THE URBAN LANDSCAPE : Barren, Colorless Park Hides Drama of La Brea Tar Pits

The La Brea Tar Pits are not a pretty sight. I’m not talking here about the gooey stuff that sits in the middle of the lake off Wilshire Boulevard, but about the barren park, sentimental statues and bunker-like buildings that surround the pits. Perhaps it is the fault of those pits that this is such a badly designed public space; smelly black scum is not a promising beginning for any park.

The park got its start in 1916, when G. Allan Hancock gave the county 32 acres of the oil-rich land he was developing out of the old Rancho La Brea. Ten years before, W.W. Orcutt had discovered a treasure trove of fossils in the asphalt pits that dotted this seasonal swamp. These excavations proved to be one of the most fertile mining grounds ever found for mastodon and saber-toothed cat bones and other remains of days gone by.

For three decades the “park” was just an empty and unkempt wasteland. In 1949, neighbors demanded that the county clean up the area and make it more accessible to the public. A succession of Parks Department designers then molded the area into a weak imitation of an English park. They hid the working excavation areas with shrubs and trees, while giving the then-new Park La Brea development a nice front lawn. The area was graded to help drainage, and in time, the County Museum of Art and the Page Museum impinged on the park, leaving it to look even more leftover then it already did.

The only grand space in the park is its reason for existence, an asphalt pit that was abandoned, filled with water and now serves as an artificial reminder of the graveyards of man and animal that made the area famous. It has been shaped to look the way a proper park lake should, which is to say oval with a dip in at least one side. A sculpture worthy of Disneyland occupies one corner, showing us a mother mammoth about to drown in the muck, while her mate and child watch in frozen horror. You can climb on top of a concrete concession bunker next to the lake and survey the whole romantic scene, and then enter into the abstract, quasi-military farm of the Page Museum to get a carefully staged explanation for this experience.

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The park is, in other words, a giant cover-up. In contrast to these grand gestures meant for public entertainment and information, the real work of both excavation and leisure goes on in little pockets to the rear. There you can find holes in the ground shored up with steel beams. It smells and looks like real work there, as if the messy past was coming up from underneath the well-ordered plots all around. Surrounding it are scruffy lawns where dogs run and families spread out picnic blankets, oblivious to the past. Ironically, their play area has been made more visible, as the city has weeded out dense vegetation so as not to give any unwanted visitors a refuge in the park. The result is a barren expanse without much character or sense.

This is a strange park, not quite large or lavish enough to isolate you from the city, nor urban enough to feel like a city plaza. Both Wilshire Boulevard and the museums turn their back to it, and there is little sense of the original landscape that Hancock had thought he was preserving. The drama of the place is hidden in the museums and the pits. Only the gentle bubbling of methane gas reminds you that this area was once alive with subterranean danger and wealth. In a metropolis that has less park space than any major city in the country, and where there is little regard for either landscape or history, this is a sorry excuse for such an urban amenity.