A Say in the Park

They’re often the jewels of the community, oases of space and light where neighbors snap Frisbees, grill hot dogs and shoot the breeze. In a relentlessly gray urban landscape, they provide a splash of green and a dash of aesthetic relief.

Who doesn’t love a park?

The answer, these days, seems to be plenty of people.

Across the region, a number of parks and some swaths of undeveloped land have turned into battlegrounds, pitting neighbors wanting to improve or expand their scarce public spaces against those determined to leave well enough alone.

Of course, new or expanded parks are still being embraced. Santa Monica officials have committed $141 million for a network of mini-parks scattered on 57 acres, including traffic medians, hillside slopes and concrete ditches. And in East Los Angeles, a third of an acre known as Elysian Valley Gateway Park was just dedicated as the first step toward transforming the Los Angeles River into a scenic, recreational corridor.

But in Glendale, it took a court ruling for the city to begin work on an outdoor sports complex nestled in a vacant canyon. Residents of Studio City have been cleft into feuding groups over the proposed addition of a roller-hockey rink to their beloved community park. In Silver Lake, homeowners bared their teeth over a new off-leash dog park and an enlarged recreation center that was put off for months by bureaucratic maneuvering.

On the surface, the squabbles mirror the countless planning disputes waged for years by homeowners intent on insulating themselves from the banes of modernity: traffic, noise, crime and, consequently, declining property values.

“It’s going to change my neighborhood,” said David Beckstead, a Westlake Village violin dealer opposed to the establishment of Lindero Canyon Park, a 33-acre recreational area just inside the Los Angeles County line.

But beyond that, experts say, are changing uses of public parks in a region with an ambivalent attitude, at best, toward shared space. Several of the recent controversies involve the creation not of traditional parks, with their lawns, trees and implied serenity, but of recreation outlets that could attract rowdy teenagers.

Ironically, the dust-ups come when Angelenos seem hungrier than ever for common areas in which to unwind: In the past five years, voters have authorized spending nearly $860 million to improve the county’s public parks. In addition, the city of Los Angeles passed a $776-million parks enhancement measure last November.

When the abstract literally becomes concrete, however, some residents find themselves less enthusiastic, caught up in a spiral of we-want-it-but-we-don’t.

“People want jails too, but nobody wants to live next to a jail,” said Beckstead, 50, who is fighting construction of a paved roller hockey-cum-basketball court, two soccer fields and four baseball fields within a pop fly’s reach of his front stoop.

“Having parks is wonderful and having open space is wonderful, but having an active park that’s going to be used on a daily basis, with noise and spectators and cheering and amplified speakers--that belongs more in a commercial area.”

Beckstead’s worries point up not only the concerns of homeowners but also the evolving use of the region’s patches of open land, where planners have sought to build new parks or gussy up old ones.

Gone, planners say, are the days when the region’s parks could afford to be a collection of “passive” recreation areas--shady, tranquil swatches of grass adorned with only a picnic table and a creaky swing set. Replacing this ideal are more active centers accommodating the myriad ways Angelenos have fun, from in-line skating to skateboarding, power-walking to walking the dog.

“Parks aren’t just a nice, soft, fuzzy, feel-good green issue,” said Esther Feldman, an L.A.-based planning consultant. “They’re about a critical component of our public infrastructure and a critical component of keeping neighborhoods livable.”

But the reality planners must spar with is the lack of available space, a legacy they blame on decades of myopic planning.

Before the area’s boom in the latter half of this century, open land was so plentiful, especially compared to Eastern cities, no one could imagine depleting it. When someone suggested converting Wilshire Boulevard into a public park stretching to the ocean, “everyone laughed,” said Feldman, who is affiliated with the national Trust for Public Land. “Now imagine if we had indeed set aside all that land.”

Single-family homes with their own backyards further led to a de-emphasis on major public spaces. And the growing love affair with the car encouraged the sense that people could simply drive somewhere to get away, whether to outlying areas, the beach or the mountains, said Martin Krieger, a professor at the USC School of Urban Planning and Development.

The result: a city that ranks among the lowest of large metropolises in its per capita amount of public parkland, according to a survey Feldman helped conduct a few years ago. Los Angeles, home to 3.5 million people, has 350 parks totaling 15,665 acres--less than 200 square feet per person.

By contrast, cities like New York--with more than 1,000 parks covering 37,000 acres--incorporated huge tracts of land such as Central Park into their urban maps decades ago. In San Francisco, planners tried to install parks within a 15-minute walk from any residence in the city, said Barry Tindall, spokesman for the National Parks and Recreation Society in Ashburn, Va.

“All those cities grew up with those parks,” Feldman said. “In Los Angeles, that hasn’t been the case. The need has emerged intensively only in the last decade or so, and it’s a lot harder to play catch-up.”

Fueling the shortage has been the city’s growth, from a population of 3 million in 1980 to 3.5 million a decade later. Along with that, the number of people below the poverty line, who cannot afford to buy homes with backyards, has also increased by a third.

Between the lack of space and larger population, planners have been propelled into clashes with residents.

The question of whether to upgrade a recreation center at Silver Lake Park simmered for months, as a group of residents filed administrative appeals to stop the project. The new building would occupy too much land, opponents said, while defenders cited the existing building’s age and outmoded facilities.

Those in favor finally won, capping what the neighborhood newsletter called “a long and divisive struggle between the majority of the Silver Lake community and a handful of vocal dissidents.” Construction is due to begin by the end of the year.

Feelings there had earlier turned nasty over an off-leash dog park that was eventually established. Now, some residents are hoping to build a traditional park on an empty lot once earmarked for development off Fletcher Drive.

Neighbors in Glendale took their battle to court against a planned 26-acre park accessible only by a quiet residential road (they lost last week). In Westlake Village, a petition campaign has sprung up to stop construction of Lindero Canyon Park, now an empty field opponents want to preserve as open space.

In Studio City, a bitter fight is brewing over the proposed addition of a roller-hockey rink to a small park off Beeman Avenue. As the only such facility within miles, opponents say, the rink would attract skaters from all over, crowding out local residents and increasing noise, traffic and parking problems on the two narrow residential streets leading to the park.

“There are already more venues here than the park can support,” said Mitchell Thomas, 43, who lives on the park’s perimeter. “If you’re going to plan for something that is high-growth, you have to have the infrastructure where it’ll work.”

The proposed hockey rink reflects the changing demands on recreation areas and ever-changing leisure trends. Popular new pastimes like in-line skating and skateboarding have prompted planners to look for safe, controlled spaces where kids can strut their stuff rather than on the streets.

The shifts could heighten generational conflicts, parks officials say, setting the needs of young families and senior citizens against those of adolescents and young singles. To resolve such differences, Los Angeles is instituting a new program to let neighborhoods themselves govern their parks through local advisory boards.

“Parks should be very cyclical in their uses, because neighborhoods are cyclical in their demographics,” said Steven Soboroff, head of the city’s Recreation and Parks Commission. “You move to a neighborhood with teenagers necking in their cars and [soon] you’re in a neighborhood with people walking with baby strollers.”

Still, officials acknowledge that it is impossible to please everyone, especially as more deep-seated fears arise.

In Pacoima, some residents clamored for the city to shut down Hubert H. Humphrey Park, the scene of several violent gang episodes, after a high school football player was gunned down last month while riding scooters with a friend. Officials have vowed to keep the park open.

Poorer areas like Pacoima, where hundreds of people live in apartment buildings without the luxury of enclosed backyards, desperately need public spaces for residents to enjoy the outdoors, parks experts say. But the threat of violence sparks fear not only in the immediate neighborhood but adjacent ones.

“As much as people want public spaces, they’re concerned about public space,” said Sharon Mayer, an aide to City Councilman Mike Feuer, who has been caught in the middle of the dispute over Studio City Park. “They’re scared that if they improve something, more people will come.

“There’s a general fear about different people and how it will change the character of their neighborhood. No matter where people live, when other people come in from anywhere, they’re nervous. I don’t know how you get over that.”