Barnsdall Park to Get $6.8-Million Face-Lift

Hollywood’s Barnsdall Park, battered by the Northridge earthquake, spotty maintenance and nearby subway construction, will receive some badly needed polish this September when a project designed to return some luster to the fading Los Angeles landmark begins.

The improvements, $6.8 million worth of landscaping, won’t be enough to solve the park’s many problems. But officials and park users voiced hopes at a hearing Saturday that the changes would be a first step toward restoring the park and arts complex.

“It’s not been an easy time for Hollywood, and it hasn’t been easy for Barnsdall Park,” Los Angeles City Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg told a group of park users. “But things are turning around.”

The improvements will include adding plants, replacing dead trees, repairing hedge walls and widening roads.

Perched atop a hill and cloaked in olive groves near Vermont Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard, the park’s location keeps its attractions largely hidden from the hectic streets that surround it. Since it was given to the city in 1927 for use as a public art park, Barnsdall has existed in relative obscurity. With a 300-seat theater, art galleries, an art school for children and a historic home and garden designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, residents and park officials are eager to make the site more of a gathering place.

A group of planners, led by Berkeley-based landscape architect Peter Walker, has drafted a master plan with the goal of maintaining the park’s historic feel while making it more accessible and amenable to public use.

The plan calls for more stairways to the park from the bottom of the hill off Hollywood Boulevard, improved access for the disabled and greater visibility of the park from street level. Many of these changes won’t be included in the first phase of construction, which is limited to the $6.8 million the park is receiving from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in return for allowing the agency to build on its northern border.

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For now, there is no funding for the project’s second phase, which calls for adding walkways into the park, repairing structures and making further landscaping improvements.

But most in the audience Saturday seemed satisfied that after several false starts, the work will finally begin.

“The park has been in decline for over a decade now,” said Linda Whittier, a resident of nearby Los Feliz and a park regular. “Every few years some elaborate plans are developed and until now, nothing happened. So maybe this complete grand vision won’t be finished either. But at least they’re doing what they can now.”

The first phase is scheduled for completion in the fall of 1999, and officials acknowledged that construction will probably disrupt some park events.

“Barnsdall is an absolute gem that we’ve let get dirty,” said park visitor Cassie Meyer as she walked the grounds with her daughter, Meghan. “It’s this agrarian and cultural retreat, smack in the middle of the city, that has been forgotten and neglected. It’s time to bring it back.”