Wilshire Highlands

Dreaming of Downtown’s Central Park

DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES - New York has Central Park. In Chicago, there’s Millennium Park. San Francisco boasts Golden Gate Park and the Presidio.

Then there’s greater Los Angeles, and while the region has some 75 miles of coastline and beloved open spaces such as Griffith Park, the city’s center lacks the kind of iconic green space that urban dwellers flock to and visitors come to associate with their stay.

A coalition of planners, urban designers and government agencies are hoping that changes with the latest revival of a proposal that seems audacious in scope: a plan to cap a segment of the Hollywood (101) Freeway that runs through Downtown, and build a park over the area where thousands of cars speed by every hour.

It is clearly a mammoth undertaking.

“The last time we’ve done something as grand as this was building Bunker Hill,” said Vaughan Davies, director of urban design with AECOM, a planning and engineering firm working on the project.

A 101 park plan dates back to the mid-1990s, when Nick Patsaouras pushed the proposal. The current version, dubbed Park 101, was formulated in 2008 by a group of international student interns working with AECOM staff. Their vision, which will get a public airing at a Downtown meeting this week, addresses the eight-lane road that slashes through Downtown, severing the Civic Center from Chinatown, El Pueblo and Union Station.

The proposed park would stretch from Grand Avenue to the Los Angeles River; its heart would cover the quarter-mile trench that sits roughly between Grand Avenue and Alameda Street. Capping the freeway, officials say, would create pedestrian friendly linkages among various government buildings. It would also convert some 100 acres currently covered in freeways or parking lots into green space, Davies said.

Funding Puzzle

Though Park 101 has popular support, with the California Department of Transportation, the city Planning Department and the Southern California Association of Governments among those endorsing the basic idea, it remains little more than a vision at this point.

A meeting on Thursday, May 13, at the Caltrans headquarters will represent the first step in a public approval and entitlement process, though Davies acknowledges that the grand vision put together by AECOM will likely be pared down into a more feasible undertaking. He said the entitlement process could take five years.

The budget is not set. In 2008, the student project pegged the cost at about $800 million, but that included elements beyond the main thrust of the cap and the park, such as extra greening of adjacent streets, said Christine Safriet, senior economics associate with AECOM.

Funding sources are also unclear, though Davies said the project will pursue everything from Measure R money, which voters approved in 2009 to support various transportation projects, to federal grant dollars and private investment.

Perhaps the most viable economic engine for the project, said Davies, stems from the so-called Alameda District Plan. Approved by the city in 1996, it entitled some 11 million square feet of space for commercial and residential development in the area east and north of Union Station.

Davies said project stakeholders will pursue a change in the plan so that its boundaries would stretch further west, encompassing the proposed Park 101 project area in order to encourage various kinds of new development. Any future projects could then be assessed a tax that could help fund the park, he said.

If the project ever gets off the ground, it will likely rise in phases. The first piece would likely center around El Pueblo and Union Station, making a more pedestrian friendly walkway between the two landmarks, and capping the segment of the freeway between Main and Los Angeles streets, Davies said.

The May 13 meeting will take place from 4-6 p.m. at the Caltrans District 7 headquarters, 200 S. Main St. More information is at dot.ca.gov.

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