panoramic view of augustus hawkins park

Panorama

Thomas Guide page 674 F-5

The Augustus F. Hawkins Natural Park is widely touted as an urban greening success story. For almost a century, the site, at the corner of Slauson and Compton Avenues in a heavily industrialized corridor, was a DWP pipe storage yard. A coalition of local government and the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, and significant input from the surrounding community resulted in this “naturalized” environment.

The main lawn of the park is surrounded by small hills covered in native scrub, with paved paths offset by dirt trails. A mountain stream-in-miniature begins at a wind-powered spillway at the top of one hill and trickles down through a rocky watercourse shaded by trees. Hawkins Natural Park is a scaled down version of the Santa Monica Mountains, and indeed, the public programming at the park reinforces that at every opportunity. The Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority (MRCA, a subsidiary of the SMMC) is the park’s steward, and provides free buses on the weekends to take resident children to the Santa Monica Mountains. On site, the park hosts a Junior Ranger program and a visitor center (after all, what’s a state park without one) which contains exhibits about wilderness rather than urban wildlife.

Directions: Blue Line to Slauson; walk three blocks west to the park. Or, 110 to Slauson exit, head east on Slauson. There is parking inside the park gates.

Contact info: Santa Monica Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority: 323-585-3205 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              323-585-3205      end_of_the_skype_highlighting

site plan of the park (image credit: Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy)

public art at every turn: mosiacs of animals cover curved benches, one of many artworks including designed seating areas, historical markers, and decorative ironwork

a windmill pumps water through a spillway, under the path, and into a stream that runs through the park

the stream and wetlands area is "naturalized," landscaped with river stones and native plants

wooden planters hold the community and demonstration garden. the Evan B. Frankel Visitor Center is in the background.

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the confluence today (photo by catherine hollis)

Thomas Guide page 594 J-6

Welcome to one of the ugliest, most devastated spots on the Los Angeles River – that is, if you can find it. The confluence of the river and the Arroyo Seco can take some effort to locate – three separate tries, in my case – amid a hellscape of train tracks, freeways and overpasses, fences, truck-parking lots, homeless encampments, human feces, and trash. This spot is where L.A. was founded. It’s the center of the L.A. River watershed. And it looks like a Blade Runner set that got torn down and then put back together wrong. Right now, this spot is a testament to the longstanding erasure of community, nature, and history in Los Angeles.

You have to do more than squint to imagine the future Confluence Park here – you need special glasses, almost – but this is arguably the most logical site for a major city park in L.A. The project has drawn only a fraction as much publicity as the two other big future riverside central L.A. parks – the Cornfield and Taylor Yard – but its location and history should make it a crown jewel in the ambitious overall plans to use the restoration of L.A.’s 51-mile river to restore some community, nature, and memory to Los Angeles.

No matter that so many Angelenos still can’t find the L.A. River at all, much less this site. The state Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, which will oversee the park’s creation, purchased the first half acre, a current parking lot, in March. Compared to the Cornfield and Taylor Yard, the land acquisition here should be much easier, since much of the land is already publicly owned by the City of L.A., the County, and Caltrans, and adjacent private chunks are not in the hands of L.A.’s major real estate developers – which explains in part the scarcer publicity. Also, rather than acquiring the acreage in one dramatic swoop, the state plans to purchase and develop it piece by piece.

Government does not always move fast. The Conservancy plans to de-parking-lot and green up the new half acre this year, and to develop this first piece fully in the next 3 to 5 years. As the state acquires more land (the next 10 to 15 years? 20 years?), this aggregate of parks crisscrossed by the several major roads through the area should include native-plant landscaping, walking paths, a bicycle station, public art, a visitor center, and exhibits on the nature and history of L.A. – as well as paths to the new River Center, which houses the Conservancy as well as community and nonprofit groups and features exhibits, gardens, and parks.

The funding and political will to restore the river will have to keep flowing. But envision – and use the special glasses if you must – the proposed (and in-progress) 51-mile L.A. River Greenway as the backbone for a county-wide network of greenways and parks. Confluence Park is at the center of it all. It’s the Nexus. It’s the meeting point for bikeways planned to Pasadena, to the Valley, and to downtown and into South L.A. The Gold Line, soon to connect Downtown and Pasadena, will stop right here. The park connects up to the Taylor Yard and down to the Cornfield parks, which themselves connect to Elysian and Griffith Parks and to El Pueblo – and would be an essential stop in the envisioned historic district in the central part of the city. While it sits at the center of a regional network, the park would also provide green and community space locally to lower-income, green-starved, long-underserved neighborhoods. The park should incorporate watershed management features, including wetlands restoration and a potential partial naturalization of the river’s walls, that are essential regionally to flood control, water and air quality, water supplies, and wildlife habitat. And it commits the founding of L.A., and the centrality of the L.A. River to L.A. and its history, to civic memory.

You don’t exactly have to run out to see the Confluence of old, since the state does often seem to operate on geological time. But it’s worth seeing – if you can find it. It is at once one of the most hopeless and hopeful spots in L.A.

plan for confluence park (image credit: Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy)

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the community planning process

Thomas Guide page 671 H-1

The narrative of lost public life and public space is prevalent throughout Los Angeles. It may be valid to say that public space has largely been commodified and rarely becomes truly public in that some type of exclusion must occur for these spaces to be inhabited. Within the city proper, however, parkland is more limited and public landscapes are programmatically and ideologically loaded. In certain cases, public parks become more than areas of recreation. The community park becomes the public center, the meeting place, or the town hall.

Virginia Avenue Park, in the Pico Neighborhood of Santa Monica, is a place that has become a center of its community. While Santa Monica is widely regarded as an affluent beach community, the residents of the Pico Neighborhood talk openly about struggling to make ends meet and the challenges of youth violence. It was during the process of redesigning and expanding the park that these challenges crossed from individual concerns to community reality.

As part of the overall park project coordinated by Koning Eizenberg Architecture, I led a youth-involvement workshop for the design of a youth center. In the workshop the youths actively participated in the transformation of a former plastics warehouse into their own vision for the new facility. The workshop taught the teens modeling techniques, presentation strategies; collected information from other teens through surveys, internet research, and public forums; and studied other youth-targeted design (buildings as well as Nike sneakers and hip hop culture). Working with the youth, a strategy was developed to use simple building techniques, re-use found or off-the-shelf building components, foster both privacy and safety, and allow them to display a portion of the activity at the center.

During this process, the community was struck by a violent act. A teenage girl committed suicide. Her house was across from the park. She was an active member of the park community, and despite her age, was a strong advocate for the Pico Neighborhood.

On most Wednesday afternoons when I would show up, I would instantly see Julio. Julio was always around the park. He would typically wave and talk about what he was up to. I never had to ask. Simon was always in the lobby waiting for a program to start. He would often scold me for being late. There were others – a few that often played soccer, another group of basketballers, some mothers with young children, and some others just hanging out.

This day was different. A certain routine was disrupted. There were more people and different people there. There were psychologists from a local hospital, clergy from local churches, teachers, youth leaders, parents and youth. For a little while a community had a collective agenda, collective concerns and a collective voice. Virginia Avenue Park was instantly transformed into a crisis management facility and became the place where the public turned for support. The invisible dependence on the park was now showing itself. The park was completely different although it wasn’t because of the physical structures or landscapes. The people were different.

We contemplated canceling our session that day. However, the kids depend on the park, depend on the staff, and depend on the programs as a structure in their lives. It was decided to still meet, although as an architect, I thought it would not feel right to discuss a building. Despite the unusual atmosphere at the park, the teens arrived for the architecture workshop anyway. Some wanted to talk about design. It seemed that architecture was a way to avoid the very present issue of their lost friend and neighbor. Some were annoyed that people weren’t talking about her. Some thought it was “stupid” to talk about her.

virginia avenue park (image credit: Koning Eizenberg Architecture)

We found a middle ground.

We started discussing how the future youth center would function on a day like today. We invited the counselors to participate. They talked about the kind of role they could play and the kinds of discussions they could facilitate. As we talked about a hypothetical situation, which was in reality the very present situation, conversation began to flow quickly to the things that they were going through emotionally.

For me, the architect, it was good to see the other side of the adolescence paradox. A week before they were shunning supervision, independent, confident to an extreme degree. A week before adults didn’t understand them and would reject out of hand assistance offered by adults. This week the fragility was apparent. For our youth center this was the architectural challenge. How can a place, or landscape, or building foster an environment of security and safety while also cultivating an atmosphere of freedom? On this day, the park was that place.

The park functions largely in the context of an understood system of equipment, surfaces, and lines. Basketball works with stripes, pavement, and hoops on sticks. Soccer operates on turf and perhaps garbage cans to shoot at. Swings and slides and monkey bars dictate a very specific and visible use. Architects often talk about space in the context of the underlying, unseen patterns of movement. In design, it is difficult sometimes to communicate the presence of these patterns. Recently, while at Schouwburg Plein, I was sitting on one of the benches watching some kids play Frisbee. On one throw, the guy on the receiving end ran to his left to make a catch. He stopped short with both feet together and reached out to grab the Frisbee as his body lunged diagonally. He made the catch looking like an NFL wide receiver at the sideline. The line that had meaning to this game was a linear shift in the patterned wood decking of the plaza. These patterns suggested a set of specific rules; any system will be appropriated in unforeseen ways by a creative public.

In the event of a community crisis, an unseen layer of this public park revealed itself like an overlooked line separating patterns of wood. There were many lines present and only some of them were on display at that moment. The youth center hopes to be a little bit like this park in that it was meant to house a set of articulated functions as well as a set of discreet needs. Some of those needs might not be predictable. Maybe it’s a little less like a building per se and more of an apparatus of sorts, a spot that can be appropriated by the public.

youth center as designed in workshops

Case studies documenting the privatization of what was once public space though methods such as street barricades, fortification, security systems, etc.

Building Paranoia: The Proliferation of Interdictory Space and the Erosion of Spatial Justice
Forum Publication #11, 1994
By Steven Flusty
Forward by John Kaliski
Designed by Sheridan Lowry and Nicholas Lowie
Photography by Benny Chan, Steven Flusty and Patrick Ramsey of the Labor/Community Strategy Center

This publication has been funded in part by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.