The Dead Parks : Insufficient Funding, Drugs and Violence Drive Many Away From City Recreation Areas

Three dozen terrified children ran into the Ross Snyder Recreation Center on East 41st Street one afternoon in late July, screaming that men with Uzi submachine guns were in the park.

Arby Fields, a recreation director on the job eight months, went outside and saw about 20 men with clothing draped over guns. “I shut the doors and called the cops--three times,” he said.

Almost three hours later four police squad cars arrived. By then, the armed men were long gone, and the police, who later said Fields had called the police gang unit number, not 911, left without making a report.

“We get shots fired in the park three or four times a week,” says Field, echoing a concern voiced by many of his co-workers. Others complain of slow response by police and of inadequate funding.

In scores of city parks across Los Angeles--mostly cramped sites in poor neighborhoods--fear is high. So pervasive are gangs, drug dealers and drunks, so limited are the programs and facilities, that the sites are known to parents and even some recreation directors as “dead parks.”

Hector Hernandez, head of security for the city’s 300 parks, playgrounds and pools, agrees that there is, indeed, a problem. But he disagrees on what to call it. “I wouldn’t call them dead parks,” Hernandez said. “I’d call them terrorized parks.”

The Los Angeles Police Department, in a report Oct. 6, called them “problem parks” and listed 75 in need of extra police attention.

What the Public Perceives

James E. Haddaway, general manager of the city Recreation and Parks Department, said there is a general public perception that many of the city’s parks are unsafe. Forty-nine percent of Los Angeles residents, questioned by the city two years ago at shopping centers, reported they are afraid to enter their neighborhood parks, he said.

“They feel the parks are unsafe,” he said, adding that “I believe them.”

Scattered across Los Angeles, from the Valley to the beach to the harbor, the “dead parks” have generated little official attention. But residents of the neighborhoods, the parents and children who cannot picnic and play safely in their local parks, are intimately aware of the dangers.

Alejandro Salazar, 10, was playing with friends July 19 on the sidewalk abutting Pacoima Park when he was hit by a fatal bullet in the back of his head. A 17-year-old gang member, shooting at rival gang members over an incident that grew out of a boy wearing the wrong gang colors, couldn’t shoot straight, the police found.

At Hubert H. Humphrey Memorial Park, also in Pacoima, child care director Valerie Moody told of frightening encounters with gang members.

“I’ve had guns put to my head. I’ve had to go out by myself and tell the drug dealers to quit dealing in the park and get out,” Moody said. Her boss, Rufus Wade, echoed her remarks, as did two dozen recreation workers across the city.

At Norwood Elementary School, just southwest of the Harbor-Santa Monica Freeway interchange, principal Angie Kasza said her 1,500 students are “caught between the Hoover Rec Center and Toberman (Park), which is where the 18th Street Gang formed. There are fewer problems at Hoover because it’s on a main street, but Toberman is sort of tucked away and it’s a real bad scene.”

Sengiak Yeoh, a Norwood fourth-grader, said: “You can’t play in the parks, they’re dangerous.” His friend Danny Orzuna added that “bad people” hang out in parks so he stays away.

Southbound Ramps

At Toberman Park, wedged into the crook where the southbound Harbor Freeway ramps lead into the westbound Santa Monica Freeway, evening often brings out men who stand idly until others approach. Little folds of wadded paper are exchanged, sometimes openly, for little bags of emotional escape.

At Ardmore Recreation Center near Koreatown, morning brings out the gamblers. Rosa Manriquez, who runs Ardmore, said she has called the police again and again, hoping they will drive by in patrol cars to scatter the gamblers. But she said the police never came until she called the vice squad, which quickly sent in officers to break up the dice game.

On Tuesday afternoon Manriquez again called the police three times to report men fighting outside the recreation center. Three hours later, she said, the police finally called back to ask if the fight was still in progress.

At Pecan Park and Pool, next to the Aliso-Pico Housing project on East First Street, the homeless sometimes break in at night to bathe in the pool. In the daytime, wandering drunks relieve themselves on the basketball courts.

At Pecan and some other pools, the problem is frequently not that there are too few people but that people come at the wrong times. “At some pools we have more swimming after-hours than when the pools are open,” said Haddaway.

After-hours swimmers, he added, are generally not teen-agers but families, often groups of families. Most city pools close at 7 p.m., before many working-class parents get home.

Haddaway said vandalism also drains money. Both the Harvard Park and Central pools, near downtown, have had their locker rooms vandalized repeatedly, he said.

Yet the city’s 220 recreation directors--40% of whom are women--are routinely required to work alone after dark in parks.

The official police position is that they do the best they can with limited resources. Cmdr. William Booth, LAPD’s senior spokesman, said he does not believe officers fail to respond to reports of violence and felonies in parks.

As to complaints by some recreation directors that police decline to take reports of violence, burglaries and other offenses, Booth emphasized that officers must take reports. However, he noted, when the only evidence of a crime is a citizens’ complaint an officer has the discretion to conclude no evidence of a crime exists and to decline to make a report.

“What the officer is not supposed to do is say he doesn’t have time to take a report,” Booth said, adding that anyone who feels an officer “has neglected his duty should call the area captain, or if he is out, ask for the watch commander, and make a complaint.”

Booth questioned the wisdom of sending officers in some cases, however. He said when patrol cars appear, drug dealers simply walk off and police have few resources for undercover operations. He said gamblers, likewise, can pocket their dice and run.

The city Recreation and Parks Department currently employs 1,927 full-time people, less than half the number on its payroll in 1978, when California voters passed Propopsition 13 and Uncle Sam began phasing out the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, which paid locally for nearly 2,000 people to run park programs.

Lately, recreation directors sometimes are not on duty during their assigned hours at “dead parks,” a problem Haddaway termed so serious that he has disciplined several directors and warned others.

A reporter stopped four times at Toberman Park to see Recreation Director Herb Price during business hours. Price was finally interviewed on a fifth visit. He said he had never cut work and he must have been at staff meetings and other events.

Then Price talked about working at Toberman Park.

As he spoke, he sat in one of two decrepit chairs that wobbled constantly and seemed about to collapse. Price, who has been at Toberman for five years, said he cannot recall how many years it has been since he had a budget for office furniture.

His view of the park from his dark, unpainted office is obstructed by heavy metal screens, installed to keep out burglars, whose corners have been pried back in several places by would-be thieves.

“What’s different today from the ‘60s is the drug problems and the gang members. It’s dangerous here and the city won’t even talk about hazard pay,” he said.

“Exposition is the nearest pool to here, but it’s too far for little kids to walk and the older kids have to cross through gang territory,” he added, “so a lot of people are frightened.”

Price, who is alloted 22 hours of part-time recreation help a week, said: “The No. 1 thing I need is staff.”

In addition, Price noted, the city expects the part-time workers, some of whom are college students, to tell gang members or people on drugs to leave the park. By contrast, he pointed out, when police respond to reports of trouble in the parks, they always send several cars, each with two officers.

Drug abusers are also a constant problem. “About once a month,” Price said, “I have to call the paramedics because someone ODd.”

The neighborhood where Price works is overwhelmingly Spanish-speaking. Price, like all but 30 of the 220 recreation directors, speaks only English.

And Price, like other directors of dead parks, gets almost no money from the city to serve local youngsters. This summer, and the two previous summers, the City Council authorized about $700,000 for part-time recreation leaders at 65 parks in poor neighborhoods.

But, Haddaway conceded, there is no budget for extra staff when full-time people like Price are on vacation, get sick or are called away to meetings. Thus many part-time hours get diverted from providing programs for poor youngsters to simply watching the office.

Under orders from a memo issued last month by Ed Ferrante, who oversees 11 inner-city parks, the recreation directors at those parks must stay in their office and at their desks, instead of running their recreation programs. Ferrante explained his reasoning by saying recreation directors must not be distracted and must be instantly available to give aid if anyone is hurt.

This year the Bradley Administration and the City Council authorized a total, citywide figure of $30,000 to buy baseballs, basketballs and other sports gear for all 150 recreation centers, according to Stephen E. Klippel, chief financial officer for the Recreation and Parks Department. The sum equals less than one nickel per child per year in Los Angeles.

And Price, like other directors, told of ordering basketballs that he said the city General Services Department delivers after basketball season, of baseballs so cheap that one side flattens the first time the ball is hit with a bat.

Meanwhile, according to Klippel and Betty Leroy, the department’s budget chief, the city has budgeted $383,000, or nearly 13 times as much, to buy recreation-center office supplies.

Each of the two dozen recreation directors interviewed said they couldn’t imagine such a large budget for office supplies. All said they used their own funds for supplies or raised funds from merchants.

“I’ve got about $100 for supplies for summer camp,” said Annette Payne, a recreation director at Pacoima Park. She said that money comes from the $25 monthly fee charged each of the 40 children who attend.

While the dead parks struggle to survive, the picture elsewhere in the city is much greener. Those in affluent areas have active programs and abundant sports equipment. The reason is simple.

After voters passed Proposition 13, Haddaway recommended--and the Recreation and Parks Commission, Mayor Bradley and the City Council adopted--new budget policies that continued the even divisionof taxpayer funds among all the parks according to a long-established formula based on park size.

But, park visitors who now want organized recreation must pay fees, and children whose parents cannot pay fees have to find their recreation somewhere else.

Several recreation directors noted a direct link between the cutback in organized recreation in poor neighborhoods and the growth of youth gangs.

“What we are seeing is the philosophy of recreation for profit brought to municipal parks,” said Cheryl Parisi, the business agent for Local 901 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the recreation workers’ union.

The results can be seen in the vastly different budgets at affluent parks and dead parks.

At Northridge Park, which serves an largely middle-class to affluent area and which Haddaway often cites as a model for Los Angeles, $13,500 was spent on recreation in July, according to Klippel. At month’s end Northridge still had $36,000 in the bank, most of it from fees. In a year, Klippel said, Northridge will generate about a quarter million dollars in fees.

In Toberman Park, by contrast, not one penny was spent in July on recreation. At month’s end, its balance was $1,538, most of which came from a touring carnival show.

And at Pacoima Park, which is between two subsidized housing projects where nearly all of the children qualify for free lunches, $362 was spent in July, leaving a balance of $1,708, according to Klippel.

Four years ago Haddaway adamantly asserted in interviews that no serious inequities existed as a result of his budget policies. Since then he has held extensive meetings with the people who run the parks and the people who work in the parks, he said, and his attitude has shifted.

“For 10 1/2 years I have felt fair was equal . . . but in the last year I have begun to question that,” Haddaway said, adding that he has come to believe that “equal money, equal amounts of resources, does not produce equal results.”

The age of buildings, the kind of shrubbery, the presence or absence of automatic sprinklers, the degree of use or misuse of a facility, he said, are among factors that can mean great differences in maintenance costs.

Haddaway said he is now working on developing a new formula to take these costs into account so maintenance personnel can be assigned in ways that should produce equal or nearly equal results.

The proposed plan conforms with the trend in Recreation and Parks Department spending since 1978. As the city budget has begun to recover from the jarring effects of Prop. 13, the Recreation and Parks Department has begun adding staff. But the emphasis has been on land and building maintenance, not recreation.

The number of recreation directors and leaders, the people who manage parks and supervise organized activities, was 301 nine years ago. Today that staff numbers 275, an 8.6% cut.

In the same nine years, the number of gardeners and grounds keepers has gone from 703 to 754, a 7.5% increase.

Haddaway attributed this to the opening of new parks, most in affluent areas of the Valley and the Westside where, he said, fees imposed on developers have generated both land and cash for recreation.

In recent years Haddaway has come under increasing criticism at City Hall and his relations with Bradley are said by the mayor’s intimates to be strained. Others are more specific.

Permit Pay

“Some council members are unhappy with him, which is reflected in his permit pay,” said Councilwoman Joy Picus, who represents part of the Valley. The council rated Haddaway’s performance for last year only minimally satisfactory, the fourth lowest of five ratings, and gave him a 5% pay raise to $100,475.

Picus said generally council members “representing more privileged areas of the city are more pleased with him than those representing less privileged areas.”

Councilman Richard Allatorre, who represents a largely Latino area north and east of downtown, had “strong words” with Haddaway the first time they met in 1985, according to Robin Kramer, Allatorre’s chief deputy. Allatorre believes “there is tremendous under serving” of people in poor neighborhoods of the city, Kramer said, and the councilman has begun seeking information to document the amount of service provided.

PROBLEM PARKS

These 10 facilities are among several dozen identified by LAPD as ‘problem parks.’

1. Hubert H. Humphrey Memorial Park and Pool

2. Pacoima Park

3. Downey Park and Pool

4. Denker Recreation Center

5. Loren Miller Park

6. Pecan Park and Pool

7. Trinity Recreation Center

8. Central Park

9. Harvard Park and Pool

10. Ross Snyder Recreation Center and Pool