Watching the Park Go Dark

I moved to Los Angeles from St. Paul, Minn., right after college. It was 1961, and I had a job teaching English at Northridge Junior High.

Sometimes on Saturday afternoons my friends and I had lunch at Bullocks Wilshire. We weren’t part of the staid old Los Angeles crowd that we imagined gathered there, but we tried not to be intimidated. After lunch, I liked to take a swing by MacArthur Park a few blocks away.

This is what Los Angeles must have looked like in the ‘30s and ‘40s, I’d think. It evoked memories of when F. Scott Fitzgerald retreated to the Garden of Allah apartments, trying to write again. I imagined him in the indolent Wilshire Boulevard surroundings with the pink stucco buildings, murals and palm trees.

Then five years went by before I went back to Bullocks Wilshire. On that occasion, I had taught all day at Charles Drew Junior High, and I was in a hurry. I no longer thought about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s apartment. Los Angeles had lost that appeal for me. Faded elegance seemed far away from the crises of the mid-’60s, and irrelevant in comparison to a riot and a war.

I was getting married, and I needed the perfect dress. I had seen it in a bride’s magazine; it seemed appropriate that the right dress was at Bullocks Wilshire. I showed a clerk the picture, bought the dress and was out of there before rush hour. I drove past MacArthur Park and smiled. Old Los Angeles, at least this small section, was part of my wedding dress now, part of me.

Then came the song in 1968. By then I had worn the wedding dress down the aisle and had two young daughters. My hair was long and my skirts short. I listened to Richard Harris’ voice filling up our tiny rented house in Palms. “MacArthur Park is melting in the dark/All the sweet green icing flowing down. . . .”

I also remember standing at the kitchen sink and hearing of the raid on the Black Panthers, listening to false body counts from Vietnam and stopping in my tracks as Chet Huntley said on a newscast that he thought the women’s movement would be bigger and more revolutionary than anything we could imagine.

The music of MacArthur Park floated through those years, but I didn’t go there. MacArthur Park had become something to gaze at through my car window if I happened to drive down Wilshire. It was also a symbol of the past, mine and the city’s, that was always there, in song or real life or in my mind.

I next saw the park 20 years later. My daughters, now three of them, were in high school, college or out of college, and I was teaching at Oregon State University in Corvallis.

I came to Los Angeles to do oral history research on Central Americans, and one day took a walk with a Nicaraguan friend. I had asked her to show me the streets she had talked about where drugs and false immigration documents are sold, where the Immigration and Naturalization Service, la migra, makes its sweeps.

We walked from Olympic, up Alvarado, toward Wilshire. I didn’t know that our destination was the park. My friend was nervous. She preferred to be on streets with fewer Latinos, because that reduced the likelihood that la migra would catch her.

All was possible on Alvarado: shop owners of every nationality, passing druggies looking desperate, and whatever you might want available somewhere on the street.

Then I saw MacArthur Park. My friend said that we could not, should not, walk on the same block as the park. She had seen too many sweeps and too much trouble. It was more than drugs and false documents. People died there and babies were born there.

So I stood across the street and looked. It still had the lake, the palm trees and, for me, the elegance. Angelenos driving by could do so without noticing what had happened, that is unless they looked carefully. The park was full of people, but too dangerous to enter.

A look at some Los Angeles Times headlines tells the tale: “MacArthur Park or Skid Row West?” (1980); “MacArthur Park: Cultures, Crime, Life Styles Clash in Crowded Community to Turn Idyll Into Volatile Mix” (1984); “Fear Sets Tempo in L.A. Park” (1989); “MacArthur Park: Police Try to Retake It From Drug Dealers” (1989); “MacArthur Park Plan Would Lock Out Addicts” (1990); “Operation MacArthur: Police Announce Strategy to Retake Crime-Plagued Park” (1990).

For many of those in the park, it must have seemed that they tried to leave behind one war and found themselves in another.

Two years later I drove down Wilshire with a friend from Oregon. I told my friend that we’d soon see the MacArthur Park lake, on the right.

I was struck silent by the sight of an empty lake and earthmoving equipment behind a chain-link fence. At first, I thought they couldn’t control the crime, so they destroyed the most gorgeous part of the park.

I found out later that MacArthur Park is going to be the stop for the new Metro Red Line, but I still think my first thought was right. They would not have done that to the old park.

They say that except for the Red Line station, the park will be returned to its original state in three years. But will it once again be the “crown jewel of city parks?” I doubt it.

MacArthur Park exists only in a song and in my mind, not in real life. It melted in the dark.