Urban Campers Stake a Claim

When Willie Jordan started a day camp for poor children, she did not settle for the obvious.

Facing the expected worries about costs and logistics, the director of the Fred Jordan Mission came up with a campsite that met her needs. She chose one of the city’s most trash-laden, crime-ridden, drug-infested areas--MacArthur Park.

“It’s turned into such a dangerous park,” said Jordan, 56, wife of the late founder of the mission, as her Kid Row Day Camp opened its third season this week. “Because it is not safe, that’s exactly why we wanted to go there.”

Determined not to be intimidated by the crime and squalor that have overtaken the 32-acre urban park, Jordan and her campers return to the site each year to fulfill the day camp’s pledge to “take back the parks for the children.”

“It’s great that we are going there,” she said. “The parks should be used by kids without them having to fear for their lives. We go right to where the kids live, and make it safe for a couple of hours.”

Last weekend, volunteers from the mission distributed flyers around the park, inviting children living nearby to attend the camp, which runs until July 27. Each day at about 3:30 p.m., after year-round classes let out, children from a 20-block area around the park gather for the camp near the corner of Park View and 6th Street.

Other children are bused to the park from hotels on Skid Row, where the mission is located.

Still others, like Teresa Chavez’s six children--who attended the camp during previous summers but have since moved away from their Westlake neighborhood near the park--are driven in from more distant areas. The Chavez family now lives on 84th Street in South Los Angeles.

“Of course, I worried at first, because the park is kind of scary,” Chavez, 32, said in Spanish. “But now, I know the children are all right. The people from the mission take care.”

Instead of heading for the mountains or some other bucolic setting, these campers remain in the city, joining in sing-alongs, party games and a show called, “Bible Boot Camp,” run by a pastor wearing military-style camouflage clothing.

One 11-year-old girl sat among the campers holding a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles coloring kit--her prize for winning a camp game. The girl, who lives in a Skid Row hotel, said she was going to take the prize home.

“I’m going to share it with my brother,” she said. “He’s always saying he doesn’t ever get anything.”

The campers have been sharing the park with police, horse and foot patrols. The stepped-up LAPD patrols in recent weeks are aimed at ridding MacArthur Park of drug dealers and unlicensed vendors. The crackdown, which began last month, is part of an effort to ferret out the ragged, violence-prone crowds that had taken over the park, contributing to a 43% increase in arrests in the area over the first half of the year.

“If we went to the nice neighborhoods in the San Fernando Valley or Orange County, it wouldn’t be a big deal,” Jordan said. Such a program in the affluent suburbs, she said, would make “no difference for the children there. They can use their parks.”

Not everyone appreciates the mission’s efforts. Jordan recalled a disturbing conversation during a radio talk show appearance three summers ago.

“The caller was very abrasive, very confrontational,” she said. “ ‘How dare you take these poor little children and try to show them how the rest of the world lives. Don’t you know they will be so dissatisfied?’ the man scolded. It was one of the most bizarre conversations I’ve ever had.”

The camp program includes weekly field trips. Outings to the Queen Mary and the Spruce Goose, Universal Studios and the Ringling Brothers & Barnum and Bailey Circus are scheduled.

“Actually, I want the children to be dissatisfied with poverty conditions,” Jordan said. “This program gives these kids a chance to see things that other kids take for granted. It gives them the little extras. It’s like saying, ‘Hey, there is more. You can be more.’ ”