MacArthur Park’s Come-Hither Look

One of the more desirable neighborhoods in Los Angeles a century ago was the area surrounding MacArthur Park at Wilshire Boulevard and Alvarado Street, then known as Westlake Park.

The tone was genteel suburban and the streets were studded with comfortable houses in the latest Victorian styles. Glimpses of these still can be seen along the faded 800, 900 and 1000 blocks of South Bonnie Brae Avenue.

That gentility continued into the 1920s and took the form of some ornate apartment hotels, a few of which persevere on West 6th Street, north of the park. A particularly rich example, replete with larger-than-life statues adorning the facade, is the Park Plaza Hotel at the southwest corner of 6th and Park View streets.

However, a neighborhood is distinguished not only by its buildings but by its public spaces, and Westlake Park was for half a century the city’s most gracious; a place to promenade with the family on weekends, to see and be seen. It anchored the neighborhood, giving it a focal point and lending it value.

Whether it was the park or the neighborhood that started to deteriorate first in the 1950s is debatable. The reality is that by the 1980s the park was being overrun by undesirables, seemingly abandoned by the city and left to rot.

But happily it was not abandoned, at least not on weekends and holidays, by the families from Central America who live in the area or by the Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design, located across from the western edge of the park and whose students use it as a campus.

With Otis/Parsons taking the lead, a MacArthur Park Community Council was formed a few years ago and an ambitious public art and park maintenance program launched. The program was frankly geared to involve some of the youths who had been trashing the area, and to lend the park, its users and the surrounding neighborhood a new pride.

There was recognition--long understood by urban designers--of the critical position of parks in the city fabric, particularly in lower-income neighborhoods crowded with immigrant populations in need of a place beyond their small apartments in which to socialize and let their children play. In 1848, prominent social reformer and landscaper Andrew Jackson Downing said:

“You may take my word for it, (parks) will be better preachers of temperance than temperance societies, better refiners of the national morals than dancing schools and better promoters of general good-feeling than any lectures on the philosophy of happiness.”

With the help of increased police patrols, the combination of art and maintenance seems to be working in MacArthur Park. More families and the elderly are using the park, while the unsavory elements appear to have dwindled and moved to the fringes along a raw Alvarado Street.

Certainly the park has become more engaging. On a recent weekend there with my family, the lawns were mowed and free of litter, the refurbished playground bustled with children and the art beckoned.

Happily, most of the art is not of the so-called plop variety, those large awkward pieces seemingly dropped down from a great height to confront viewers and consume valuable park space.

“We like to think of the public art here as art with a small a , art tailored to the needs and concerns of the people who use the park,” says Al Nodal of Otis/Parsons and the park council.

Inviting my 2-year-old son, Josef, and a few other children to climb up and over them were two ceramic-tiled pyramids, designed by Judith Simonian. The pyramids, about 30 yards apart, also have an additional attraction of being connected by an underground tube through which children, and adults, can speak. Josef loved it.

On a shaded slope on the north side of the park is a modestly sculpted poetry garden fashioned by Doug Hollis and Richard Turner. And if you don’t hear anything--the plan calls for speakers in the benches there to broadcast poems--you might consider bringing a book and reading aloud.

The murals on the band shell, a utility building and the entries to the pedestrian tunnels underneath Wilshire Boulevard are strong stuff, with a color selection that appears to discourage graffiti artists. They were produced by neighborhood youths under the direction of Patssi Valdez.

Less successful are the arches over the entrance to the park at Wilshire Boulevard and Park View Street and a clock tower in the southwest corner of the park. Executed respectively by R. M. Fischer and George Herms, the pieces are cluttered and distracting.

My favorites are three pieces created by artist Alexis Smith, bordering the northwest section of the lake. Two are terrazzo-and-bronze installations embedded in the pedestrian path, the third a small bronzed suitcase next to a bench.

One installation shows a prizefighter knocking down another, with an inscription declaring: “Mine was the better punch, but it didn’t win the wristwatch.” The other installation is of a formally clad couple dancing; the inscription reads, “Crazy as a pair of waltzing mice.”

The quote on the bronze piece: “She sat in front of her princess dresser trying to paint the suitcases out from under her eyes.” According to Nodal, who will be leaving soon to take a cultural post in New Orleans, the suitcase serves as a reference to the apartment hotels in the area, the neon signs of which can be seen in the evening from the park.

I like them because the quotes are from three evocative stories of Los Angeles by Raymond Chandler, and because they are unobtrusive, so-called personal discovery art pieces and do not compete with the park for attention. Now that it’s emerging again as a valued public space, MacArthur Park deserves all the attention it can get.