A Tunnel of Luck May Help Park : Transit: Construction firm needs an excavation site for Metro Rail subway. Barnsdall Park could use a splashier entrance. Both may win.

For years, Los Angeles officials and art community leaders have yearned to improve the image of Barnsdall Park, a cultural treasure of international prominence which remains a secret to most Angelenos, isolated on a hill in Hollywood with a shopping center and a carwash obscuring its entrance.

Now it appears that help for the long-neglected city park--home to Frank Lloyd Wright’s celebrated Hollyhock House--might be coming from an unlikely source: the company that is building the Metro Rail subway system.

Seeking an excavation site for workers to tunnel under Hollywood, officials of the Rail Construction Corp. have offered to buy the carwash at the foot of the hill, use it and a portion of the park for three years as a construction site, then give the land to the city along with enough money to build an art library.

In a plan that is still taking shape, three city departments would work together to fashion the library as a formal gateway to Barnsdall Park in place of the drab sign and driveway now almost lost in the clutter of Hollywood Boulevard.

“I’m very excited about the idea,” said Diane Kanner, a member of Barnsdall Park’s board of overseers. “This will solve the problem. There will be a name. There will be a library that says Barnsdall Library and it will be at street level, and people will be aware of it.”

As envisioned by City Librarian Elizabeth Martinez-Smith, the art library would feature books, computers and other materials on the visual and performing arts and would also showcase local artists. The collection would range from materials for scholars to arts primers for children.

Councilman Michael Woo, who helped to formulate the plan, said the library would increase the park’s presence in the community and draw more visitors to the park’s other facilities, which include an art gallery, two art schools and a theater as well as the Hollyhock House. The landmark was designed by Wright for wealthy widow Aline Barnsdall, who donated the park to the city in 1926.

“It’s not very often that magical solutions like this emerge through the political process,” Woo said.

The Rail Construction Corp. made the offer to build the library in talks with Woo and officials from other city agencies. Its only formal proposal so far is a letter sent to the Department of Recreation and Parks last week, asking to use a part of Barnsdall as a construction site.

But Elaine Stewart, public affairs director, confirmed the company’s plans. Using the carwash and the lower part of Barnsdall’s parking lot at the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Vermont Avenue, workers could tunnel south under Vermont Avenue and west under Hollywood Boulevard, Stewart said.

That would eliminate the need for three other excavation sites, at the intersections of Vermont Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard, Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue, Stewart said.

The firm did not specify how much money it would give the city, and Stewart also refused to provide specific figures, saying they were still being negotiated.

She did say, however, that the money would be enough to build a new library and stock it with books and other materials, if that was how city officials decided to use it.

Stewart also said the construction company would find additional parking to serve the park until the construction was complete.

The proposal would require approval by the commissions overseeing the city’s Recreation and Parks Department, which owns the land; Cultural Affairs Department, which runs programs in the park, and Library Department, which would build and operate the library.

Early reactions from all three departments have been favorable.

Frank Catania, director of planning and development for the Recreation and Parks Department, said the parks department has dealt successfully with Metro Rail before on a $7.5-million agreement for construction at MacArthur Park. He said the department is “inclined to listen to what they are proposing.”

Al Nodal, general manager of the Cultural Affairs Department, said the money and the land could prove to be just the shot in the arm that the park needs.

“It would be worth giving up the front of that space for three years,” he said.

If the agreement is worked out, it could also resolve a bitter dispute among many Los Feliz residents about where to place the new branch of the Los Feliz library, which is to replace the too-small branch on Hillhurst Ave.

Nodal had proposed building the branch at Barnsdall, to help out the ailing park, but many Los Feliz area residents accused both Nodal and Woo of trying to “hijack” their quiet neighborhood facility and have demanded that the Library Commission, which is scheduled to vote on a site next month, build the new library on one of two sites on Hillhurst Ave.

Woo said that if the arrangement is approved, the community would get both. The Library Commission would use its money to build a neighborhood branch library on Hillhurst Avenue, and the city would get a specialized art collection at the front of Barnsdall.