Face-Lift Crew Deposes Park Vagrants

Shortly after dawn Thursday, Eden DeFreze awoke to find her home being pushed away by a tractor.

“Home” for DeFreze’s was a bench at Horton Plaza Park, which got a face lift courtesy of the city of San Diego.

Tired of crime and rampant drug abuse, the City Council voted last year to remove the park’s 18 benches and every patch of grass.

Sometime next week, the park will be covered with geraniums and shrubs, and, say the homeless like DeFreze, many will have no place to go.

“They just tore up my bed,” she said. “The sprinklers come on at 7. That’s my wake-up call. I’m up stretching, and next thing I know, away goes the bench. I been homeless for six years, and this is the only place I felt safe. Now it’s gone too.”

Horton Plaza Park is to San Diego what Pershing Square is to Los Angeles or Union Square is to San Francisco. During World War II, Horton Plaza--as it was called back then--was a gathering place for sailors.

In the post-war era, as commerce began to flee San Diego’s downtown, the plaza changed, as did the city. The park and the fountain became gathering places for the homeless, and for drug dealers, and, in recent years, many say, the problem has grown worse.

In the post-war era, as commerce began to flee San Diego’s downtown, the plaza changed, as did the city. The park became a gathering place for those on society’s fringe--the homeless, transients, the mentally ill, chronic alcoholics and drug addicts.

The opening six years ago of Horton Plaza, now the copyrighted name of the modern shopping complex next to the park, did little to deter either crime or loitering. Neither did an $850,000 renovation of the plaza itself, which is named for Alonzo Horton, a San Diego pioneer, turn-of-the-century entrepreneur and former mayor.

If anything, merchants argued, problems intensified.

So, bulldozers began appearing shortly after 5 a.m. Thursday. By 1 p.m. the benches that had been used over the years as beds were gone. So, too, was all the grass and the dozens of people who, hours before, had snored atop it.

The City Council decided last July that the landscape project was the best way of forcing the homeless and the drug- and alcohol-addicted to move elsewhere.

DeFreze and others who had been living in the park said they now may move to Pantoja Park, another small park 10 blocks to the west on G Street. They refer to it as Condo Park because of its proximity to several luxury condominium complexes.

“The solution to homelessness is not ripping out every park in the city,” Paul Downey, the spokesman for Mayor Maureen O’Connor, said Thursday. “We need far more help from the federal and state government to treat the cause, rather than the symptom.”

Last summer, O’Connor and three council members voted against the landscape proposal, saying it did nothing to lessen the problems of homelessness and crime. But a five-member council majority won the argument.

On Thursday, many of the homeless as well as others who use the park said blame is being put in the wrong place.

“The hotel across the street (the U.S. Grant) wants to blame their bad business on this little plaza here,” Marvin Revier, 49, a downtown resident, said. “Their bad business is caused by a recession and ridiculous overdevelopment--not by us.”

But John Roberts, managing director of the U.S. Grant, which advertises itself as the place “where the city’s movers and shakers meet,” said the hotel is “enjoying” its highest occupancy rate in five years.

“Personally, I think the dignity of Horton Plaza has been improved,” Roberts said of Thursday’s efforts.

Ron Oliver, president of San Diego’s Central City Assn., spearheaded efforts that began three years ago to “restore the dignity” of Horton Plaza Park. Oliver said the project will cost $39,000.

“The problem was illegal activities--the drug dealing, public drunkenness, panhandling, public urination . . . . The city is using more water to clean out . . . the fountain than it was to run water through the fountain,” he said.

Because of the drought, water stopped running in the park’s landmark fountain in March. The City Council will decide Tuesday whether or not to turn it back on.

“The problem is the vagrants,” Oliver said, adding that the focus of debate over the landscaping project should not be who’s being displaced by the effort but who’s been deprived of the park because of crime and drug dealing.

“It should be a place where a family can go,” Oliver said, “where business people could have lunch. We have videotapes, if people don’t believe us. We can prove how bad it is. Dealers down there bring only enough drugs to warrant a citation--in case they’re caught.

“They have runners who go to the stash, who keep supplying them with contraband. It’s very serious down there. We won’t solve the problem--maybe we are just relocating it elsewhere--but we’ve got to start somewhere. It’s how you eat an elephant. A bite at a time. Little bits at a time.”

Raymond Brandes, historian at the University of San Diego and the author of “San Diego: An Illustrated History,” said the park changed considerably in the 1950s, when the core of San Diego businesses suddenly moved to Mission Valley.

He said the loss of streetcars on Broadway, and the advent of buses, changed the “nature of the park--you no longer had the same kinds of people using it.”

Brandes said he supports Thursday’s change: “I know I’ve been hassled in the plaza, and it’s an uncomfortable feeling. It’s a hard thing to control. It’s not fair to have that kind of nonsense going on downtown. And, from one perspective, if this is going to change it--fine. I’m for it.”