Lincoln Park Becoming a Battleground Over Food Programs

When is a park not a park?

When it serves mostly as a mess hall for the homeless, says Alan Lowenthal, the Long Beach city councilman whose district includes Lincoln Park.

Lately, the town’s oldest park has become the site of numerous civic-minded and church-sponsored feeding programs for the homeless--and the cause of unhappiness by nearby Pine Street business owners.

Lowenthal, along with the Downtown Long Beach Associates, wants to see a return to parklike activities and has proposed transferring responsibility for Lincoln Park to the Department of Parks, Recreation and Marine from the Department of Public Works, which has maintained it since the 1970s.

Public Works mows the grass, waters the plants and picks up the trash. But Lowenthal says that Parks and Recreation would staff it, like a park, and program recreation, like a park.

Maybe.

“How do you program something when there isn’t anything to program?” asked Ralph Cryder, head of Parks and Recreation. “I wouldn’t do much different than what is going on now because there’s really nothing there.”

Long gone are the restrooms, fields and playground equipment that once graced Lincoln Park, renamed in 1920 to jibe with the first monument erected west of the Rockies to the Civil War president.

For decades, the open green space operated like a park. Then in 1973 came the new Civic Center and Lincoln Park’s status dropped from park to aesthetic backdrop for the new government buildings. Recent attempts by Parks and Recreation to program activities failed, Cryder said, “because no one came. There’s nothing for people to do there.”

Except eat. Feeding programs in the park draw hundreds of homeless people and that rankles John Morris, owner of a trendy Pine Avenue restaurant. He complains that those who congregate in the park for food spill over into the business district.

“It’s just out of control,” he said. “Nobody wants to go near [the park]. It’s like a camp.”

Lowenthal also said organizations helping the homeless should do so at their own or other facilities so that Lincoln Park can return to being a park. He is planning a June 11 hearing on the park’s status.

Still, the park remains an anomaly, said John Hough of Public Works. “The question is not who is going to take care of the park. The question facing the city is a policy one: Is it going to try and use the park as an active, recreational-type park or as an aesthetic park. That needs to be answered before anything else.”