Running the Parks

As I've made my way up and down parks owned by the City of Los Angeles from the South Bay to the Valley, the one thing I like to do in all of them:  run.

Maybe it was Forrest Gump, maybe it's just habit, maybe it's the easiest way (for me) to feel like an athlete, but whatever it is, that's what I do when I'm not supposed to be writing a proposal, article, or thesis/dissertation.

When I lived in Silver Lake, I would lap Bellevue Park's dirt track over and over.

When I moved with my folks to the Valley, I would run the concrete perimeter sidewalk surrounding Panorama City Recreation Center.

Nowadays, you can find me every other day running either the perimeter or the grass at Banning Park in Wilmington.

But none of them compare to the one park I like in particular for running: the Sherman Oaks park.

Why? 

Because of its sign and map indicating the distance of each running trail.

That's it.

I do use gmap-pedometer to see how much each of my runs (and bikes) are, but having the sign affirming the distance would be a permanent symbol for everyone to know how much is enough for them.

I think something as easy as that signage would create a lot more motivation, and make people perceive a space as "runnable."  You'd probably see a spike of more people outside running, which I wish I could confirm and observe, but at the moment can only propose, till a person or group of people with more clout than me make it happen.

Central Long Beach and those interested in "Building Healthy Communities", perhaps that's something to think about.

CicLAvia Needs to Happen at Night

Great that it happened just because it created a public space for LA. And it was good to see the work of a few good friends come to fruition.

More than I can say about myself. I give credit to those that actually make something like this, with no precedent here, happen. That took some amount of elbow-pulling, twisting, and different kinds of contortion.

CicLAvia is overwhelmingly a space that absolutely needs to happen, frequently. I think it's any piece of public space is a great infrastructure for community-building.

However, I want to propose an add-on to CicLAvia that I think could go a long way in really building up the community. Something that could help drop crime even more, but more importantly something that attempts to reach da yutes of LA, particularly the youth of color. And it's real simple:

CicLAvia needs to happen at night.

Somewhat in the same vein as the Midnight Ridazz, and Critical Mass rides. However, I don't think it should be dominated as much by bicyclists.

Ala my buddy Jane Jacobs, I'm thinking of a CicLAvia that includes more pedestrians, more points of engagement for people, at night, when there is very little safe public space at all.

I'm thinking of the open fiesta that is the Central Avenue Jazz Festival. I'm thinking the claiming of spaces by various organizations in Park(ing) Day LA. I'm thinking the social scene of the Art Walk for the 20 somethings. I'm also thinking very prominently about Antonio Villaraigosa's Saturday Night Lights anti-gang program for youth and their families.

Why does CicLAvia need to happen at night?

Well, I'm quite tired of the nights of LA being reserved for adults with money. The dance club, the nightclubs, the bars, the gourmet food trucks, the frozen sugar injections, movies, bowling alley, hoity toity museums.

What do we do in those night-time spaces in LA? Talk. Drink. Eat. Smoke.

Lots of privatized, not really all that active activities.

Meanwhile, past 10 PM public parks are closed. This means that the kids who were just kicking it and skateboarding, must kick push to another place.

Public libraries shut down at 6. This means that the homeless people at Central Library gotta get the fuck out of there and go to some shelter or the street corner outside of Busby's. Or better yet in front of your local 7-11, a space he occupies like a void, where you can just learn how to filter the individual's humanity out of your talking, eating, drinking, smoking level of consciousness.

Places of free, spontaneous community convergence during the day time are suddenly dark, desolate potential crime spaces.

Our nights in LA are monopolized by private spaces. The spots of activity are suddenly concentrated into privatized, insular spaces. Whether it's the Standard downtown or Suehiro in the latenight, your entrance and access to those spaces, establishments are mediated only by money (or favors) if you have any to exchange.

The key to your entrance anywhere is having money (or favors) to exchange. A lot of youth, particularly the colored ones whether you're in Central Los Angeles, South Los Angeles, Van Nuys and above, East Los, (me too) don't have a lot of money to exchange.

There are very few spaces in LA at night that are free. There's the Tuesday Night Cafe, the Zocalo and ALOUD public lectures, events at universities and colleges, and Art Walk. Each cool in their own right, but all infrequent, and random, usually targeted towards adults, and particular kinds of adults at that. The events at night are either for the 20-30 something in the case of the open mics and the artsy stuff, or if it's some kind of public lecture it's for white people old enough to excrete dust particles when they are ready to deposit their #2's.

A downtown LA at night with no Artwalk or other big event features closed doors, gates, homeless and "sketchy" individuals.

So let's put this altogether:

• There isn't much public space in Los Angeles in general, and even fewer at night with the closure of parks and libraries.
• Activities are very limited, and not very active, and Americans are fat fucking bastards.
• Private space overwhelmingly monopolizes and characterizes LA at night; it's a purely adult, privatized, disconnected mass of dystopia of borders and isolation, breeding grounds for "deviance."
• Youth don't have a lot of money and don't have many places to go at night.

CicLAvia at night could be something to tackle these various problems. Preventative, and yet absolutely engaging and enthralling social infrastructure. An open space at night created by people and a free community event that could encourage youths to get out, be cool, be safe in a safe space.

The whole reason I even propose the night is for the youths, particularly the "latchkey" ones. The ones that are out and about after after-school hours.

I think outreach could be done to those youth intervention programs, and hell include the high school clubs, and whatever else. The great thing about putting this outreach in the great mass that is CicLAvia is that the event doesn't have to center around just that or them. They're just in with the rest of Angelenos who want to enjoy their streets and public spaces at the time of day when were culturally expected to be in exclusively private spaces.

As much as crime has been falling, crime could fall even more. CicLAvia on a Sunday morning needed tons of police; the police handle most incidents at night. They police will be out there already and the kids and the cameras so it's a shared visibility space. If you took a panopticonish view, it would be like a midnight nightwatch of streets, but done with fun and a lot more community involvement.

And that's where Mayor Villaraigosa's Saturday Night Lights program catches on. He began his Saturday Night Lights program last summer as an anti-gang program. His program kept parks open till late. Result, 2009 was the safest summer since 1967.

Except his program was concentrated exclusively at parks.

I wonder how much more crime could be reduced if he had the streets as well as the parks for this.

The CicLAvia at night would be a way for masses of different people to reclaim their streets at the time of day when it isn't expected to be claimed.

What I Didn't See at Park(ing) Day LA

The topic of Park(ing) Day in Los Angeles has been organized, blogged, and pictured to death by a circle of people who already seem to know each other. There are 70 posts in my google reader (which include Park(ing) Days in other metropolitan areas in the US). The crudest offenders: Streetsblog LA, Blogdowntown, LAist, and Curbed LA making sure to give me every single camera angle of every Park(ing) space.

No doubt that an event like this sorely, achingly needs exposure, but damn, multiple updates in one day is way too much for me.

It reminded me of how NBC spent about 79 hours covering some random 5.4 earthquake we had a few months ago, showing us videos, images, countless people on the street interviews, of "the experience."...of what ended up being a minor event with little damage and no one dead (damn!)

But, this is Parking Day, and I could understand people's enthusiasm bleeding over into quick and easy blog posts.

A very nice photo stream from Damien Newton at Streetsblog covering the occurrences at LACC/the Bicycle District/East Hollywood/my old neighborhood.

The Militant Angeleno supplemented his experience with a hilarious rant on Neighborhood Council old people.

CurbedLA's Dakota talking about the lack of Park(ing) spaces in the Valley, which I obviously agreed with, and headed down from the nothingness car-tropolis that is called the valley.

Per my actual first-hand, -foot, and -mind, experience...

I only went to Downtown LA, figuring that if I was going to take a car, I might as well be at the spot where most of it was happening. Like I always do when I head downtown, I plopped my car in the neighborhood hugging Echo Park, probably away a parking space from a resident. I'm a hypocrite and whatnot. Park(ing) Day and using all this fuel and polluting the environment through driving, I feel like if I told anyone that, they would've rounded up a mob and nailed me to a cross...mind you, a "green" cross complete with biodegradable nails.

I'll say more about my tendency to drive places later in a separate post.

Parking Day for me was about the "Park", the people-oriented public space, and the people, not so much the anti-automobile, ultra-pro transit and biking Park-ing. So I looked forward to seeing the different exhibits, how they used their "public space", and how they engaged people. I think it was as much a public awareness/outreach event as much as it was a artful exhibit.

On my trip downtown, I came, I saw, and I remember:

...the Community Redevelopment Agency of LA with their knitting circle and free juice, which I enjoyed primarily because they were actually quenching my thirst with some Minute Maid cherry limeade.

...the LA County Bicycle Coaltion and their symbolic bicycle rack.

...LAMP from Skid Row at the "Block party" with Coach Ron being the ubiquitous face in my forays into "that" side of downtown, next to the interactive

...EDAW LA, the people who propose turning part of the 101 freeway into a park, and their forest to the periphery of the LA Central Public Library,

...and an architecture firm's exhibit of smoky emissions from a vehicle.

Outside of this network of organizations and usual suspects behind any kind of urban living change, I kept wondering how many common, everyday people walking downtown actually noticed, took in, or even had an opinion about what was happening to their on-street parking spaces.

I gather that most of the folks wandering and working in downtown LA parked within private parking structure lots, so perhaps it didn't affect them in any kind of engagingly emotional, personal way. Families had places to go and probably figured that they weren't really invited to the fun, seeing that the people who organized it didn't look them, besides CRA/LA's Knitting circle.

I was an intentional attendee of Park(ing) Day LA in downtown, but I did not know how to find the different spaces.

While I enjoyed, I still felt like a few things were missing from making it a great outreach/awareness event. It seemed like it should've been funner, and more broadly inclusive.

A few of the things I noticed:

1) There weren't enough families.

Relative to the pictures from concurrent Parking Days in New York, it looks like families are actually participating!

Note the photos of kids playing connect four!

Note the kids on the turf!

Now turn the camera, back to LA: why such a paucity in Los Angeles?

Maybe a combination of:

...downtown being full of "working" people
...there being no real high-traffic parking spaces
...the free public spaces in downtown being inhabited by homeless folks
...luxury loft construction combined with affordable housing demolitions affecting the homeless
...the lack of kid-friendly, happening places downtown. Re: bookstores, playgrounds, music stuff...less trips for families downtown

2) Going off this apparently adult-centered Parking Day, some of the green space was just utterly uninviting.

EDAW LA's space in particular was particularly disengaging.

Yes, greening things, is a theme, but not too much of it that you lose part of the point of why you build a park in an urban setting in the first place.

It's like they aimed to build a fortress of privatized greenery ala the Beverly Hills sidewalks rather than some kind of space that actually looked to include everyone, even a 24-year old brown-ish kid in a Habitat for Humanity shirt and straight-from the Phillippines basketball shorts.

I hope Park 101 wasn't supposed to emblematic of that space.

Greenery talk seems to have infiltrated LA discourse since at least the 70s, and yeah, hope it's not all talk.

But, it was just a one-day thing and overall their idea is nothing that I could knock.

3) It was really hard locating anything until I spotted the parking space with the flags, the cyclist, and the symbolically-polluting vehicle.

Thankfully, they provided a Map for other Parking Day LA events, but even with the map a lot of them were hard to find. Still afterward, I had gotten one of their maps, it still felt like a treasure hunt...I was forcefully, intentionally, frustratedly hunting down these spots.

They needed a lot more noise pollution.

MU-SIC!

There was a saxophonist on Third Street that was playing Mas Que Nada in loop. He would seem to fit the theme of people-oriented public space.

If cost was a concern, maybe just a simple iPod for every single space would've done something. It would've been a cost-effective quick way to draw attention.

4) On the idea of community-building, I would have worked with what was available in the community and on the streets already.

Ala a Historic Filipinotown get-down featuring the Blue Scholars and Bambu, formerly of the hip-hop duo Native Guns, get an ice cream truck, or cart at the block party, get some bacon-rolled hot dogs.

Basically, the party atmosphere liked enough of the "party." An environment where people could actually play. That kind of medium

The basketball court was a real nice touch by LAMP or Ron's organization, but no one was playing with it at the Block Party when I got there. The pool up in the Bicycle district and the Valley would've been pretty cool too. If they brought some kind of swingset, soccer goals, boxing, random art exhibits like they do in Silver Lake, I think the party would've smoked up the block a bit.

But what do I know, I was just a man walking the street.