ago.

The Ciceros’ former cornfields are scheduled to become the site of a decorative lake, a lure for even more recreation-seekers.