TAKING BACK THE PARKS

ARBY FIELDS WAS OFFICIATING at an evening basketball game at Ross Snyder Recreation Center in South-Central Los Angeles in January when a group of gang members began harassing the players. When Fields, the park recreation director, politely asked them to stop, gang members exchanged angry words with him and warned him as they left that they were going to “take (him) out.”

Twenty minutes later, they tried to make good on their promise, returning to the crowded gym with weapons and opening fire on Fields. The “gang-bangers” chased the 28-year-old former college football player out the gym and up the street but stopped short of killing him when a woman let Fields into her house to call for help.

After talking with police that night, Fields locked up the park as usual and went home, determined never to step foot in Ross Snyder again. That resolution is something he and many park-area residents have in common.

“I’m 6 feet (tall) and 225 pounds. I don’t look like the kind of guy you push around--but I don’t have an ‘S’ on my chest that ricochets bullets, either,” says Fields, who subsequently transferred to another park and still has nightmares about the attack. “Will it take a (park) director to get murdered before they take some measures to deal with the situation?”

Ross Snyder is defaced and crime-ridden and offers few programs to the community for which it was built. But Jack Perez, head of the Urban Impact Parks task force with the city’s Recreation and Parks Department and a 31-year department employee, remembers when it was a center of neighborhood life. “The parks used to be cared-for things,” he says. “There have always been gangs, but they knew they couldn’t occupy the parks because people were there. We had a male presence, even in the most depressed areas of the city. Guys came home after work and played basketball with their kids.”

Los Angeles was the “mecca for urban recreation,” says Perez, and Ross Snyder, on East 41st Street, was a “great place,” a park that attracted 25,000 people for a Halloween celebration in the years before the Watts riots destroyed the Central Avenue businesses that had supported its programs. Even after the riots, Ross Snyder was an active park. But that era ended when Proposition 13 devastated its budget. And across Southern California, parks have seen similar changes.

In some neighborhood parks, drug dealers, gangs, vandals and the homeless have replaced children on swings. Graffiti and litter have overtaken what were once green and pristine oases; equipment has deteriorated, and programs have dwindled. In the better neighborhoods, parks that are safe during daylight hours become dangerous after dark. And even the city’s flagship park, 4017-acre Griffith Park, is not immune: In April, five bodies were discovered there in a span of 10 days.

The situation is particularly bad in Los Angeles and most acute at parks in the inner city. Families that once would have used the lawns for a Memorial Day picnic or strolled out to escape the heat of a sweltering apartment are afraid to let their children out to play there; many adults are afraid to go near the parks after dark.

But this fear and frustration have also bred a new activism--a growing, multi-fronted push to take back the parks.

Among recent developments:

- A citywide coalition of more than 60 local community and environmental groups formed earlier this year in a first-ever attempt to breathe life back into Los Angeles’ dying recreation centers and create a citywide advocacy group for a better parks system. Called People for Parks, the group hopes to force politicians to pay attention to the area’s parks and environmental issues.

- “100 Men Plus,” a group of concerned South-Central Los Angeles residents that organized in October, has sponsored park family days and taken part in rallies at local parks to help the community “reclaim our parks.”

- In Chinatown, community activists have made the tiny Alpine Recreation Center one of the city’s most-used parks and have been a force behind a new $1.5-million gym that will allow the park to expand its programs.

- On the Eastside, the United Neighborhoods Organization is a co-sponsor (along with the South-Central Organizing Committee) of the “Safe Harbors” program, which works with law enforcement and city agencies to boost park security with high-visibility patrols of police and unarmed rangers.

- The rise of open cocaine dealing in MacArthur Park--only a year after the city spent $400,000 to revitalize the park with new lighting and equipment--prompted a community candlelight protest march.

- And the city of Los Angeles is pouring more than $1 million into what it calls its Vision Parks program, designed to find ways to resuscitate four urban parks and in the process pioneer approaches that can be used in urban parks citywide.

So far, in Los Angeles at least, success stories are few and usually reflect the tenacity of one person or the organized determination of one neighborhood. It is still difficult, organizers admit, to persuade citizens to become involved in saving their parks and in untangling the web of problems facing the parks system, which include poor security, insufficient funding and an overburdened and demoralized parks staff. But increasingly, they feel compelled to try.

THE LOS ANGELES parks system began to deteriorate soon after the voters passed Proposition 13 in 1978, and the parks soon reflected general changes in the city itself, most notably the growth of crime, drugs and gangs.

Proposition 13 funding cutbacks hit the parks system hard. “Parks and libraries were seen as frills by a lot of people who didn’t have to rely on them,” says Barbara Gardner, director of USC’s urban affairs program, and budget cutters made them prime targets. In 1979-80, the first year to reflect the realities of Proposition 13, the Recreation and Parks Department budget shrank by 12%--losing $4.8 million of the $40 million it had spent to run its 350 park facilities--and dwindled steadily thereafter. Two dozen recreation centers closed, the department’s staff fell from 4,000 to 2,000 employees, programs were slashed and park hours were reduced. James E. Hadaway, the department’s controversial general manager, had divvied up the remaining money by using a simple formula: Parks of the same size got the same amount of money. It was, he believed, a fair system.

Parks were suddenly thrust into the fund-raising business. If they could come up with money from jog-a-thons, local businesses or fees for classes and the use of facilities, the city said, they could rehire recreation assistants to keep their buildings open evenings and weekends and their programs growing.

The results weren’t surprising. Parks in affluent communities, which could charge $20 for a class or $3 for a swim, did well. And in the poorer areas, the parks--referred to by planners as Urban Impact Parks--died out, says Jack Foley, a professor in Cal State Northridge’s department of leisure studies and recreation and a former consultant to the city’s Recreation and Parks Department. This, he wrote in a recent paper entitled “Leisure Rights Policies for Los Angeles’ Urban Impact Parks,” “could be called a kind of ‘recreation apartheid,’ separated by income, race and ethnic origin.”

Parks Commissioner Stan Sanders agrees, calling the city’s parks “separate and unequal.”

Interestingly, an informal survey of other local park districts shows that the city of Los Angeles was unique in its approach to recreation after Proposition 13. Many other parks districts, such as those in Anaheim, Glendale and Long Beach, faced with similar cutbacks, continued to offer a basic, standardized level of programming--including free classes--for all segments of the community by subsidizing parks according to their needs, not their size.

It was only in the past year and a half, Hadaway says, that he realized, while attending a parks convention, that “fair is not equal.” As a result of increasing public outcry over the disparity between urban and suburban parks, the city has begun to distribute resources to Los Angeles parks based on need. Last year, the Recreation and Parks Department and the city acknowledged that discrepancies exist in the parks system by providing an extra $2.8 million for increased maintenance, recreation personnel and security at the 66 Urban Impact Parks.

For parks employees, safety is one of the paramount issues. Talk to most veteran inner-city park staffers and each has stories to tell about the violence.

Emma Ruiz, now director of Toberman Recreation Center in South-Central Los Angeles, tells of being knocked down and assaulted by a gang member in broad daylight last year at Hoover Park, which she ran until last June. Loren Miller Recreation Center director Clarence Palmerremembers being threatened by a PCP-crazed gang member with a screwdriver when he ran El Sereno Recreation Center in East Los Angeles. And Ralph Jordan, director of Normandie Recreation Center, remembers how often he considered carrying his gun to work with him in his previous position running Denker Recreation Center near USC.

Reduced park hours, staff and programming--and the resulting drop in park attendance--have been blamed for the rise in crime, but officials say that in many ways, crime in the parks merely reflects the crime problem in the city itself. Hadaway points out that half of the city’s parks are on gang turf. And, says Los Angeles Police Cmdr. Ronald Banks, park police coordinator for the LAPD: “With the increase in gang activity and narcotics activity and the gradual increase in crime, parks have become more of a focal point of these activities than they have in the past.”

Although the LAPD does not keep specific statistics on crime in the parks, park rangers’ records show a steady rise in crimes in most inner-city parks. The overall number of incidents in the city’s 350 park facilities more than doubled from 1987 to 1988, according to Chief City Park Ranger Lucia Ruta.

City officials responded by doubling the number of park rangers in the coming year to 50 and giving them limited peace officer status--a victory won by park activists.

BEYOND MAKING the parks safer, there is no consensus about exactly how to make them thrive. Each park, activists say, has different needs, but even in providing additional funding to the Urban Impact Parks, the city stresses its own priorities and requires that each park spend its money in about the same way. The typical park will receive an additional $235,000 for refurbishment and play equipment, $30,000 for maintenance and security and $30,000 to help expand its programs (in the form of 2,600 hours of part-time help) by the end of 1990, according to Stephen Klippel, the department’s director of finance.

That means that the parks will look more appealing, but parks activists stress that it will take more than repainting buildings, installing playground equipment and planting grass in the inner-city parks to revive them.

“We are bringing a lot of parks up to a visibly attractive level--that helps,” Sanders says. “But it’s not enough.”

“You can plant and paint forever,” USC’s Gardner agrees, “but what people need are programs. The original concept of public parks was as places to stroll, where families would come. But in 1989, parks are the only place to meet very important needs of young people. They have to provide recreational services and social services and educational functions that nobody else is meeting. So we can’t hold to the original idea of parks as a lovely place to stroll.” Tiny Aliso-Pico Recreation Center (see sidebar), for example, thrives despite a lack of grass and equipment, attracting community interest with its full roster of classes and activities.

Ideally, park programs--and employees--should be tailored to their communities: soccer fields in the predominantly Latino Eastside parks or Chinese-speaking recreation assistants in Chinatown.

Hadaway agrees that it is vital to get communities to embrace their parks but says, “I don’t think anyone adequately knows how to do that.”

Creative, tenacious individuals within the parks system, however, have found ways to reconnect dying parks with their neighborhoods. It took Ralph Jordan eight years as director of Denker Recreation Center, one of the city’s worst, before he saw any progress in reclaiming the now-thriving park. Jordan says at first he had to push through 150 to 200 gang members every day to get to his office.

When he went home at night, he’d have to take the park’s equipment and supplies with him to keep them from being stolen.

“I’d lock up at 10 p.m. and go home,” recalls Jordan, who was recently transferred to Normandie Recreation Center, “and at 10:05, (gang members) would be in here having a full party.”

Unable to raise any money to hire more staff, and frequently the only park employee on duty, Jordan was still able to start a successful adult softball league by forging a fragile truce with the local gang and hooking up with local black radio stations to try to lure patrons back to his park.

“There were several times when I said, ‘To hell with the park; they might as well blow it up and build some housing,’ ” Jordan recalls. “But time brought about a change. The key is not to give up. If you’ve got a safe park, you can have good programs.”

Jordan is now trying to repeat his success in the Vision Parks program, which is experimenting with ways to improve Normandie, Queen Anne, Hoover and Toberman parks. He and three of the department’s strongest, most motivated directors have been promised “everything they want” and mandated to do “whatever it takes” to bring area residents back into their parks, Hadaway says. The lessons learned will then be applied throughout the system, he says.

But even the Vision Parks directors say they continue to have a hard time obtaining the essentials necessary to run their parks. At Toberman, a park tucked away near where the southbound Harbor Freeway ramps lead into the westbound Santa Monica Freeway, director Ruiz says she still must rely on friends and charitable organizations to provide office supplies and materials and brings in her own toilet paper, soap and paper towels for the park. “We shouldn’t have to go out and beg (for supplies),” she says, “but most of us (directors) are scavengers and beggars.”

Some parks advocates see one alternative to begging in something called the Quimby Ordinance. The 1972 city ordinance requires residential developers to pay the city an average fee of $1,400 to rehabilitate existing parks or develop new parks within a mile and a half of new residential development. This has brought such boons as a $5-million recreation facility to Westwood but has largely excluded the inner city, which has been skipped by the development boom. Although Urban Impact Parks receive general revenue funds that the Quimby parks don’t, the poorest parks are getting less than their share. Distributing the money citywide, activists say, would be more equitable.

Another funding option: bond issues. Buoyed by the success of Proposition 70, the statewide ballot proposition last year that raised money for buying and developing parkland, local parks groups are considering offering a similar proposal to Los Angeles voters.

Specific strategies aside, there’s one thing parks advocates agree on: The health--and survival--of the parks system depends on making parks a priority.

“It’s not just our problem, it’s the whole city’s problem,” stresses Rosa Manriquez, director of the mid-city Queen Anne Recreation Center. “If we don’t wake up and reclaim the parks, 20 years from now, someone is going to look at this and say, ‘My God! What did we do?’ ”