In a town built on make-believe, Hollywood leaders are hoping to pull off the greatest feat yet: creating a public park out of thin air.
Civic and business organizers want to turn a half-mile portion of the Hollywood Freeway into a tunnel and construct a 24-acre greenbelt swath from Bronson Avenue to Wilton Place on top.
Those proposing what they call Hollywood Central Park will reveal preliminary details tonight when leaders of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce and the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency meet with local business executives in an effort to raise $120,000 for a project feasibility study.
When the study is completed, local leaders say, they will be able to seek federal funding for the estimated $209 million that the freeway retrofit and park construction could cost.
Backers say other densely populated U.S. cities have undertaken similar projects to carve out hard-to-find recreation space.
They say the portion of the freeway that passes beneath Sunset and Hollywood boulevards near the heart of Hollywood is perfect for what is known as a "freeway cap." Traffic lanes there are below the level of neighborhoods on both sides.
Although urban planners in the past informally discussed a Hollywood tunnel, the current proposal got its start by accident at last year's Hollywood Christmas Parade when a Hollywood Chamber of Commerce director drove over the freeway on his way home.
"I was bemoaning the fact that the freeway cut a giant scar through Hollywood as I crossed over it on Hollywood Boulevard," board member Don Scott recalled Tuesday. "Over Christmas I did some research on the Internet and came up with a proposal."
Scott, an investment banker who lives in Pacific Palisades, discovered that similar freeway-spanning parks have been built in Seattle; Cincinnati; Washington, D.C.; Boston; Phoenix; and Hartford, Conn. Charlotte, N.C., is designing one. Locally, a small park extends over the 210 Freeway in La Canada-Flintridge.
Other chamber leaders were quick to embrace Scott's idea.
"We have a 150-acre park deficit in Hollywood," said architect Ed Hunt, a parks supporter who for years has advocated using freeway airspace. "Taxpayers own it. Caltrans is the custodian," Hunt said.
In recent weeks the chamber proposal has won support from the Southern California Assn. of Governments (which is considering it as a possible demonstration project), four Hollywood-area neighborhood councils, the redevelopment agency and Los Angeles City Councilmen Tom LaBonge and Eric Garcetti, who represent Hollywood.
