Proponents of Cornfield Park Look for $30 Million

Despite a much-lauded agreement to create green space instead of an industrial park at a former rail yard northeast of downtown Los Angeles, proponents said Tuesday that the real work has just begun.

A coalition of nearly a dozen environmental and community groups must now lobby Sacramento for the $30 million in state funds needed to buy the proposed Cornfield parkland by Nov. 30 or the deal is off, officials said. And they must choose among many competing ideas on what the new park and community land near Chinatown and the Los Angeles River should include.

The groups and city officials have their eye on some of the $70 million that Gov. Gray Davis proposed in the state’s January budget for major river parkway projects.

The agreement to turn the 40-acres between Broadway and Spring Street into a park, with other such possible facilities as a cultural center, was celebrated Tuesday at a news conference on a bluff at the weedy site.

“This is only a stage in the battle,” said Lewis MacAdams, president of Friends of the Los Angeles River, a group active in trying to block the proposed $80-million industrial development there. “We have to get the money to buy this land.”

Most details on what would become the biggest park in central L.A. have barely made it onto the drawing board, architect Arthur Golding said. Hired by the environmental and community coalition to design the park, he added that he will try to find some consensus on many ideas. As it stands, the site might include green space heavily planted with trees, soccer fields, a magnet school and a Chinese cultural center.

The blighted rail yard, known as the Cornfield because of its 19th century agrarian history, had in recent months become a political battlefield that pitted the industrial developer and the Riordan administration on one side against the environmental groups.

As part of the new agreement, the Trust for Public Land, a national park conservation group, temporarily secured an option on the land from developer Majestic Reality Co. The goal is to transfer the site to state ownership. However, if the Nov. 30 purchase deadline is not met, the rights revert to Majestic, company official John Semcken said.

The pact was signed late Monday--just three days before a legal showdown over the original plans was slated to be heard in court. Friends of the Los Angeles River, Chinatown Yards Alliance and other groups had filed suit in September, charging that the city neglected to require a needed environmental study before approving the industrial project.

Despite the upbeat mood at Tuesday’s event, Semcken said the news was good but not finalized.

“This is a stay of the litigation,” he said, “not a cancellation of it.”