Parks Needed Along River

When Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Feuer met over the summer with Studio City residents about plans to develop parks and trails along a half-mile stretch of the Los Angeles River, the response was skeptical. Residents raised question after question about security, graffiti, trash and whether a riverside park would attract vagrants and gangs.

Here in park-poor Los Angeles, you would think that residents would scream for green, but instead neighbors tend to react to new parks as if the government were proposing a prison complex next door.

So Feuer asked his San Fernando Valley field deputy to organize a bus tour of other areas in the city where parks have been developed along the river. A busload of Studio City residents toured tiny pocket parks with beautifully designed wrought-iron gates along a section of the river between Los Feliz and the Elysian Valley. The tour group met with park neighbors and a Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy ranger, who told how they’d worked with planners to develop the greenways and how happy they were with the results.

Feuer and his staff were smart to try to defuse some of the fears that have become all too common when a new park is proposed. Such a reaction seems particularly unexpected in Studio City, home of the beloved Beeman Park, which is everything a neighborhood park should be. Kids of all ages play softball and soccer there, shoot hoops and challenge each other at tennis. Families picnic under shady oaks, dogs frolic on the grass. This green, tree-shaded square fosters community between neighbors who might never meet each other if not for this neighborhood public space.

Surely a city needs more such places.

The parks and trails planned between Whitsett Avenue and Laurel Canyon Boulevard would serve as a model for a larger plan to develop other parks and trails along the 51 miles of what passes for a river in Los Angeles.

Whether the concrete-bound watercourse, tamed in the 1930s after devastating floods, can ever be a real river again is subject to debate. There are purists who want to see it flowing free and filled with trout, and pragmatists who say it must first and foremost be a flood-control channel.

But whatever parks can be developed along its banks are needed and welcome in this city of concrete. And if encouraged to get out of their cars and walk between neighborhoods and to the shops that line Ventura Boulevard, residents from Studio City and elsewhere in Los Angeles may at least have the opportunity to reflect on the river they’ve turned their backs on for so long.

And if it comes to pass that the Studio City stretch becomes the model for the rest of the L.A. River Greenway, then the new park’s neighbors can be the ones who assure other wary Angelenos that a park is, indeed, a community treasure.