L.A. Times editorial, the Olmsted vision, and the poverty of L.A. parks today
The Los Angeles Times recently editorialized: "Los Angeles is chronically short of park space, a civic failure that generations of leaders have only glancingly addressed. In 1930, the brilliant but ignored Olmsted-Bartholomew plan envisioned a county where every resident enjoyed easy access to beaches, vistas, recreation areas and parks. Today, just 30% or so of Los Angeles’ children live within walking distance of a public place to play, the lowest percentage of any major American city — and the city is growing denser all the time."
The City Project’s core maps include the Olmsted proposal for parks, playgrounds, and beaches for the Los Angeles region, and for doubling beach access, compared to the poverty of parks, schools, and beaches in Los Angeles today, and the levels of child obesity.
In 1930, Olmsted Brothers and Bartholomew Associates proposed a comprehensive and coherent network of parks, playgrounds, schools, beaches, forests, and transportation to promote the social, economic, and environmental vitality of Los Angeles and the health of its people. The Olmsted firm was started by the sons of the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed Central Park in New York City and founded the field of landscape architecture. According to the Olmsted-Bartholomew Report in words that remain true today:
"Continued prosperity [in Los Angeles] will depend on providing needed parks, because, with the growth of a great metropolis here, the absence of parks will make living conditions less and less attractive, less and less wholesome. . . . In so far, therefore, as the people fail to show the understanding, courage, and organizing ability necessary at this crisis, the growth of the Region will tend to strangle itself."
The report proposed the shared use of parks and schools, greening the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers, and doubling public beaches. Implementing the Olmsted vision would have made Los Angeles one of the most beautiful and livable regions in the world. Civic leaders killed the Report because of politics, bureaucracy, and greed in a triumph of private power over public space and social democracy.
