ROSS SNYDER: A ‘Dead Park’

ROSS SNYDER, an 11-acre park on East 41st Street in the center of the inner city, is a prime example of what has come to be termed a “dead park,” a facility so run-down and rampant with crime, so limited in programs and facilities, that many residents have stopped using it.

Although the Recreation and Parks Department has installed new children’s play equipment in the park, other facilities remain in abysmal shape. Basketball hoops and tennis courts are missing nets. Restrooms are filthy and covered with graffiti, and the park’s Olympic-sized swimming pool is so vandalized and filled with paint and broken bottles that it may be shut down permanently, staffers say.

And some park employees are getting pretty tired of working in a battle zone.

“This is the third park I’ve worked at where the park director has gotten shot at,” says a weary Lily Shaw, the new recreation director.

For the past 12 years, Shaw, a slight woman with long, braided hair and faded jeans, has worked at places such as the recreation center at the Nickerson Gardens housing project and at Loren Miller Recreation Center, considered to be among the toughest parks in Los Angeles. But Ross Snyder is different, universally referred to by police and parks experts as one of the city’s worst.

“It’s kind of like a jungle where I am right now,” agrees park director Alvin Rambo, 45, who’s back for his fourth stint at Ross Snyder since 1969. “I was standing out front yesterday and realized somebody could pass by and shoot me right there. The average person would have been long gone.”

Police say Ross Snyder is a local gang stronghold. The red, black and white graffiti splashed over walls, sidewalks, bleachers, benches and trash cans show the territorial markings of the local Latino 38th Street gang, and the park also is frequented by the Bloodstone Villains, a black gang that police say is heavily involved in cocaine dealing.

“We’ve had murders in that park, drive-by shootings and attempted murders,” says Newton Division Detective John Garcia. “It’s an ongoing, daily thing out there.”

Staffers say the gang members hang out at the park intimidating local residents and keeping them from using the park and its programs.

The gang situation improved slightly, staffers say, during a Recreation and Parks Department pilot program last year in which the park was patrolled by rangers eight hours a day for six months.

When that experiment ended, says former recreation director Arby Fields, who transferred out of Ross Snyder in January after being shot at by gang members, “it went right back to being Dodge City.”

Department critics say that the current ranger program, in which unarmed security guards patrol the park part time--about 13 hours a week--is insufficient and unlikely to drive the gangs out of Ross Snyder. Newton Division Police say that their resources are limited, since they must cover other crime-infested parks, such as South Park and Gilbert Lindsay Community Center, both Crips strongholds.

Two days after Shaw showed a visitor around the park’s dingy, graffiti-covered community center and gym, the community held a “take back the park” rally to challenge the gangs’ dominance. The next night, the center was destroyed in a fire that city arson investigators say was intentionally set.

A parks department spokesman says that the city eventually will raze and rebuild the center, but it’s anyone’s guess as to when. In the meantime, Rambo is reduced to trying to run the park out of his car, because his office and telephone were destroyed in the fire. Since there’s no secure building, he must now store park supplies away from the park so that they’re not stolen, he says.

So far, efforts to clean up the park through the department’s Urban Impact Program have had little success. For example, within half an hour after the men’s restroom was repainted recently, the graffiti were back on the walls “worse than before,” says maintenance worker Maria Burrell.

Along with poor security and inadequate funding for programming to attract patrons, there is little support from the local business community. Fields says that the most money he ever raised was a $300 donation from Boys Markets for a park pancake breakfast.

His most successful program, Fields adds, involved taking 25 7- to 12-year-old kids out of the park to visit successful professionals who’d grown up in the ghetto and made good, but Fields had to apply to the department for a $3,500 special allocation to do it.

In March, before Ross Snyder’s community center burned down, Shaw discussed the types of new programs she hoped to implement at the park and spoke of her dream of finding a way to appeal to the neighborhood’s young women. She had been planning to offer 20 classes for spring, including ballet, tumbling and arts and crafts. Several classes were to have been free; others were to cost $15 to $20 for 15 weeks--too expensive for many residents, park experts say.

As a result of the fire, however, many classes, including English as a Second Language and dance, were canceled. Currently, Ross Snyder runs a daily preschool program that attracts five to 12 children a day and costs $25 a month. Rambo also plans to start baseball and basketball leagues but says that other coaches are afraid to bring their teams into the park for games.

Besides extra security and better programs, park experts are not sure what is needed to help save Ross Snyder Recreation Center.

“We went eight years with nothing (no programs); you can’t go without something that long,” Rambo says wearily. “It’s not too late--but it’s going to take time.”