A couple of weeks ago, I took a walk at Magic Johnson Park, a large park in the Willowbrook neighborhood of South Los Angeles. The Los Angeles County Parks and Recreation Department describes it so: “This 104-acre recreation area, named after basketball Hall of Famer, Earvin ‘Magic’ Johnson, is ideal for outdoor activities such as family or corporate gatherings, festivals and large sports activities. The focal points of the park are the beautiful fishing lakes, open green space and a popular walking path.”
For those thinking about visiting the park, I offer a more sincere description: “This 104-acre street gang sanctuary and former ExxonMobil petroleum contamination site is ideal for broad daylight robberies and corporate gatherings for businesses undergoing Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The focal points are the trash-filled ponds, the patchy grass, and a popular trail of goose droppings.”
My walk through Magic Johnson Park brought me back to my childhood, when I played there often. Between dodging bullets (at least four instances that I remember) and pesky pocket-checking gang members, we had some good times.
The state of Magic Johnson Park is the norm, not the exception in LA and many parts of Southern California. Athens Park, Ted Watkins Memorial Park, Franklin D. Roosevelt Park, Jesse Owens Park, MacArthur Park and the list goes on. All of these parks have been known to their communities for their criminal activity and for those of us who grew up playing at these parks, there was never a hint that life could be otherwise.
We had no idea that it’s not the case that filthy and dangerous parks are the best we could hope for and it wasn’t a thought for us that this was the result of mismanagement and poor leadership.
All it takes is a trip to Polliwog Park in Manhattan Beach or Valley Park in Hermosa Beach to see that it’s possible to have clean spaces where children can play carelessly without them needing to keep an eye on any suspicious individuals. Travel the country, and you’ll quickly learn that there is something wrong with recreation areas here. Frankly, after experiencing neighborhood parks in other parts of the country, I find many LA parks disgusting and entirely unsuitable for children.
Kids in our neighborhoods are forced to play next to overdoses and piles of garbage all while being harassed by criminals. These are formative years, when children in LA learn about the tricks to surviving a scrimmage match.
City leaders tout the opening of parks and green spaces as investments into our communities and Magic Johnson Park itself recently underwent an $80 million renovation. These improvements amount to little more than empty symbolic gestures when our parks immediately revert to looking like cesspools.
It’s easy to wonder why it’s so difficult in Southern California to keep our parks safe and clean. Clearly, the poverty of neighborhoods directly tracks the expected cleanliness of their parks. It seems though that the focus is often placed on expanding access to recreation areas, perhaps at the expense of maintaining what we already have.
The Trust for Public Land releases a yearly ranking of major cities in the US based on their residents’ access to public recreation areas – the city of Los Angeles ranks an embarrassing 90th, highlighting that access is undoubtedly a concern. Both LA city and county needs assessments estimate local parks are in need of billions of dollars in funding for upgrades and catching up on deferred maintenance.
In an ideal world, we would have greater access to parks while ensuring that they are kept clean and free of crime. As it stands though, park maintenance does not appear to have improved much over the years – restrooms at Magic Johnson Park are better suited for farm animals, meaning that it hasn’t been given the priority that it deserves.
Apart from children having to play in dangerous places, their minds are being molded for adulthood by their environment. Their surrounding conditions are what they are supposed to be, at least to them. People are supposed to be using drugs and joining gangs and garbage is supposed to be scattered on the ground rather than placed in bins.
Despite living in the county with the highest GDP in the country (LA County), within the most wealthy nation on Earth, our leaders are unable to provide our children with clean and safe parks for them to thrive in.
As much as local leaders may be enticed to focus on the admittedly radical happenings in the nation’s capital, they must not forget that they are failing their local residents in the most fundamental sense. A government that cannot provide safe places for kids to play in has failed to fulfill its easiest promise within our social contract.
Rafael Perez is a columnist for the Southern California News Group. You can reach him at rafaelperezocregister@gmail.com.