“The difference is like night and day.”

By the time bulldozers came calling at Skid Row’s Gladys Avenue Park in January, 1987, the one-third-acre parcel had deteriorated into a place where colonies of homeless people erected cardboard neighborhoods nightly and drug dealers made sales virtually unchecked by law enforcement.

During the period leading up to the demolition “you couldn’t walk through here if you didn’t know anybody,” said Gary Aldridge, a city maintenance worker at the park. “You would get robbed or beat up.”

The park was a vision unfulfilled.

With construction orders passed in 1981 by Mayor Tom Bradley’s office, the park project began as part of a move to increase public amenities in poor areas.

The thinking went: Provide parks, restrooms, shelters and other services for Skid Row’s low-income and homeless people, then watch their quality of life improve. This, according to the plan, would also reduce the numbers of poor who wander through the burgeoning business and upper-middle-class residential districts to the west, city officials said.

‘A Disaster’

The accumulation of drugs, cardboard and despair from 1981 to 1986 led people to finally term the park “a disaster.”

Lay the place to rest, said merchants near the park at 6th Street and Gladys Avenue.

The park remnants did go down. But the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency was not ready to give up on the mayor’s vision. Before the razing, the CRA earmarked $365,000 to redesign and refurbish the park.

Forecasting a return to chaos, neighbors demanded that the city quit putting public money into a doomed project. But the park has been revived with basketball backboards, vandal resistant floodlights, a security fence and a management team.

And 10 months after its reopening, Gladys Avenue Park is now a place where children come to play.

On a recent typical morning 90 minutes before the park opened to the public, about 30 preschool children from a neighborhood day care center filed through the wrought iron gates. The morning cloud cover gave way to sun and the children’s shorts, skirts, T-shirts and socks formed a pile in the park’s mini-plaza. Sprinklers went on and the children romped and giggled under an outdoor shower.

Early-Morning Visit

The next morning, a group of drug and alcohol rehabilitation patients from the nearby Weingart Medical Center visited the park early. At this gathering, the visitors remained clothed and played cards and board games checked out from the park office.

When the facility opened to the general public later in the day, hundreds of area residents crowded onto the recreation area, benches and modest lawn. Some chatted. Some played basketball, some slept.

“People don’t do dope around here any more,” Aldridge said. “And we check every brown bag that comes in here.”

Park visitors--many who live in the 60 or so single-room-occupancy hotels that dot the Skid Row area--are now more conscious of policing themselves and keeping the grounds trash-free, said Aldridge, who lives in a motel a few blocks to the south.

“They call this the ‘clean park’ now,” he said.

It is not without complaints, though.

Customers at the Pacific American Fish Co. across the street reported two recent car break-ins, said Peter Huh, manager of the firm.

“Some merchandise was stolen,” he said. “I can’t say that the break-ins are directly related to the park. . . . They do seem like symptoms of a problem.”

But Huh agrees that security concerns are not at the level they were with the old Gladys Park.

“The difference is like night and day,” said Andy Raubeson, executive director of the Single Room Occupancy Housing Corp., which supervises the park. “Before, the clean-up crews required a police escort. We would have four squad cars and a police sergeant come out to make sure that trouble didn’t happen. Now our manager takes care of security.”

Park officials hope the days of police escorts are over. Merchants hope the car break-ins remain isolated occurrences.

“If the park keeps working, it’s nice to have,” Huh said warily. “Who is against a park?”