Park’s Paths Less Traveled

A group of L.A. history buffs gathered at the eastern edge of Elysian Park Saturday to learn about the lesser-known parts of the city’s oldest park.

What they got was both a lesson in the park’s rich history and an education in the modern realities of park maintenance in a city struggling with limited funding, a hiring freeze and the responsibility of caring for a place that is at once a modern-day park and a historic relic.

Elysian Park was dedicated in 1886. Construction began on the eastern entrance, which was marked by a monument to explorer and politician John Fremont soon after. In his book “The Los Angeles River,” Blake Gumprecht suggests that city officials’ reasons for transforming the area into a public space were less than altruistic. The “city officials decided to create Elysian Park on 746 acres of hill land west of the river,” he wrote, “because the property ... could not be given away.”

On Saturday, Scott Fajack, president of the Citizens Committee to Save Elysian Park, met a group of 14 at the head of the Portola Trail, named after Gaspar de Portola, one of the first Europeans to visit the site, for a two-hour walking tour.

The tour, one of three walking tours offered on a rotating basis by the Echo Park Historical Society, focused on the 30 acres that were cut off from the rest of the larger park, just under 600 acres, by the completion of the Pasadena Freeway in 1953. The parkland on the other side of the freeway, which houses Dodger Stadium and the Police Academy, “doesn’t have a lot of history,” Fajack said.

As traffic whooshed by and the occasional freight train clanked along the network of tracks approaching downtown, Fajack told the group about the history of the park’s eastern edge.

He showed off the former site of the Buena Vista Reservoir, in whose guard house William Mulholland once lived. He pulled out architectural sketches of the 1893 Elysian Park Pumping Station, which was replaced by a more modern structure in the 1990s. And he displayed color copies of postcards depicting the massive pigeon farm that supplied squab to downtown restaurants from 1892 until it was destroyed by flood in 1914.

But Fajack also acknowledged that what the group was looking at didn’t compare to the way the park once was. “It doesn’t seem very inviting now,” he said apologetically, as he pointed out the site where a brick structure once stood, now replaced by a metal storage unit.

Due in part to the passive nature of the park, he said, it has become a refuge for transients and a spot for cruising. The Citizens Committee, along with the Echo Park Historical Society, helps the city clear dead vegetation in an effort to discourage people from hiding out in the park.

But there are other problems. The city’s Parks and Recreation Department is short-staffed, Fajack said, and he has been told that Elysian Park is down about 16 maintenance workers.

In some of the more trafficked areas, hillsides were covered with blooming annual flowers, grass was green and trash was sparse. In other places, the rich mix of plantings, including eucalyptus and bougainvillea, was overgrown. Hiking trails were littered with used condoms, discarded clothing, Chinese take-out containers and ice cream wrappers.

“It’s a pretty amazing place,” said Rob Moon of Eagle Rock, as Fajack pointed through a locked gate to the site of a 1920s-era auto park. “It’s such a shame it’s so uncared for.”

“I’d seen pictures in a book of the park taken in the 1950s,” said Carol Martin of La Canada Flintridge, who was also on the tour Saturday. “It was still just beautiful then.”

Near the end of the tour, Fajack pointed down from a hill inside Elysian Park to the nearby Cornfield yard, a 32-acre swath of cleared land, once a railroad yard, that will be turned into a state park. “We’re hoping this part of the park will get more use when the Cornfield yard gets developed,” said Fajack, who sits on the state advisory board that will make recommendations about how to transform the site. Still, he added, “There’s no money to maintain anything. You add land, and the stuff gets stretched even thinner.”