The Slow Dawn of an Oasis : Fears of Crime and Financial Woes Have Delayed Grand Hope Park’s Opening

Grand Hope Park, Los Angeles’ newest green space, offers amenities unusual for these days of tight money and tough streets in American cities: a 53-foot-high clock tower that chimes with jazz and new age music. Shady arbors inscribed with lines of specially commissioned poetry. Fancy fountains and sculptures symbolizing a multicultural society.

Yet, the 2.5 acres in south downtown will have added features that reflect heightened concerns about crime, the economy and city government’s ability to manage its physical treasures. Those worries, along with the bankruptcies of its construction company, have delayed the park’s opening again--12 years after planning began, six years after a ceremonial groundbreaking and two months after the dedication of what is supposed to be the centerpiece of a new downtown neighborhood.

“Everyone thinks it’s opening next week, but next week never comes,” said Annie D. Johnson, a vice president of the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, whose 2,100-student campus moved three years ago to share the park block bounded by Grand Avenue, Hope and 9th streets and Olympic Boulevard. Johnson and other officials active in planning the park now happily anticipate children on playground slides and office workers lunching on lawns by year’s end.

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First, there is to be a controversial addition to the park’s original design.

Built to near completion without permanent barriers, much of the park soon will be surrounded by an eight-foot-high fence of wrought-iron columns. Its seven gateways will be locked at night to keep out troublemakers and vandals. Puzzled passersby now peer through temporary chain-link fencing at the offbeat sculptures of coyotes poised on the grass, at curved benches that await sunbathers, at a fountain shaped like a snake.

City Councilwoman Rita Walters, who represents the area, strongly argued against a permanent fence, saying it would project an image of exclusion. She was outvoted by council members eager to protect the $20 million investment in park property, landscaping and artwork. The clock tower, the snake fountain and some seating sections will remain outside the permanent fence, partly as a compromise and partly because it would be too awkward to wrap the gating that way, say participants in the debate.

“Our concern was how to do it in an aesthetically pleasing way and how not to convey the wrong image that this is a private compound. I think we’ve done a good job,” David M. Riccitiello, the city Community Redevelopment Agency manager for that part of downtown, said of the planned $250,000 fencing.

The CRA sponsored and funded the park, envisioning it as an oasis in an ambitious, new community of apartments, schools, hotels, businesses and shops that may stretch one day from the expanded Convention Center to the financial district.

But the crippling recession in Los Angeles real estate has at least delayed redevelopment of what is called the South Park area. Pioneers, like the Fashion Institute and nearby apartment dwellers, say they feel isolated and worried about crime. Fears deepened after looters hit the sportswear store in the Fashion Institute’s ground floor during last year’s riots.

So the CRA asked the park’s architect, Lawrence Halprin, known for such projects as the Bunker Hill Steps in Los Angeles and Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco, to design a fence. In addition to smaller entrances, his plans include 40-foot-wide gateways on Hope and Grand, with lintels that proclaim the park’s name and fencing that can be rolled back at night. In drawings, it is reminiscent of gated parks in Europe and may serve as a model for gating other parks in Los Angeles, experts say. Fencing is being considered for parts of MacArthur Park when subway construction finishes there.

However, John Sheppard, Walters’ planning deputy, said the councilwoman remains concerned that “putting the fence around the park would close off the open-space feel that was originally planned.”

He suggested that the CRA should have thought more about security before building such an elaborate park. “Everything in the park is well done and artistic in one form or another. A lot of stuff has cultural meaning. . . . But maybe they should not have put in so much art that would be in danger of being possibly damaged,” Sheppard said.

Also questioning the elaborateness, the city’s Department of Recreation and Parks was reluctant to take over Grand Hope. “It’s very fancy and the costs to maintain it would be astronomical,” said Alonzo Carmichael, the department’s planning officer.

City workers use very wide lawn mowers ill-equipped for the meandering walkways and lawns dotted with sculptures, he explained. “You’d have to hand tailor it,” Carmichael said.

Fans of the park contend that the city department wants only the most boring and standard-issue facilities. And Grand Hope is not boring, they boast. Not with a mix of palms, sycamores, Italian cypress, California oak and ficus trees. Not with $390,000 spent on artworks.

The park, however, has no bathrooms because planners feared that they would be too expensive to maintain and might become a magnet for the homeless or drug dealers.

The life-size bronze coyotes, joined by a hawk and snake, are artist Gwynn Murrill’s reminders of what roamed downtown before briefcase carriers arrived. The snake fountain designed by Raul Guerrero commemorates a Mexican nature myth. The central arbors are inscribed with lines of poetry by Los Angeles writers Kate Braverman and Wanda Coleman. A second fountain, designed by Halprin and Lita Albuquerque, invites clambering down along a cascade onto little islands in a pool.

Concern for those amenities, along with financial considerations, led to the creation of a nonprofit corporation to manage Grand Hope Park. The new entity’s board is to include heavy representation from nearby property owners who must pay for park upkeep and security as part of the redevelopment zone.

“The objective is to have a safe, nice place for people to have to use. The objective is to preclude the activity which unfortunately has become common in city parks around the United States,” said Paul Jacobs, manager of Renaissance Tower, a 192-unit apartment building nearing completion at the park’s south boundary.

The Urban Land Institute, a Washington think tank, reports that cities around the country are exploring similar ways to privatize park services. Aside from two vest pocket parks on Skid Row, park management outside the traditional city department is a first in Los Angeles, Carmichael said.

Renaissance Tower, the Fashion Institute, the 270-unit Metropolitan apartments across the street and a nearby office tower are to pay a total of $155,000 annually for park maintenance. Additional funds were anticipated from other projects in the redevelopment zone, but those buildings have been delayed or canceled. To make up the difference, the CRA is to pay a maximum of $110,000 a year, capped at $880,000 over the 50-year ground lease.

“In hindsight, we probably optimistically believed the area would change faster than it has,” said the CRA’s Riccitiello.

The construction recession affected the park in other ways too.

The bankruptcy filing of Renaissance Tower’s previous owner, and a temporary shutdown in work there, further postponed public access because the apartments’ work crews used the park’s south end for a staging area.

More directly, the bankruptcy last year of the park’s contractor, MSH Constructors Inc. of Burbank, when the park was about 90% complete, caused other problems and delays. The waterfall fountain leaks and may have been improperly built, officials say. Soil was improperly mixed, causing large patches of the new lawn to wither. Some trees died too. The CRA is dealing with the bonding company that is to guarantee completion and repairs. Suspended since January, work recently resumed.

In June, the park was dedicated by Mayor Tom Bradley. Some neighbors assumed, wrongly, that it would then be open to the public. Officials now admit that the ceremony was held only because Bradley, a booster of the park, was leaving office a few weeks later.

Halprin, the park’s architect, said the delays and the fence debate should not distract people from the accomplishment--a park where one is badly needed. He likened his design to a series of rooms that seek to accommodate different uses and populations: children at the playground, office workers at the fountains, seniors under the arbors, students on the lawn.

“Diversity is the answer,” Halprin said from his San Francisco office. “If you have enough room, then you ought to have something for everybody, particularly in a neighborhood situation where no one group predominates.” There was no space, he said, for any sports facilities.

Halprin, who also designed the West Lawn frontage at the renovated Los Angeles Central Library, insists that cities must not turn away from parks, despite social problems, crime and the tough economy. “There was a time when I thought design could solve the problems of the world,” he said. “Obviously it can’t. . . . But to say we need to pull in our fangs and say we don’t have to have anything nice is wrong.”