Park Is a Tribute to Power of Persistence : Neighborhoods: Barrio Logan gets its second park, a 3-acre landscaped bay-side oasis in the sun, thanks to activists.

The residents of Barrio Logan on Saturday finally came full circle, ceremoniously reclaiming a piece of the waterfront as a community park, an achievement not lost on 38-year-old Richard Rodriguez as he hunkered over a 12-pack of Bud with three buddies.

Twenty-some years ago, Rodriguez said, he stalked out of school with his friends and rallied for a park for Barrio Logan, a refuge where the kids could try to deny the junkyards and shipyards and those ugly industrial buildings that blocked their view of San Diego Harbor.

Rodriguez and his community got its way back in 1970, and even if Chicano Park was planted beneath the support columns of the Coronado-San Diego Bay Bridge, Barrio Logan had its prize.

It wasn’t right alongside San Diego Harbor, and it was as much concrete as grass, and as much in perpetual shade as not. But hell, Rodriguez said, at least it was a park.

On Saturday, Rodriguez toasted Barrio Logan’s new park, a 3-acre sliver of finely cut Bermuda grass, with palms and pines. It is a strangely green oasis set between the oily waters of San Diego Harbor and the steel and dust of the Santa Fe train yards, sandwiched between the Port District docks and a fuel tank farm on its north side and the flattened site of an old tuna cannery on its south.

This park, Rodriguez said, hardly compares to Coronado’s parks, teasingly beautiful and a lifestyle away across the bay, but the folks of Barrio Logan have learned to take one step, and one park, at a time.

“You always want to give the kids something a little better than what you grew up with,” said Rodriguez, who as a teen-ager marched for Chicano Park. “That’s what it’s all about. Give the kids something better.”

So just like that, with appropriate speeches and applause, Barrio Logan’s 500 youth soccer players have a new place to call home, darting across the Bermuda and its boundaries of lime lines, with navy ships and sail boats in full view like trophies on a mantle.

For their parents and grandparents, people with a sense of history and pained by the snail’s pace of progress in the barrio, Saturday’s ceremonial opening of the park harken to days before World War II when they’d walk to the foot of Crosby Street to fish, to swim, to go clamming.

“I use to live five blocks from there, and I remember going down there to jump in the water, to push the boats,” said a smiling Rachael Ortiz, a community leader who is executive director of the nonprofit Barrio Station. “We’d dig up clams and cook them right there, on the beach.”

One of the barrio boys who hung out at the local youth center was Carlos Castaneda. Today he is an attorney for Caltrans, but he never left the Barrio Logan family home set alongside his father’s tailoring business and which now counts three generations.

“Industry took over our bay front in the 1940s. We were ignored,” Castaneda lamented. “Everything was rezoned for industrial use--as if they thought we would all move away. But we didn’t. We stayed--and we lost our bay front.”

Castaneda is one of a cadre of local activists who, under Ortiz’s tutelage, battled the bureaucracy for two decades for their bay-side barrio park. They organized, they campaigned, they delivered speeches and they grabbed politicians in elevators. The San Diego City Council. The county Board of Supervisors. The San Diego Port District. State legislators.

The state’s Coastal Commission demanded public access to waterfronts and damn if Barrio Logan was going to be denied its access--especially since it had it once, only to lose it to the industrial big guys.

Ultimately, the San Diego Unified Port District agreed to offer the base of Crosby Street as parkland, a $4.4-million project that is unfinished. For now, the park stops about 50 feet shy of the water, where the smell of creosote and floating timbers of old docks fail to turn back inquisitive youngsters.

In a year or so, boat slips will occupy that space. Another 2 acres will also be developed for the park, for a larger soccer field and parking.

Even if it’s not completed, the park looks neat with its purple-and-teal jungle gyms, its precast, charcoal-gray picnic tables and barbecue stands, its pink, orange and turquoise gazebo and its skinny yellow light standards looking like so many flex drinking straws.

Prime use of the park will be for soccer and other athletic games.

“We don’t want a passive park because then it will just be a hangout for negative activities,” said Castaneda, who today is chairman of Barrio Caucus, a local planning advisory group. “But soccer will bring out the kids, their parents, the volunteers. It will help the community develop its organizational skills and its athletic abilities, and will get families together.”

Dreamers talk of the day that both the Crosby Street Park and Chicano Park, several blocks up the street, will be linked by a wide, landscaped promenade with the kinds of shops and cultural outlets that will enliven the street as never before.

“We’re using our heart and our intellect to improve our community,” Castaneda said. “We’ve learned to link cultural awareness with the bureaucracy, and we’re reclaiming what we lost.”