“This is healthy for everyone . . . It’s going to change our lives.” Vista Hermosa Park opens downtown - Los Angeles Times
By Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
July 20, 2008
In downtown Los Angeles on Saturday there were sights and smells and sounds of a milestone event the concrete urban core had not hosted in more than a century.
Fresh bark. Tinkling water cascading down a rocky slope. California sycamores and coast live oaks, an expansive meadow of velvety green grass and squealing children everywhere — in soccer fields and on slides, clambering atop playground snakes and turtles.
After a decade of political battles over what to do with land once slated for the Belmont Learning Center, a new park has bloomed on top of old oil fields, an earthquake fault and what had become a weed-infested, dusty lot.
Vista Hermosa Park — whose name, Spanish for “beautiful view,” reflects its backdrop of the downtown skyline — was formally opened Saturday by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy as downtown’s first new public park since 1895, giving residents of a city with far less green space than other major urban centers a chance to breathe, relax and play.
The park also represents a triumph for the low-income, largely immigrant community that had pushed for a larger share of public resources, said Councilman Ed Reyes, who represents the area.
“This is very symbolic of how a community can persevere and actually be counted, not just be displaced and thrown away,” Reyes said. . . .
“We made what was a terrible situation into one of the most beautiful things in downtown Los Angeles,” Reyes said.
Armando Gonzalez and his 10-year-old daughter, Pamela, agreed.
Gonzalez, a laundry room supervisor, said the park offered him a place to take his daughter away from TV and video games to smell fresh air and run through the grass. “This is healthy for everyone,” he said. “It’s going to change our lives.”
For Pamela, it already had.
“I can play on the slide and play on the rocks and get on the snake and practice balancing,” she said. “I can touch the water and wade through the waterfall.
“It’s inspiring, because we didn’t really have anyplace to play before,” she said. “Now we do.”
Read the rest of this article in the Los Angeles Times . . .
See images of the Vista Hermosa grand opening on flickr.
