Urban Paradise revives a single planter with drought-tolerant vegetation. You can help

This Sunday, if you’re not busy, you might consider helping save Main Library. Again. Maybe. (Any plan to really save our existing Main Library has to seem a little tenuous now that the folks at 333 W. Ocean Blvd.–that’s City Hall–have declared their intentions to someday scut the whole place.)

But from 10:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Sunday, Eliot Gonzales and the non-nonprofit group Urban Paradise will be replanting one of the library’s exterior planters–the one at the northwest corner of Ocean Boulevard and Pacific Avenue–with native plants.

Urban Paradise is still so new, Gonzales says, that it doesn’t have nonprofit status. (That’s in the works.) And it could use some volunteers.

The plan sounds intriguing–even sounds like something we should have considered in 1976 when the Burton W. Chace Civic Center first opened, back when drought-resistant gardening was still something the wilderness did when it reseeded itself.

And it sounds easy, right? After all, tree plantings go on every weekend, don’t they? Think again. In their inexperience and newness in town, Gonzales’s little planting–in just one of Main Library’s vast, barren planters–has taken him and his organization months to engineer, and all the while, it hasn’t cost the city anything.

“It just seems like such a waste–a million-dollar waste,” Gonzales, a former Verizon employee who is 21, said of the library gardens’ current state. So he got busy: “I talked to [Mayor Bob Foster's assistant] William Doll, and then I talked to Broc Coward from Suja Lowenthal’s office.”

And so, hearing that, I called William Doll myself. And he said this, about Sunday’s planting:

“Well, it’s news to me. I have talked to Mr. Gonzales and he expressed interest in the rooftop. But that’s not how he first got to us,” Doll said, not really going into detail about how Gonzales did get to City Hall.

(I’m guessing the former Blackstone resident might have walked. After all, he was hanging around City Hall during much of the debate over Main Library this summer.)

“And he also talked to [Chief of Staff] Broc Coward in [Second District Councilwoman] Suja [Lowenthal's] office. And I haven’t really been involved in it since then,” Doll said.

So I called Coward, and like any good chief of staff, he deferred to his boss, saying he really really didn’t want to go on the record, but confirming that Gonzales and Urban Paradise had been set loose on this one particular planter, which angles toward the sun like the side of an ancient temple. (Which really, it sort of is, now.)

And that was that. Except … . Gonzales’s press release started out strong. A little too strong:

“In June of 2008—The City Council gave its approval of a test garden on the northeast corner of Ocean Boulevard and Pacific Avenue to be planted by Urban Paradise, an arts and environmental action group,” it ran.

So I checked that out, too. I read every Long Beach City Council agenda in June 2008. Then, I read every agenda in June 2007. That item was nowhere to be seen, and City Hall staffers confirmed it had never actually been agenda-ized.

Rather, Gonzales and Urban Paradise’s sincere desire to improve the city won them over.

“We just wanted to focus that enthusiasm somewhere,” said a wise person at City Hall who is familiar with the situation. “He’s the type of person who, when you listen to him, you really sympathize and you want to help him.”

Second District Councilwoman Suja Lowenthal had this to say, in a statement:

“I appreciate the diligence and contributions of Elliot and other volunteers at Urban Paradise to beautify a mostly plantless section of our civic center. No doubt their work will contribute positively to the overall pedestrian experience in downtown.”

Either way, that planter at Ocean and Pacific isn’t doing anything anyhow–and all of Urban Paradise’s plants are donated, by Armstrong Gardens, Long Beach City College, and the El Dorado Park Nature Center. That means they’re free.

Urban Paradise plans to divide the planter into five sections–two for miscellaneous; one for medicinal plants; one for plants that bloom year-round; and one for succulents. Then, they’ll plant those five sections, and water them periodically, using water from the library or from nearby businesses.

(During the winter, they could almost bring the library’s rain buckets directly upstairs.)

Folks at City Hall–some of whom should be able to watch Sunday’s planting from their offices–will monitor Urban Paradise’s, well, urban paradise. If it blossoms, and if the library doesn’t experience any, er, seepage, the project may be expanded.

“We’ll see where their efforts lead to–perhaps we can partner on another portion of planter along Ocean Boulevard,” Lowenthal said in her statement.

But what about that statement in Urban Paradise’s press release, about the City Council approving all this?

“I-shit–I should have erased that!” Gonzales said in a telephone conversation yesterday afternoon. “I told someone to take that out of the press release.”

Yep, he’s learning.

“Oh, totally,” Gonzales said. “Let me tell you, I had no idea what a native plant or a nonprofit was. But–oh! All of this came this year. It is learning as you go.”

And perhaps if Urban Paradise’s planting is a success, we can all learn from them.

FOR INFORMATION CONTACT ELLIOT GONZALES AT 562.786.3874.

Tags: Broc Coward, California, Elliot Gonzales, Long Beach, Long Beach City Council, Main Library, Southern California, suja lowenthal, The District Weekly, Theo Douglas, Urban Paradise, William Doll