Column: Can MacArthur Park be saved? Its past offers a blueprint

Late one morning on a sun-drenched November day, I was exploring the western edge of MacArthur Park when I came upon a social worker who was looking for a client.

We got to talking about the tree-shaded, grassy slopes; the Levitt bandstand that hosts summer concerts; the soccer field where youngsters still gather; and the lovely view across the lake toward the once-grand Westlake Theatre building and the downtown L.A. skyline.

“It’s a beautiful oasis in the middle of the city,” Willard Beasley said.

That’s the thing that breaks your heart. There’s so much potential in the 35-acre expanse that dates to the 1880s and was once a symbol of municipal pride, as well as a setting for Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton movies and for a stunt in which escape artist Harry Houdini jumped into the lake in chains.

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But the history is checkered and the beauty is blemished. Blight runs through the park and bleeds into surrounding streets, with homeless encampments in every direction. Similar issues run deep in other parts of Los Angeles, but the Westlake neighborhood is also burdened by gang activity and a fentanyl crisis on vivid public display.

I asked Beasley if he thought the park could be rescued.

“Yes,” he said. “But it’s going to take a lot of work.”

Several times in the past few decades, when park conditions deteriorated, restoration efforts were launched by assorted teams of residents, merchants, public officials, law enforcement agencies and nonprofit saviors.

Most recently, early in 2022, the park reopened after a $1.5-million makeover. Then-City Councilman Gil Cedillo called it “the front yard and back yard of so many families” and proclaimed, “I am proud to reopen MacArthur Park Lakeside to make it clean, safe and secure.”

But in a recurrence of a long-established cycle, in which the park is saved and then lost again, those improvements didn’t hold. Clean, safe and secure gave way to more homelessness, crime and drug activity over the next year.

That was the case in the 1980s, when Adolfo Nodal, who ran the Otis Art Institute in Westlake, helped organize public art projects, a town watch program and a neighborhood council that successfully lobbied the city for better lighting and other services.

Rescue workers have saved many from drug overdoses at MacArthur Park.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

“We populated the park with families that wanted to be involved with positive things,” says Nodal, whose book “How the Arts Made A Difference” documented the transformation.

But those gains were erased by the rising crack epidemic that took root, and once again, MacArthur Park was lost to the people who needed it most.

“No other place in Los Angeles thrummed with its subversive energy or labored under the weight of so much trauma,” Jesse Katz wrote of MacArthur Park in his critically acclaimed book “The Rent Collectors,” which chronicles the neighborhood’s violent gang wars, shakedowns of vendors, and the daily struggles of a mostly Central American population that has lived for decades with both hope and despair.

But there is, in one of the many reclamation projects of years past, a possible blueprint for how to lift up the park again.

It happened in 2003, involving a police captain, a civil rights attorney, a councilman, a deli owner and a tamale maker, among others. And it all began after a brash East Coast transplant named Bill Bratton became chief of the LAPD and couldn’t believe the state of MacArthur Park.

Bratton grabbed a downtown L.A. captain named Charlie Beck, who would succeed Bratton as chief in 2009, and transferred him to the Rampart Division in Westlake — a division rocked in the 1990s by one of the biggest LAPD corruption scandals in history. Beck asked Bratton if he had a particular agenda in mind, and the chief’s response was crystal clear:

“Clean up the f— park.”

Former LAPD Chief Charlie Beck, pictured in 2011, was tasked with cleaning up MacArthur Park. At left, then-Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa.

(Los Angeles Times)

Beck had worked the same neighborhood in the 1970s as a rookie, and became convinced years later as he rose through the ranks that the LAPD needed to embrace a policing model centered on building community partnerships. He walked the grounds at MacArthur Park, took notes, and was convinced the park couldn’t be rescued “with just muscle alone.”

“The lighting was not working,” Beck recalled. “All the landscaping was gone. The boathouse was a mess. The bandstand was boarded up.”

He reached out to the recreation and parks department, found a donor to pay for a surveillance camera on a nearby building, put up signs listing forbidden activities, stepped up foot beats, cracked down on the drug-dealing hot spots, recruited the U.S. Forestry Department to trim trees, brought in gang interventionists who joined in a peace march around the park, and confiscated stolen property, including shopping carts, and stored it in the abandoned boathouse.

A man walks with his belongings in a shopping cart across the street from Langer’s Deli near MacArthur Park in August.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

Beck began making regular visits to Langer’s Deli and Mama’s Tamales, which had windows on the park, and checked with owners Norm Langer and Sandi Romero on neighborhood developments, grievances and strategies.

“A lot of times I’d just go there and look out at the park while I drank coffee or had a meeting with somebody, and I’d relay back to the foot beats what I saw,” said Beck.

Romero, who hosted neighborhood meetings, recruited local clergy to the cause, and helped park vendors threatened by gang members, orchestrated weekend festivals that included singers, dancers and puppet masters.

“More families were beginning to use the park,” Romero said.

Gang members didn’t like what was happening, she said, and occasionally came by her cafe to make it known.

“I just stood my ground and said, ‘You guys need to move your stuff somewhere else. This is going to be a family park again, and you can’t be here.’”

Ed Reyes, the City Council rep in Westlake at the time, says nonprofit service groups such as Carecen and El Rescate were key in helping address the underlying socioeconomic issues. He wanted to make sure not to simply push problems into new neighborhoods without addressing root causes.

Reyes said his staff members and others “had to drill down and go into depth,” whether they were taking on neighborhood slumlords or prevailing upon grandmothers and parents to reel in sons who “were creating all this havoc out there.”

In less than a year, 35 lost acres had been recovered and turned back into a park. Beck arranged for the lake to be stocked with fish and invited neighborhood kids to a fishing derby.

“The LAPD led a transformation of MacArthur Park from a crime bazaar into a picnic site,” said Connie Rice, a civil rights attorney who partnered with Bratton on police reforms and monitored Beck’s efforts to clean up MacArthur Park.

“You have to do the whole megillah” when the crisis is as deep as it was, Rice said, because no single strategy can be effective. You have to address “the entire ecosystem” of causes and conditions.

And you have to keep at it, especially in a city notable for its lack of follow-through in addressing major problems and a neighborhood largely made up poor undocumented immigrants who struggle for survival while trying to avoid run-ins with law enforcement and gangs.

A civil rights attorney believes MacArthur Park can be rescued again, with the right approach. “Anybody can lead it, but it takes a sustained effort,” Connie Rice said.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Despite all the good work that was done in 2003, Beck eventually moved on, Romero became ill and stepped away from the park project, and gradually, the troubles returned.

Rice recently saw the park and thought, “Oh, jeez, it looks even worse than when we started out.” But she believes it can be rescued again, with the right approach.

“Anybody can lead it, but it takes a sustained effort,” she said.

It might be harder today than it was in 2003, given the fentanyl epidemic, which has turned the park and its environs into an outdoor museum of overdose horrors. Some small steps have been taken by Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez and others, but the suffering neighborhood needs a massive infusion of rehab services, more medical intervention, city and county collaboration and housing and social services of every type, along with the kind of law enforcement initiative launched by Beck in 2003.

But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.

Reyes told me that when he first met with Bratton in the park two decades ago, he pointed out the drug dealers and people shooting up, but also the families throwing down blankets on the lawn.

“This contrast, this conflict, this clash of lives where you have young working families just trying to breathe in the air and have some form of relief, and next to them, you have people in a downward spiral — I wanted him to see that,” Reyes said.

I was thinking about that idea during my stroll through the park, where a children’s playground has been fenced off for months after being damaged in a fire.

It’s a sad scene that stands as a symbol of municipal surrender.

And it’s the place where Mayor Karen Bass, Councilmember Hernandez, and incoming LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell should meet, learn from what’s worked in the past, and craft a plan that works for today.

steve.lopez@latimes.com