Downtown Rarity: a New Park : Redevelopment: Ground is broken on 2 1/2-acre site for area’s first such facility in 120 years. Officials call it the ‘centerpiece’ of the South Park renewal project.

Ground was broken for the first new park in downtown Los Angeles in more than 120 years on Wednesday during ceremonies that featured a little something for everybody.

For those who follow local politics, Mayor Tom Bradley and Councilwoman Rita Walters were on hand to say nice things about Grand Hope Park, an oasis of landscaping, fountains, a clock tower and play areas that will be created on 2 1/2 acres of land between Grand Avenue and Hope Street, on the south side of 9th Street.

Bradley noted that it will be the first new park in the downtown area since Central Park--later renamed Pershing Square--was completed in 1870.

He called the new park “the centerpiece” of the Community Redevelopment Agency’s business-residential-retail South Park redevelopment project. He also said that he had better hurry up his comments, because it was beginning to rain.

Walters, also with an eye to the weather, kept relatively short her remarks to the crowd of about 100 city officials, business people, reporters and passersby.

Calling it an “exciting project,” she said the new park “promises to attract hundreds of residents, office workers, and tourists,” along with students from the fashion design institute next door. She also gently reminded an official who misintroduced her that she is “council member, not council man. “

For those with an eye for beauty and an ear for music, the whole affair started off with a bevy of leggy fashion models from the institute, prancing to some cool sounds from a jazz combo.

For those who were really hungry, there was a rather unappetizing array of sliced vegetables, glassy meatballs and scarlet punch.

For those who were interested in how such parks are built, there was a construction equipment display that included a bulldozer and two backhoes.

For those with a sense of history, there was a classic groundbreaking setup--shovels stuck upright in low mounds of spaded earth, each topped with a construction hard-hat--that looked eerily like the helmet-topped combat graves of World War II.

And for those who like a little disruption, there were a dozen sign-waving picketers who whistled and jeered from the sidewalk during the speeches and ceremonies near the center of the block.

The picketers said they had nothing against the park, the officials, the models, the band or the caterers. They said their beef was with one of the project’s contractors, who they said had failed to pay a subcontractor for whom they had worked on another project.