Hollywood Central Park will mark a major milestone in the coming months when its draft environmental impact report (DEIR) is released.
Laurie Goldman, founding president and executive director of Friends of Hollywood Central Park, envisions a day when green space will extend across the freeway. (photo by Jonathan Van Dyke)
The document will come out at the end of spring or at the beginning of summer, and at that time, the public will see the full extent of years of planning, said Laurie Goldman, founding president and executive director of Friends of Hollywood Central Park.
“We’re going to do all the right things,” she said. “We have community support, maybe not 100 percent, but we have community support, city support and state support. I hope [the DEIR] addresses everything and provides the proper mitigations.”
Hollywood Central Park would be a 38-acre cap park — built over, or “capping”, the Hollywood (101) Freeway — stretching between Bronson Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard. It would cost an estimated $1 billion. Proposed amenities for the park would include an amphitheatre, restaurant, café, bike path, sports fields and dog parks — and a lot of open green space, representatives said.
“I can’t look at the freeway now and see a freeway anymore,” Goldman said. “There are the seven bridges over the freeway and we will connect one to the other.”
Seattle built the first freeway cap park in 1976, and there are now 162 in the United States. La Cañada Flintridge has the nearest cap park, the 1.5-acre Memorial Park, where the 210 and 2 freeways meet.
It is unclear, at this point, how the park will be funded. Goldman said it is possible the park will be a private/public partnership. Her nonprofit has been working closely with Caltrans during the EIR process, and she has testimonials from the majority of city, state and national representatives from the area.
“We’ll be starting to raise money as soon as the EIR is out on the street, then I can start figuring out financing,” Goldman said.
She added that the city could consider the area for an Enhanced Infrastructure Financing District.
“What that does is it tries to capture the increased property values back into the park,” she said.
Other options will include reaching out to the state and federal governments for grant funding. The proposed park is located in the Los Angeles Promise Zone, which will allow it greater access to federal funding.
Officials noted that the proposed park area in East Hollywood is starved for open space, and there is an increasing residential population there. Approximately 180,000 people, 40,000 of whom are children, live within one mile of the proposed park. That area has .005 acres of open space per resident versus .012 in Los Angles as a whole, according to city figures. The average medium income in the area is $23,481.
“[The freeway] really separates the two Hollywoods,” said City Councilman Mitch O’Farrell, 13th District. “The park will be built in a place that is badly in need of open space and directly accessible to tens of thousands of Hollywood residents. It’s really a neighborhood park and that’s what really draws me.”
O’Farrell said he is looking forward to the DEIR milestone.
“That is a huge, huge step,” he said. “Without it there can be no project. Then we can talk about real allocation of funding to start building the park. They are further ahead than just the concept phase. It’s getting bigger and louder and growing in support.”
Residents in the area are looking forward to having some of their questions answered by the DEIR, especially related to construction and environmental impacts.
“The construction, no matter how you slice it, will be complex and disruptive,” said Bill Zide, president of the Hollywood Studio District Neighborhood Council. “I think there are some great things about it and there are some things to be wary about.”
Joseph Mariani, associate executive director of the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, which runs the Hollywood Entertainment District Business Improvement District (BID), said his group has been keeping an eye on the park’s progression.
“It seems like it’s picked up a lot of momentum in the last year and a half,” he said. “A lot of people that we talk to — there is a cry for more open space as Hollywood becomes more residential and with more families moving here.”
Goldman said she is looking forward to moving ahead in the process, and she remains optimistic construction will begin on the park as soon 2016 or 2017.
3 Comments
Good afternoon I am writing from the LA Mayor’s Office of Economic Development, my name is Alyxandra Goodwin and I am the communications coordinator for the Los Angeles Promise Zone.
It is written in here as the Hollywood Promise Zone, and while Hollywood is a neighborhood within the Zone, the formal name is the Los Angeles Promise Zone–just for your future reference!
Cheers.
Regarding comment out of the Mayor’s office about the controversial and touchy subject of Promise Funds… for all of L.A. ? Not really. The truth is Controversial Promise Funds were applied for by Mr. Garcetti with Dixon Slingerland, to go specifically to Hollywood and East Hollywood, where Mr. Garcetti’s Millennium boss Phil Aarons (Millennium) has projects, and Mitch O’Farrell, who Mr. Grcetti appointed head of Recs and Parks, to assure all would ‘go smoothly with the Park, and Millennium put the great news right up on their websites that GOVERNMENT Promise Funds came through and would help build Millennium’s Hollywood Central Park. While other needy communities were shut out. Mr. Garcetti came under fire and he responded, even going on Tavis Smiley Show to do damage control, since African American communities were up in arms, calmly and coolly saying not to worry, the Promise Funds would be spread out over many L.A. communities. No they wouldn’t. Mr. Garcetti collaborated for years with Slingerland, one of his biggest funders, and Obama’s ‘bundlers’, former Youth Policy Institute head (in Hollywood), now on Garcetti’s staff, to assure the funds went to Hollywood and East Hollywood, where his Millennium developer boss has projects, controversial Hollywood skyscrapers on Vine (the beginning of the end for Hollywood, his high density overhaul of Hollywood, selling it out to developer funder’s for their massive projects) and Hollywood Central Park in East Hollywood. Mr. Garcetti helped Millennium get humongous tax breaks. Millennium helped him, O’Farrell and Vilaraigosa get elected, and is the Hollywood Chamber’s biggest donor and Chamber PAC funder, set up to make sure ‘we get OUR (pro development) candidates elected’..The last two they supported lost. Aware of who those candidates masters would be (as they are Garcetti’s and O’Farrell’s),residential Hollywood (the people who actually live there) and L.A. are not stupid. The Park, above a freeway, is supposedly for the poor communities of East Hollywood, when in fact once Millennium is done with their luxury towers around it, the only way they will get billions for it, the poor and middle class families it’s supposedly for, will be moved out. Garcetti’s “Urban Cleansing”. One can’t help but notice the similarities to Aaron’s NYC Highline, supposedly to save an old railroad and be a benefit to the Chelsea community, now a mecca for tourists, the Chelsea area was rezoned for mega developers to take over the area, and pushed out second,third,and fourth generation Chelsea residents, and businesses.Private funding is running out so how to keep it going..more developers and government funding. Hollywood Central Park has a tower in a version of the renderings, and there will be more towers, as it will be an open invitation to developers to help pay for it, just like the pricey river project, with deals already made with mega developers and environmental groups backing out since it is not going to be the nature preserve they were told it would be. And developers are filling campaign coffers.
It was very sad watching Councilmembers Parks and Price, a few months back, having been told the Promise Funds would be spread to other needy areas, possibly theirs, question HUD and the city’s legal adviser at a city council meeting, to find out the truth..NO, the Promise Funds would not be spread to their areas, and then Parks asked could they be eligible next time around? Probably not, since it is very competitive and since LA already got theirs.
Former Councilman and current Mayor Garcetti also got hundreds of thousands out of city council for his boss’s Park, just as Christine Quinn did in NYC for Aarons’ Highline, her biggest campaign funder.
Garcetti brings home Promise Funds for Hollywood Central Park:
http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2014/01/betty_pleasant_how_south.php
http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-obama-garcetti-promise-zone-20140407,0,6180109,full.story#axzz2yDTeOtYi
NYC Highline…& Quinn/ Aaron Project-Campaign Money
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/22/opinion/in-the-shadows-of-the-high-line.html
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/christine-quinn-cash-west-side-project-campaign-money-article-1.278117
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2013/06/christine_quinn_16.php
They don’t know where the money will come from? Ofcourse they do.
The City had to be sued to force it to repair its sidewalks and that settlement agreement provides zero dollars for sidewalks.
From where will we get the money? We still need paramedics and the training of the LAPD has obviously fallen as the number of shootings has increased. We cannot expect the LAPD to do a decent job when we do not provide them the training they need.
The whole motive behind this park is to justify more Millennium Projects.
We have many real needs in this city to provide for real infrastructure. We have fallen so low that we now Budget By Litigation. In other words, we will not get adequate paramedic, firefighter and police budgets until someone else sues the City.