Greening of the Parks

Ten years ago, the Boyle Heights neighborhood surrounding Ricardo and Juana Gutierrez was slowly unraveling, neighbor after neighbor packing up, selling off and moving out.

The source of the upheaval was an eight-acre patch of green space, a neighborhood park that had become a haven for drug deals and gang violence. But the Gutierrez family, with nine children, refused to yield. They organized remaining neighbors and, over the course of several years, drove the drug dealers out.

Today the Boyle Heights Sports Center Park is thriving, offering a respite from the heat and grime of urban life for children and adults alike.

After more than a decade of declining use, Los Angeles’ parks are enjoying a renaissance of sorts in the ‘90s, spurred in part by the frustration of longtime residents like the Gutierrezes and by park officials’ new emphasis on organized recreation programs from cheerleading camps to clog dancing.

When it comes to parks, officials have found, if you build it, they won’t necessarily come; but if you add a T-ball program, expect a crowd.

The community park of today might come equipped with a bocce ball court as well as a slide. A scan of the typical bulletin board will find sign-ups for youth day camp, adult aerobics, ballroom dancing, sewing bees and parenting classes.

Attendance at the city’s 365 parks and recreation centers is up 5% to 10% over previous years, according to the city’s Department of Recreation and Parks. The county’s 120 parks are also seeing increased numbers.

To be sure, some parks still attract thugs who scare off neighbors. At a recent public hearing before the Los Angeles City Council on a proposed park tax, some residents said they would never vote for it because crime kept them away from their neighborhood parks.

But the bigger problem at the parks now is overuse, parks officials say. In a time of strained budgets, waiting lists for some activities are months-long.

The county Department of Parks and Recreation has been hit with a 60% cut in staff positions over the last 15 years, forcing cutbacks in some park programs, said director Rod Cooper. The department has enlisted 3,000 volunteers to make up some of the difference.

The main source of funding for county and city parks is Proposition A. Approved by the voters in 1992, it provides $540 million over 20 years for park improvements. But Cooper said almost none of that money can be used for the programs that, more and more, are the key ingredients to a park’s success.

Los Angeles compares poorly with other metropolitan areas in the state when it comes to available parkland. According to a 1988 state study, Los Angeles has about 4.6 acres of parkland per 1,000 residents, compared with 11.6 acres per 1,000 residents in San Francisco, 16.5 acres in San Jose and 20 acres in San Diego.

In some pockets of the city--South-Central, Hollywood, Glassell Park and some sections of the San Fernando Valley--the figure is less than 1 acre of park space per 1,000 residents.

Despite the anti-tax sentiments offered by many residents at public hearings, the council recently voted to place the assessment on the November ballot. It would raise $25 million a year for park improvements at a cost to the average homeowner of $18.

Driving the burgeoning park attendance is a growing population, spearheaded by the arrival of immigrants from all over the world who see in parks the public meeting squares they remember but that L.A. otherwise lacks, park directors say.

“A lot of the newly arrived immigrants are living in small apartments and they really use the parks for what they were intended for; it’s kind of a meditative thing, as well as a central square for social activities and sports,” said Dave Gonzalez, Pacific region superintendent of the city’s parks department. “There are little subtle changes that have occurred. For example in Bogdanovich Park [in San Pedro] is a group of Slavic and Croatian immigrants who want bocce ball courts. The old guys come over and play, and we have to recognize the need for that.”

In other parks, efforts to revamp facilities have drawn patrons. The addition of a fleet of new boats with colorful canopies and other improvements spurred a resurgence of activity at Echo Park and its lake, which had become rundown and had a reputation as a magnet for crime.

“We created a new environment, people see these things, they like them and they come back,” said recreation and parks metro region superintendent George Stigile.

Stigile said parks officials gradually realized over the past several years that it would take organized recreational programs to pull people back to parks. Like Magic Mountain and Disneyland, they said, the parks needed to inject new stimulation to attract the public.

Helping to prod the effort along was a recent $1-million federal block grant that increased the number of programs being offered this year by almost 1,000, officials said.

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The most popular activities at south side and Harbor area parks are basketball and soccer leagues, gymnastics, ballet, tap and hip hop. Westside tastes run more toward day camps, parent and youth get-togethers, ceramics and arts and crafts.

For Gardena residents Betty and Tom Anderson, local Rosecrans Recreation Center has become a focus of their lives. Tom coaches two Little League teams, and Betty is a team mom who serves on the park advisory board. Betty Anderson says a neighborhood park is one of the few remaining low-cost family recreational choices.

“A lot of children coming to the park are underprivileged or they are from single-parent families or where a parent has been laid off, and this is the only kind of fun they know,” she said.

The couple say the Rosecrans park attracts families because it is safe and is nurtured by the entire community. But residents had to work at it, driving away gangbangers and graffiti taggers and lobbying for better lighting. They formed a Neighborhood Watch group to work with local police.

City and county officials also have placed renewed emphasis on safety. The city has targeted a number of parks, including Rosecrans, for beefed-up patrols and says crime rates are down from last year at Los Angeles parks overall. The county recently won a $6-million federal grant to add 46 officers to its park police unit over the next three years. County park police chief John Zrofsky said crime rates in county parks dipped 19% in 1995 over the previous year.

Even in long established areas of the city, parks are still being created, sometimes providing surprises in small packages: At 3rd and Bixel streets, a lot noted for its filth and profusion of used needles has been turned into a soccer gridiron for kids dubbed the “Field of Dreams”; a small space on Sunset was recently transformed into an outdoor art gallery.