Park Grapples With Rec and Ruin

It is 8 p.m. on a Tuesday night and the playing field at the Granada Hills Recreation Center is bustling with activity. Hundreds of pint-sized soccer players dart across the brightly lighted lawn, their laughter mingling with the shouts of coaches and parental encouragement yelled from the sidelines.

But on the other side of the park, the grass field along Chatsworth Avenue lies dark and deserted, save for a throng of rowdy young men perched on a picnic table, listening to hard-edged music blaring from a boombox. The smell of marijuana wafts through the air, and a lone woman hurries the three children she is shepherding across the lawn, pushing past the slides and swings that stand empty nearby.

It is a typical night at a park struggling to define itself and work its way back into the heart of a community.

And it is not yet clear which side of that park will prevail.

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When the Northridge earthquake rolled through the Valley 33 months ago, it destroyed the red-brick building that housed most programs at the Granada Hills Recreation Center.

That loss, the regulars say, broke the moorings that had anchored the park to the community.

“It went from being a safe park, a wonderful park, to a place that looks dead, that people don’t want to come to,” said park director Sue McElvogue.

The 32-year-old rec center was rather small and shabby, as San Fernando Valley parks go. But it had a gym for basketball games, a kitchen where children learned to bake and make candy and a stage for drama practice and ballet classes. There were staff offices, a preschool classroom and studios for art classes and ceramics lessons.

And it had bathrooms--clean, indoor bathrooms.

Now the park office is housed in the parking lot, in a rented trailer partitioned into a few small rooms. One room, crammed with tables and chairs, hosts a preschool class in the mornings and tutoring sessions in the afternoons. In another, guitar lessons are held Mondays, piano classes on Wednesdays and on Tuesdays small girls wearing tutus and tights crowd in for ballet lessons.

For her “Storybook Cooking” classes, Vicki Spain must rely on a hotplate and toaster oven set up in a corner of the trailer. When she hosts “Storytime” or “Fun With Crafts and Songs,” she has to rearrange the small tables and chairs.

“We lost a lot when we lost the building,” said Spain, who has spent more than 18 years at the park, first as a volunteer and now as a teacher. “When we had sign-ups for classes, there used to be a line going around the block. . . . Now it’s a struggle just to survive.

“We’ve had to do a lot to keep the program going,” she said. “We’ve tried to offer everything we could to bring people in, and I think finally they are starting to come back. But it’s hard when the place looks so deserted.”

And when the only bathrooms are a few dilapidated porta-potties lined up along the playground’s edge.

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Director McElvogue came to work at the park in the spring. Before that, she spent eight years at Mason Recreation Center, a 20-acre city park a few miles west in Chatsworth.

Unlike Granada Hills, Mason has no pool or tennis courts and has fewer baseball and soccer fields. But it does have an indoor gym and community room, and that provides for a thriving children’s basketball program that brings a steady stream of families to the park almost every night.

At Granada Hills--called Petit Park by old-timers because it runs alongside Petit Avenue--the south end of the park is well lighted and busy most nights, as home to one of the Valley’s largest American Youth Soccer Organization programs.

But few venture beyond the small, sand-covered playground to the grassy expanse at the north end of the park, where the lights are dim and a handful of unkempt men carrying grubby backpacks congregate, drinking from bottles in brown paper bags.

By morning, those bottles litter the fenced-in, weed-covered lot alongside the playground, the site where the park’s gymnasium stood before the quake.

If the gym were rebuilt, the park could host night classes and basketball games, which would attract families and keep the riffraff away, McElvogue said. “I think this neighborhood wants to support the park again, but we have to give them a reason to come.”

Conditions are improving slowly, she said. The park’s summer camp, which used to attract more than 100 children before the earthquake, drew 90 campers this summer. Recreation director Steve Cline started a winter basketball league that has grown to 27 teams, even though they must travel among north Valley schools to find spots to practice and play.

Regular police patrols have quashed most drug activity in and around the park, police say, and crime is not a significant problem.

And the primitive outdoor toilets have been replaced with newer, cleaner outdoor toilets, donated by a local landfill developer.

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But community frustration is still mounting.

Parents take their children to the library next door, then head over to the park to read. But they have to rush, because fear drives them out at nightfall, and night is falling earlier each day. And mothers are tired of carrying wads of tissue in their purses and letting their children urinate behind trees, because the youngsters refuse to use the dank and smelly outdoor toilets.

“There’s been a drop-off in use of the park,” said Paula Elephante, of Councilman Hal Bernson’s office. “People are concerned that the building’s not up yet.”

The entire neighborhood took a big hit from the earthquake. Row upon row of apartment buildings were destroyed and homes knocked from their foundations.

“But most people around the park have been able to get their lives back together,” Elephante said. “They look at the park and wonder, why not there? Will it ever be back together again?”

The roadblock to repair is one familiar to any homeowner who ever haggled with an insurance company over earthquake repairs: The city and FEMA cannot agree on how much it should cost to rebuild the park’s gym.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has offered to reconstruct the center as it was, which would cost about $1.2 million. But the city’s Recreation and Parks Department, which had been planning to renovate the gym before the quake, wants a more modern facility--a bigger gym with bleachers and community meeting rooms. That would cost more than $2 million.

Similar negotiations have delayed repairs at other city parks, including Shadow Ranch in West Hills, said Jim Andervich, assistant general manager for the San Fernando Valley region of the parks department.

“It’s a troubling situation,” Andervich admits. “Two and a half years have gone by and we still haven’t resolved this situation with FEMA. It’s disappointing, and I know it’s a disservice to the community. It puts the park at a real disadvantage.”

Officials from FEMA, the parks department, Bernson’s office and the Los Angeles Police Department will meet with local residents Wednesday evening at the park to hear their concerns and answer questions about the park’s future.

“We want people to know we’re not giving up,” said McElvogue. “We think we’ll get a big turnout, and we can let the city and FEMA know that this park means something to this community, and we want it back.”

So come out and show support, she said. Bring lawn chairs to sit on. And toilet paper.