Seeking a Neighborhood Oasis

Cautiously, I have begun to explore, discover and worry about my neighborhood park.

I want Washington Park to be a vest-pocket oasis where I can feel safe to walk, to play and to enjoy the view of the San Gabriels, just beyond the palms and utility lines defining the air around the busy intersection of North El Molino Avenue and Washington Boulevard.

Reality, though, does not always coincide with my vision. I am white and middle class. By choice, since buying a house on Eldora Road in January, my wife and I live in an ethnically and economically diverse Pasadena neighborhood.

Barely four blocks from our house, life in the park sometimes seems removed from life on our street. The house feels like home. The park doesn’t. Yet, at times, the realms of park and home seem connected. The park, like the neighborhood, is in transition.

The stories we’ve heard and the experiences we’ve had in the park have made us hesitant to embrace this park whose basic setup is most embraceable:

The park is more than five acres carved out of the center of the city, surrounded mainly by single-family houses, not far from the shopping area of Lake Avenue.

Palms tower over tennis, handball and basketball courts, recessed around a miniature arroyo. An expanse of fairway-like grass seems to flow above one rim of the arroyo. On the other rim are a picnic area, softball field and play ground.

Yet sometimes when I walk in the park, I’m put off, at the least, and sometimes even a bit afraid.

“You lost?” a man asked me the other day at noon. A brown-bagged beer bottle in hand, he got out of his dilapidated car and headed for the picnic area with a group that didn’t look as if it planned a picnic around the boom box.

Another day I declined a staggering man’s request for a match for the cigarette he’d just bummed from another passer-by. A woman following me one morning said something unintelligible. I said nothing.

Last week, when I told a neighbor I was walking to the park, she said: “Oh, you mean the creepy park.” This was the park of her childhood. Now it was only a pleasant memory of a place where her baby sitter had once taken her from Altadena. The woman rarely takes her own children there.

Boy Scouts in Uniform

Still, on Saturday mornings I have seen a band of Boy Scouts, in uniform, circled around a cookout area. At night, I regularly see a crowd gather for bingo in the nearby concrete-block building of Pasadena’s Armenian center. And on Sunday mornings, people in their Sunday best congregate across the street, inside the white stucco building of the New Guiding Light Missionary Baptist Church.

The park had contributed to the initial good feelings my wife and I had about buying our house.

“Washington Park has come a long way,” said Robert C. Baderian, Pasadena’s recreation administrator. “Four, five, six years ago we had a negative element there.” So much so, he said, that “people didn’t feel comfortable going there.”

Now, that has changed, he said, adding that his department sponsors summertime activities as well as after-school organized sports and tennis lessons during the school year.

It is one of the few city parks, he said, that has been transformed through the sheer will of active residents in the neighborhood.

One of those, Keith D. Speaks, is a parks and recreation commissioner who gave me a tour of the park the other day. Earlier, in his home three blocks away, he showed me a video of the coverage the Orange Heights Neighborhood Assn. received when three dozen people, armed with paint and brushes, reclaimed the graffiti-covered sidewalks, walls, handball courts and restrooms.

On the video, I heard one of my Eldora Road neighbors recall for the television cameras how 15 years ago “we would come to the park and have family affairs. Neighbors would walk over, and they’d play cards and just have fun.”

As Speaks and I walked in the park, he talked about the changes.

“This park has gone up and down and up down since the early 1980s.” About four years ago the city refurbished the park. Even so, he said, gangs covered it in graffiti. He organized a cleanup, he said, when city officials would not respond. Since then, the public works department has done an admirable job of cleaning the park daily, he said.

Two boys on skateboards scooted by us on the basketball court. “Did you notice there are nets on those rims,” Speaks asked. “There’s almost always nets on the goals. That means that the park is stable.”

We walked across a stone bridge and up the stairs to a picnic area where a noisy group of men, drinking from bottles in brown bags, dominated the area.

“Hey, how you doing,” said a man who recognized Speaks from his frequent visits.

“Sometimes these guy get raucous here,” Speaks said as we walked on. “But, what the heck, it’s a public park, though I am concerned about the homeless coming in here.”

Already one young man has engaged us in conversation, wanting to know if we’re interested in buying a two-bedroom house down the street. Later on, somebody else called out: “Ya’ll want some grass?”

We ignored him and Speaks said: “This place has been painted as being Sin City. Apparently some stuff has gone on here. But what other park hasn’t had the same? I just don’t think it’s that much of a problem. I go with my kids every week. I don’t see any real problems. And I have never ever, for one second, been afraid to come over here.”

Camera Stolen

More frequent visits by police, who need to get out of their cruisers, would help improve the ambience and image of the park, Speaks said. And he, like Pasadena police officials, said 10,000 instances of people enjoying themselves in Washington Park can be eradicated in the public’s mind by one mugging.

That happened Wednesday afternoon, when Lou Mack, a Times photographer, went to take pictures for this story. Two men whose pictures Mack had taken with others who were drinking accosted him and stole his camera. Save for a twisted shoulder, Mack escaped injury.

This year, police concede, crime is worsening. For the first eight months of 1989, police have made 31 arrests at the park. About a third were on public drunkenness charges and another half-dozen on narcotics charges, including use of heroin. Police report only one other mugging this year.

“People should not worry about going to Washington Park,” Sgt. Bruce A. Linsenmayer said.

Gangs and drug sales once were a serious problem, he said. But the gangs have left and drug problems seem restricted to a few habitual park users. No park in the city, regardless of the neighborhood, is immune from crime, he said.

Police held a crime prevention meeting Tuesday at the Catalina branch library to set up a “park watch” at Washington. It is one of six city parks where neighborhood residents have pledged to keep an eye out for suspicious activities.

“If good people get in the park more frequently, the undesirable, transients, the gangs and the drinkers will go somewhere to ply their trade,” said Patrolman Jim Shear, who is helping organize the park watches.

I have grown to love walking through the park, looking at the trees and shrubs, which still fascinate me as a relative newcomer to this urban desert of Southern California. “Now is that a pepper tree?” I ask myself in a moment when I am not worried about whether it’s safe to be strolling in the undulating landscape.

And I revel in the diversity of the people who are there, radios playing the brassy music of Spanish-language stations or rap.

The other morning, under a shade tree and on the grass, an older gentleman read La Opinion. His socks lay crumpled over the tops of his shoes by his bare feet.

I nodded and smiled. He smiled back. If for that moment only, neither of us had a care in the world, together in our park.