Garden Rises From a Patch of Squalor : Hollywood: A vacant lot that will be the site of a Metro Rail station is being transformed. But because of the high-crime area, it will be fenced so that people may look but not touch.

A vacant lot in Hollywood notorious for its crime, drug and prostitution problems is now being transformed into a garden, ablaze with flowering, drought-resistant plants, as part of a city beautification project.

But there’s a catch: The garden, at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue, will be off limits to the public. An eight-foot-high steel fence will ensure that Hollywood residents and passersby will be able to look, but not touch.

City officials say there is no alternative--if the garden were open to the public, it would be destroyed.

Dubbed Metro Gardens, the $50,000 project--which will be in place only until construction begins on a Metro Rail station at the site next year--is described by officials more as a public art demonstration garden than a park. Provocative steel sculptures have been installed atop the fence by Hollywood artist Adam Leventhal, a mural is planned for one of the outside walls at that corner, and the landscape architect describes the garden as “a painting in plants.”

“Nobody’s happy that it’s going to be closed, but if it’s open without a fence, it will become another example of urban blight,” said Lester Burg, assistant Hollywood project manager with the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency. The agency is funding the project, which is expected to be completed by mid-September.

“I think it’s sad we’ve reached the point in society that when we create a public park, we have to close it to the public,” said Sharyn Romano, co-chair of United Streets of Hollywood, a coalition of neighborhood organizations.

The project was conceived about six months ago when the Metro Rail’s builder, Rail Construction Corp., advised Los Angeles City Councilman Michael Woo’s office that the three-quarter-acre property was available for public use until construction begins on a Metro Rail station next August. The lot has been vacant since a bank branch was torn down about three years ago.

Woo and the Hollywood Community Advisory Council considered several ideas, agreeing that the garden was the best interim use of the land.

“We wanted to take a corner--which is one of the worst corners in my district in terms of crime and urban problems--and make something wonderful,” Woo said.

Almost from the start, Woo said, the advisory council members debated whether to close the project to the public. “If it were a public park, there could be major security problems,” he said.

The 500-foot fence, with sculptures, has been the first part of the project to be built.

Artist Leventhal, who began work in mid-July, has created seven sculptures so far, including “Homeless Ghost,” featuring a shopping cart pushed eerily by metal hands; “Snake Eats World,” a metallic serpent with a bulging belly; and “Mountains, Mist and Moon,” an interpretation in iron of a Chinese brush painting.

Leventhal said passersby have told him they are happy the property is fenced off “because it was drawing this scuzzy criminal element.”

Preliminary work has also begun on the garden. It will include drought-resistant plants such as poplars, Tipu trees, bougainvillea, cassia, flax, oleander and statice, said Lauren Melendrez of Melendrez Associates, the landscape architect and former member of the Hollywood Community Advisory Council.

“From far away, you’ll see a mass of color--purple, bronze, yellow, pink and green,” Melendrez said.

On the ground will be “ribbons of colored gravel” and decomposed granite, and signs will be posted to identify for passersby the plants that are in the garden, she said.

Melendrez said it is not unusual to have gardens that are created for viewing. “If you study Japanese gardens versus Chinese gardens, Japanese gardens are really intended to be viewed, while a Chinese garden is designed to be walked through,” she said.

Melendrez said that although the project is temporary, it will not be destroyed when construction on the Metro Rail station begins. The fence, sculptures and most of the plants will be moved to other public sites, she said. And the mural--to be painted by artist Miguel Angel Reyes--will remain.

Burg, of the redevelopment agency, hopes the garden will set the tone for improvements in the neighborhood.