2,097 Acres Inspire Almost as Many Ideas

About 20 years ago, the teen-age drag-racers who terrorized Van Nuys Boulevard and the store owners who had to tolerate it launched a campaign to break the stalemate.

They proposed building a drag strip in the Sepulveda Basin to keep the youngsters off the boulevard.

To win public support, the grown-ups gathered thousands of signatures. And hundreds of teen-agers plastered their hot rods with posters pleading: “Give the LAPD a Rest and Take Heed--the Homeless Generation, Sepulveda Basin They Need.”

But it didn’t work. The Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks nixed the idea.

It wasn’t the first or the last time that the city or the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which owns all the basin property, has played Scrooge to the dreamers and schemers who salivate at the idea of paving a piece of the basin. Over the years, the 2,097 acres of largely uninterrupted green space have been as irresistible to developers as chocolate sundaes to dieters.

“We get a tremendous number of requests from people who want to develop everything from car washes to apartments,” said John H. Ward, an assistant general manager of the parks department, which leases much of the basin land. “We turn down somebody every week who wants to build some kind of commercial development in the basin.”

“Anybody who wants to do something which requires a lot of land comes in saying, ‘Do I have a good idea for you!’ ” observed Ward’s colleague, Joel Breitbart, assistant general manager of planning and development.

The latest rejection last week was for a proposal to stake out the basin’s wildlife area for camouflaged would-be soldiers playing war games. The warriors would shoot each other with pistols loaded with paint.

“He didn’t see a thing wrong with it,” said Ward in exasperation. “I told him he was wasting his time.”

Other dead-end ideas have included a blimp-landing pad, a basketball and hockey arena, a post office, a Little League headquarters, an international exposition, low-cost housing, a convention center and a storage area for parade floats.

The city also turned down an idea advanced by golfers to make the basin what Cooperstown, N.Y., is to baseball: to create a golf hall of fame there.

Perhaps the most notorious proposal came in 1978 from the owners of the Hollywood Park, who wanted to move the Inglewood race track to the basin. A plan to build sports facilities for the 1984 Olympics also fizzled, the victim of public opposition, although the city vigorously endorsed the idea.

Over the years, some failed proposals were taken more seriously than others, at least at first.

Shooting Shot Down

When skeet shooters and riflemen clamored for a shooting range in the late 1960s, city parks officials decided to conduct an experiment. A shotgun was fired against a wall of white rocks at the Sepulveda Dam to determine if the noise level would be unbearable.

The gunfire reverberated throughout the basin, leading to the conclusion that a shooting range would be too noisy.

Not all applicants accept rejection lightly. Many years ago, upset California Highway Patrol officials appealed to Sacramento and Washington when their proposal to erect a headquarters in the basin was coolly received by the city. The strategy failed, and a city Recreation and Parks Commission member chastised the CHP for trying to raid the parklands.

In the 1970s, Seymour Greben, a parks department official, suggested that the endless stream of people wishing for space would continue as long as idle basin land remained.

“It’s potentially a tremendous recreation area,” Greben said. “We have not had enough money to develop it. As long as we don’t develop it, perfectly legitimate requests will keep coming forward.”