Parks Los Angeles

A private swimming club's use of most swimming lanes at the city's popular Westwood Recreation Center during peak hours has angered some recreational swimmers and led city officials to consider restricting such arrangements. City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, whose district includes Westwood, described the club's arrangement as "outrageous." He said he supports a proposal by the city's Recreation and Parks Department that would severely restrict private groups using pools throughout the city.

At dawn, MacArthur Park belongs to the scavengers. First light brings hundreds of robins, gulls and blackbirds, swarming over the park grounds for scraps of sustenance. Trudging among them are dozens of human companions. Like the birds, the humans move with their heads lowered, scouring the earth. They are crack addicts and dealers, methodically searching for packets of rock cocaine dropped hours earlier during nightly police sweeps of the park.

Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan on Wednesday announced the addition of four more communities to the city's Targeted Neighborhood Initiative program. Wilmington and the San Fernando Valley communities of Pacoima/Lake View Terrace, Van Nuys and Valley Glen will receive $3 million each over four years to spend on community improvements proposed by residents. The city started the Targeted Neighborhood Initiative program in 1997 with 12 communities awarded grants.

It's a place where English is a second language and soccer is the name of the game. Men forge their way onto the dewy grass, stretching their tight muscles and talking strategy. Bleary-eyed kids pile out of the family car looking for shade and the guy who sells candy. Wives, mothers or girlfriends tag along, lugging coolers heavy with food and drink, lawn chairs and baby carriages. Then, promptly at 8 a.m.

Barbara Kauffman sets a brisk pace in the early morning heat, as she leads the usual Sunday nature hike in Chatsworth's 670-acre Santa Susana Mountain Park. She points out rare red and orange monkey flowers and tells of encounters with coyotes and rattlesnakes in her several years of combing the picturesque rocky hills that separate the northwest San Fernando Valley from Simi Valley. "It's kind of a last frontier," she says.

Fourteen-year-old Choem Ngiam felt a tug on his fishing pole as he reeled in his line. "I got one! I got one!" he shouted to his friends standing beside him. He quickly drew in the line so the fish couldn't escape. When his friends saw Choem's catch, they laughed. It was only a baby trout, a measly 3 inches long. Choem tossed the fish back into the calm waters of the lake and then quickly cast his line again, hoping for better luck.

A purple carillon tower rises 125 feet above Hill Street, with a big pink globe dangling from its pinnacle. Canary yellow walls embrace an open-air cafe and citrus trees poke up from a rose-colored walkway. A waterfall cascades into a fountain that simulates tidal ebbs and flows. Coming upon those features in Downtown Los Angeles, even longtime residents may be disoriented.

Los Angeles' vast park system--long a source of free recreational space for a city of 3.5 million citizens--is increasingly being viewed as City Hall's new source of funding. Mayor Richard Riordan, desperate for money to expand the police force, has instructed recreation officials to make the parks home to more moneymaking concessions such as water slides, batting cages and miniature golf courses. He also wants them to squeeze more money from 56 existing concessions.

Hidden behind a chain-link fence overgrown with juniper in Westwood is a shrine that is rich with American history and the final resting place of more than 81,000 veterans from the Civil War through Vietnam. Many drivers passing by on Wilshire Boulevard probably don't know the Los Angeles National Cemetery exists, but under a plan drafted by a group of veterans and neighbors, the area around the cemetery would become a memorial parkway as well as an oasis of open space on the crowded Westside.

When residents of a neighborhood near USC decided to build a park, they enlisted the help of school architects, the city Department of Recreation and Parks--and the local street gang. To avoid creating a park only to have it taken over by gang violence, residents in the West Adams district went to the Harpys gang's hangouts, homes and friends' homes, pleading with members to plan the park together. "If you exclude the gangbangers, it's defeating the purpose.