A Chance to Catch a Fish and a Train in East Los Angeles

The lawmakers and the speech-givers who descended on East Los Angeles on Saturday said the impending construction of the Eastside Gold Line and the opening of a refurbished Belvedere Park Lake represented the beginning of a renaissance and the hard-fought fulfillment of a promise for the community.

Dean Mariscal, “born in East L.A., like the song,” saw all the hoopla a bit more pragmatically: He just wants to go fishing on the weekends and someday take the train to work.

“If we can keep the park clean, keep the lake stocked with fish, it’s going to be awesome,” said Mariscal, 39. “And people in this neighborhood, they’re desperate for public transportation. Maybe it’s all finally going to come together.”

That was the idea Saturday in East Los Angeles, home to about 130,000 residents.

The morning kicked off at Union Station downtown with a groundbreaking ceremony for the $898-million, six-mile extension of the Gold Line light rail, which will run from the station through Boyle Heights to its last stop in unincorporated East Los Angeles, one of the county’s most transit-dependent neighborhoods. It took two decades of planning to reach this point, with construction beginning this fall. The rail line is expected to open in 2009.

The ceremonies ended on the cement sidewalk shores of the reconstructed Belvedere Park Lake, with 13-year-old Jerry Andrade winning the first trophy of his life for catching a 21-inch catfish using marshmallow for bait.

The lake, stocked last week with 2,000 pounds of catfish, is the centerpiece of a nearly completed $28-million plan that has created a campus-like county civic center, at last transforming the south side of Belvedere Park into a scenic area that includes an amphitheater and pathways.

Nearly 40 years ago, the completion of the Pomona Freeway cut the county park in half. The north side never quite recovered, over time turning into a hodgepodge of county offices and Sheriff’s Department operations, including a helicopter landing zone on a grassy field. Through the decades, the lake became a polluted catch basin for freeway runoff and an algae-clogged fishing hole.

The renewal project, which began five years ago, includes a soon-to-open 28,800-square-foot county library that will feature a children’s section and house a Chicano Resource Center.

A new County Hall eventually will house public service agencies, including building and safety, regional planning, consumer affairs and a field office for Supervisor Gloria Molina.

Molina said that when she held a series of community meetings about improving the park years ago, she was surprised by the magnitude of bad feelings that lingered over the freeway bisection of the park and the overall lack of services available in unincorporated East L.A.

“It was this self-defeating kind of feeling that this was never going to happen,” Molina said.

Yet, what residents wanted were simply the kinds of services that many other cities offer at parks: summer concerts, clean bathrooms, a children’s playground. And their lake. They wanted their lake cleaned up and well-stocked.

Saturday, the lake and its state-of-the-art aeration-and-filtration system provided Gilbert Lopez, 65, a catfish big enough for his wife, Margarita, to turn into a bowl of soup for dinner.

“I’ve seen it all at this park,” said Lopez, whose family has lived in the same house a few blocks away for three generations. “The pachucos with their pants way up here, and the cholos with their pants sagging way down there. But now, I have this park back for my grandkids.”

The refurbished civic center also will feature a Gold Line station, opening the park to the broader community.

“This will be a rebirth for East L.A.,” Molina said. “This will be a park that you can not only be proud of, but you will want everyone to come and visit.”

Community members and local elected officials have fought two decades for the line. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority first envisioned it as a subway. But in January 1998, the agency stopped all new construction. Red Line cost overruns had killed political support and the agency needed to spend more money on its bus service to comply with a 1996 court order.

The MTA began redesigning the Eastside route as a mostly street-level rail line. The East Los Angeles line will go underground for 1.7 miles but remain at grade for the rest of the route.

Locals have fought hard for the light rail line, making trips to Sacramento to plead with members of the California Transportation Commission and, back in Los Angeles, marching to MTA headquarters.

Diana Tarango, vice chairwoman of an advisory committee for the Gold Line, was elated their efforts have paid off.

“When I was a young girl, I used to take the ‘P’ car down 1st Street to go wherever I needed to go,” she said. “Well, now I’m a senior citizen and I’m going to be taking the Gold Line.”