HIGHLAND PARK : Sun Takes Spotlight at Park Celebration

The summer solstice will be celebrated Saturday at La Tierra de la Culebra, a park created out of a vacant lot that involves local youth in gardening, sculpting, painting and crafts.

The free event, from noon to 9:30 p.m., will offer children’s arts and crafts, storytellers, dancers from Honduras and northern Mexico, Aztec dancing, a jazz ensemble of Eagle Rock High School alumni, pre-Columbian music and two plays.

“The summer solstice celebration is to bring to light the importance of the growing season,” said Tricia Ward, an environmental sculptor and artist who started the park, at 240 S. Avenue 57, shortly after the 1992 riots. “Without the sun, we could not grow healthy food or a healthy body.”

With a nod from the property owner, who had tried and failed to build apartments on the property, Ward and neighborhood youths sifted through demolished houses and sculpted a serpent out of the brick and stone.

They have planted several varieties of trees and flowers and a vegetable garden and are rebuilding a pond that had been vandalized last year. They are also involved in a mural program to decorate the park.

The serpent winds through the park, leading visitors up a hill and back down to where neighborhood children gather after school to work on crafts.

With the theme “Healthy Earth, Healthy Body,” the event will also offer free health screenings, including diabetes, nutrition, HIV testing, pre- and post-natal counseling and information on how to stop smoking.

There will also be information on employment services and social security benefits.

Shuttle buses have been reserved for the day, with pickup points at Montevista School on Avenue 54 at noon; Viva Market at York Boulevard and Figueroa Street at 12:15 p.m.; Pic & Save at York Boulevard and Avenue 54 at 12:30 p.m. The bus will return to the pickup points every hour afterward until 5 p.m.