Activists Try to Turn Baldwin Hills Into a Park

Despite offering some of the best views in the Los Angeles Basin, the Baldwin Hills have had a tough time earning their due respect.

They’ve been scalped and terraced, deluged by a burst dam in 1963 and pecked away by hundreds of creaking oil pumps for more than 70 years. High above the urban plain, the terrain now is a mix of eroded ravines, middle-class homes and working oil fields.

But these weedy slopes could be in for a transformation. A group of community activists, conservationists and state legislators is seeking to convert the oil production area and other connected open space--the largest swath of undeveloped land in urban Los Angeles--into a park bigger than Golden Gate Park in San Francisco or Central Park in New York.

They say they already have $32 million in state money to buy 100 acres from private landowners--and are looking to acquire at least 600 more.

“This is rolling,” said state Sen. Kevin Murray (D-Culver City), who has written a bill to create a Baldwin Hills Conservancy. “It’s not a pie-in-the-sky thing.”

The ambitious plans signify a growing shift in the environmental movement toward the creation of urban open space. Many officials say that it is desperately needed in a city with a severe shortage of parks.

The diverse communities surrounding the Baldwin Hills, like much of Los Angeles, have less than one acre of park space per 1,000 people--a fraction of state and national standards.

On Saturday, a coalition of residents, environmentalists and landscape architects discussed plans for the area at a community hall in Culver City.

Their ideas ranged from skateboarding and baseball to weddings and hiking. “How about radio-controlled airplanes?” asked one woman.

The Baldwin Hills are at a cultural nexus between South-Central and the Westside, the Crenshaw district and Inglewood. It is crossed by some of Los Angeles’ major inner-city boulevards: Slauson, Jefferson, La Cienega and La Brea.

Murray said it is crucial to have open space to which local youngsters can ride their bikes or take the bus.

“We save finch. We save fish. We save redwoods,” Murray told those assembled Saturday. “This is an opportunity to save children.”

Murray has been working for several years with a nonprofit group, the Community Conservancy International, to create the Baldwin Hills Park Project around the existing 350-acre Kenneth Hahn state recreation area. In total, the project’s supporters hope to weave together 1,200 acres--two square miles--of open space.

Although the cost of buying that land is sketchy, Murray and the conservancy estimate that it could range in the low hundreds of millions and would take years to assemble. But Rusty Areias, director of the state park system, says plans for the Baldwin Hills are reaching a critical mass, much like movements to create park space along the Los Angeles and San Gabriel rivers.

“There are parts of Los Angeles where it’s difficult to get to the Santa Monica Mountains,” said Areias. “We want parks close to people’s neighborhoods. The Baldwin Hills can better serve the urban people historically underserved by state parks.”

The Sierra Club says the Baldwin Hills, part of which is targeted for a housing subdivision, is one of the most valuable and endangered pieces of land in the county.

“There’s an astonishing amount of habitat left in these oil fields and hills,” said Bill Corcoran, a representative for the environmental group. “The Baldwin Hills is a diamond in the rough.”

Corcoran said supporting the proposed park is in keeping with the Sierra Club’s new focus on cities. The group wants to help make urban areas more attractive to stop the sprawl that eats into mountains, canyons or deserts. “We have to support opportunities to make the urban community more livable,” he said.

Named for the eccentric millionaire Elias J. “Lucky” Baldwin, much of the Baldwin Hills has remained free of housing because of the area’s value as an oil field.

Standard Oil discovered that value in 1924, and over the decades Shell, Texaco and Getty also operated oil production facilities in the area, with more than 1,000 wells. Today there are 710 abandoned and 420 active pumps in the hills.

The landscape of dirt, rust and weeds has a mysterious air that has drawn film producers, including the makers of “L.A. Confidential” and “The Fugitive.” And that noir feel has been enhanced by rumors that an old brick house, sheltered among eucalyptus and oil wells, was once owned by author Raymond Chandler.

But on the outskirts, there’s a variety of more common uses.

Mostly upper-middle-class neighborhoods cling to the slopes--Blair Hills, Fox Hills and Ladera Heights. Residents are drawn by the panoramic views sweeping from the San Gabriel Mountains to Downtown to Point Dume and south to Santa Catalina Island.

La Cienega Boulevard cuts through the middle along a rift created by the Newport-Inglewood earthquake fault. To the west, beneath a canyon of sage scrub, is West Los Angeles College in Culver City. And a park in the northeast sits on the site of the Baldwin Hills dam, which burst in 1963. The resulting 292-million-gallon flood drowned five people and destroyed hundreds of homes.

The state already owns 500 acres of open space and fields in the area, including the 350-acre Kenneth Hahn state recreation area--managed by the county Department of Parks and Recreation.

There have been plans for at least 25 years to acquire the surrounding land and expand the park, especially as the oil fields became less productive. But officials could find little funding, most of which seemed to go to outlying, more pristine nature areas.

In 1996, the county received $7 million from Proposition A and it is holding the money in a joint power authority with the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy. This year, the state got $32.5 million more for the hills.

One obstacle for conservationists is that one of the prime pieces of open land, with an unobstructed view of the downtown skyline, is targeted for 240 homes.

Esther Feldman, president of Community Conservancy International, said one possibility is to use some of the $32 million to buy that 60-acre parcel, called Vista Point.

As for the other land, Feldman said, studies still need to be done to determine the costs of cleaning up the oil fields for recreational use. Stocker Resources, the company that currently operates the wells, is working with the nonprofit.

For Jim Park, with the county Department of Parks and Recreation, there is hope of restoring it. He said that years ago the county managed to convert 31 acres of the oil-saturated land to parks without major problems.

He added that in more than two decades he has not seen such an opportune political climate to create urban recreational space. “With the governor’s support and the new resource secretary, it looks like things are finally going to happen.”