How one man’s mission to transform a downtown street into open space became a mass movement. And how one city official has stalled it.

BRIAN ULASZEWSKI by RUSS ROCA

Although that’s not its official name, and may never be—even if the southernmost block of Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue really does become a park someday, instead of one of Long Beach’s most-dangerous intersections.

“Armory Park is just a generic name,” Brian Ulaszewski explains obligatorily, anxious to move the conversation forward. He doesn’t want the focus on his blacktop-to-green-grass campaign to be diverted by something so beside the point as a name—probably knowing from lifelong personal experience how easily that can happen. By the way, “Ulaszewski” is pronounced “oo-la-SHEFF-ski.”

So . . . where were we?

Oh, right, in Armory Park.

More accurately, we’re a few healthy steps away from the curb on Martin Luther King just south of Seventh Street, where those two roads form a triangle with Alamitos Avenue—and make who-knows-what geometric shape if you factor in the tangent with Sixth Street, which intrudes near the point of one of the sides. Follow? Of course not. That’s why it’s wise to keep some distance from the wild hairs of traffic that speed-braid their way through this maze. It requires a mix of driving skill and blind luck that, literally, is death-defying . . . except for those times when, tragically, it is not.

“I’ve been calling the area Armory Park because it’s next to the National Guard Armory,” Ulaszewski continues determinedly. “Walking to work past that beautiful old Armory every day is what inspired me to think about creating a park in this area. But you can call it whatever you want. Really. Call it Bob’s Park, I don’t care. I just want it to become a park.”

Lots of other people want that, too. They’ve been wanting it for a long time now. Many of them are powerful. Ulaszewski got to know them while serving on the Central Area Project Committee, an advisory group to the Redevelopment Agency. Or maybe during his stints on the Cultural Heritage Commission, the Long Beach Design Forum or the Arts Council for Long Beach—or hell, during his 2006 run for City Council. Ulaszewski is only 30, but he’s spent a lot of time in circles of influence.

But Armory Park has become a widely shared vision mainly because Ulaszewski has put so much effort into sharing it on a grassroots level. During the past few years he’s been all over town with a Power Point presentation that has evoked what feels like unanimous support from community groups and neighborhood associations.

“Brian approached me several years ago and presented his idea,” says Council Member Bonnie Lowenthal, whose First District includes what would be Armory Park. “I immediately felt it was fantastic—a stroke of genius on his part—and I asked the Redevelopment Agency to put aside a million dollars for it.”

Ulaszewski envisions about an acre of parkland in the most crowded part of the city, an open space centered around the Armory that would also tie together the new Museum of Latin American Art building with the historic campus of St. Anthony High to create a gateway to downtown Long Beach for people approaching from the east—which is to say, Orange County.

“It’s a wonderful idea,” agrees Pat West, who is Long Beach city manager now, but was in charge of the city’s Redevelopment Agency when Ulaszewski revealed his plan for Armory Park. “It was so widely accepted by everybody that we quickly put aside that million dollars to get it initiated.”

But that never happened. See, the plans for Armory Park were not accepted by absolutely everybody. There is one person who does not like the proposal. He turns out to have the power to stop Armory Park. And that’s exactly what he’s done.

“Let me try to defend myself,” Dave Roseman says calmly, and he knows that it’s not going to be easy. He knew where this conversation was headed before he picked up the phone in Long Beach’s traffic and transportation office. The receptionist put the call on hold while she clued him in. But Roseman answered anyway. And although he’s heard it all many times before, he listened again without interrupting as the Armory Park scenario was laid out once more. “First of all,” Roseman begins, when it’s finally his turn to talk, “I’m not all evil.”

Roseman is in his sixth year as Long Beach’s chief traffic engineer. He’s the person ultimately responsible for the city’s every traffic signal, lane stripe and curb color.  Less directly, he’s the guy responsible for every convenient cross-town drive, every breezy bike trip and every safe walk across the street. Also, all of the ones that don’t turn out so well. Bottom line, says Roseman, “Our No. 1 focus is to try to make the system as safe as possible for everyone who uses it.” Apparently, the guy’s got a pretty good track record.

“Obviously, it’s not just me—it’s partly our department and partly the police,” Roseman allows. “But the accident rate in Long Beach has dropped each of the last six years, despite a rising population and an increase in traffic.”

But Roseman’s job performance doesn’t entirely boil down to accident and fatality statistics; put endless restrictions in place and you could probably bring down those rates to nearly nothing. A quality-of-life component looms large, too; drivers have to be able to get where they are going in a timely manner and residents require that most of the cars travel on major thoroughfares, as opposed to swarming every neighborhood in the city.

When Roseman studies the plan for Armory Park—eliminating the southernmost tip of Martin Luther King Avenue and forcing its traffic flow through the already crowded-and-hazardous intersection of Seventh and Alamitos—he says these quality-of-life equations don’t work out. Instead, he sees a recipe for intensified traffic congestion that may send ripples of additional problems into the surrounding streets.

“We spent probably a year looking at all the possibilities and ramifications of losing MLK and creating a park,” says Roseman. “But we kept finding that making that change could create a bottleneck. Up to 300 cars an hour could be diverted into residential neighborhoods by drivers trying to get around that bottleneck. Ultimately, when we finished, we couldn’t make the traffic situation work.”

And that has been pretty much that for Armory Park.

“The stumbling block has been the city’s traffic study,” acknowledges Lowenthal. She pauses for a few moments to select her next few words carefully. “It is extremely disappointing.”

West does his best to keep emotion out of his analysis of what’s kept Armory Park on the drawing board.  “Without the traffic engineer’s signoff on a project, we as a city lose our design immunity. In the event of a traffic accident we are considered negligent. We are exposed to lawsuits,” he explains. “The buy-in by the traffic engineer is so, so, so critical.”

Roseman went to school to learn his stuff. He’s got a degree in it from Long Beach State—civil engineering, with an emphasis in traffic—and he’s passed an exam to earn state certification.

Meanwhile, everybody else has a driver’s license.

“Everybody is an expert in my field,” he says good-naturedly. “Most engineers work with things—steel and wood and whatever—that don’t talk back. Being a traffic engineer is different. Everybody uses the traffic system, and they all have opinions.”

Of course, most people also have lives outside of the time they spend in traffic, or worrying about it—lives they might want to spend, once in a while, maybe, at a downtown park? The First District has only 36.7 acres of Long Beach’s 2,872.8 acres of parkland. Isn’t Armory Park a quality-of-life issue, too?

“I can understand the general perception that the traffic engineer may be out of touch,” Roseman allows. “I don’t believe that traffic is the big, overarching concern in charge of everything. It has its place. But in this specific area, it’s a big element.”

If it weren’t so crazy dangerous, the collection of intersections around Armory Park might seem rather quaint, sort of cute—a quirky local nuance created long ago where a growing little city popped some of the first buttons on its baby clothes.

Of the four streets that converge here, two are one-ways, another is a diagonal and the other merges into the diagonal . . . just after it crosses both one-ways, one which makes an off-kilter T-bone as it meets the diagonal, and the other which becomes a two-way on the other side of the diagonal. Following this time? Of course not—unless maybe you’re behind the wheel of a Model A.

Long Beach’s long-ago growing pain has developed into a chronic condition. It’s become one of the city’s most complicated and perilous places to drive. Or cycle. Or walk. In fact, traffic-department statistics that take into account the numbers of vehicles, accidents, types of accidents injuries suggest that the Armory Park area may be the most dangerous intersection in Long Beach.

In a front-page story by the Press-Telegram in 2006—headlined: “Crossroads for Danger”—reporter Kristopher Hanson revealed that the Armory Park area had one-fourth the traffic but twice as many accidents as the city’s famously congested intersection of Second Street and Pacific Coast Highway. And Armory Park’s accidents were more apt than anywhere else to be broadside collisions, the most dangerous kind.

“Right now it’s actually functioning pretty well,” says Roseman, whose department did a little tweaking of the MLK-and-Seventh design in 2003, adding a couple of protected right turn lanes and synchronizing some traffic signals. “There’s congestion, but you’re not waiting through multiple lights to get through. Even though it’s slightly ugly, it moves the traffic pretty well. We don’t want to create a situation where we invest millions and end up with something much worse.”

But traffic in the Armory Park area is undoubtedly going to get much worse anyway—and very soon. In addition to the ongoing construction of various residential projects in the downtown area, the City Council in 2007 approved two massive condominium complexes just a few blocks down the streets that lead to the Armory Park nexus.

The Press-Telegram Lofts—a pair of towers that will rise behind the historic façade of the old newspaper building—will pack 482 units on Pine Avenue between Sixth and Seventh. And the Shoreline Gateway, a 35-story sail-shaped skyscraper, will pile 221 units on the corner of Alamitos and Ocean Boulevard. In other words, about 700 more residences in just those buildings, multiplied by about two vehicles per unit, multiplied again by however many trips to wherever they might want to go every day, plus the cars driven by whomever may come to visit—get ready for the crazy and dangerous life at Long Beach’s funkiest junction to become downright unctuous.

BRIAN ULASZEWSKI by RUSS ROCA

“I’ve tried to be a real team player on this—not make a big stink—but I don’t know,” says Ulaszewski, and from the way he keeps riffling the pages of the various Armory Park-related documents he’s brought to a downtown Long Beach restaurant, it’s pretty obvious he’s pissed.
“This wasn’t just some whim I had one day. It came to me over time, and I took my ideas to a lot of people and a lot of agencies before I even took them to Bonnie Lowenthal,” Ulaszewski continues, and he briefly picks up one packet of studies as if remembering that day, then quickly sets it down as if remembering this one. “But it’s been almost four years since then—two years of bureaucratic stuff and now two years of nothing.”

Then as now, Ulaszewski believes that Armory Park is the kind of solution Long Beach should be applying to any number of its problems.

“It’s a way of reconceptualizing the public domain,” he says. “At the time I came up with it, the city was bulldozing blocks and blocks of the west side of downtown to create a gateway. But Armory Park creates a proper East Gateway to downtown without resorting to blockwide clearing. A planner would see this as mitigation for development.”

Ulaszewski went to school to learn his stuff, too. The 30-year-old Wilson High grad—he came to town when his father was transferred to the Long Beach Naval Station and put on the team to decommission the facility—majored in architecture at USC. He bought a fixer-upper in the Craftsman Village Historic District. Now he works at Studio 111, the innovative downtown Long Beach firm that designed the Shoreline Gateway tower. In fact, he’s on a lunch break, at the moment.

“I’ve invested lots of lunch breaks on Armory Park,” Ulaszewski says. “Lots of people have invested lots of time. And money, too.”

In all, the Armory Park plans have undergone three traffic studies to predict the effects of eliminating Martin Luther King Avenue between Sixth and Seventh and reducing the number of traffic signals in the area from four to two.

The first study was conducted by Roseman’s office of City Traffic Engineering (CTE), and the results of this preliminary review were promising. “I thought, maybe this will work,” says Roseman, whose official written report said “the concept had merit and was worthy of further study.”

The Redevelopment Agency funded the other two studies, hiring the private firm of Meyer, Mohaddes Associates (MMA), which is regularly used as an outside consultant by the city. Ulaszewski says the results of the second study were even more favorable, “but the positive results were contested by the CTE.”

Actually, the summary of the second study did seem to be trying to have it both ways. On one hand, it said the new traffic plan “would not significantly worsen traffic operating conditions,” and on the other hand it said that “it in fact would improve operations.”

So there was a third study, after which MMA concluded that “the intersection levels of service and operating conditions could be maintained at an acceptable level.” Ulaszewski believes that by reducing four intersections to two, the area would be less dangerous.

Not in Roseman’s eyes, however.

“The final study couldn’t make the configuration work as good as it is today, not even without figuring in the future growth of downtown,” he says. “If losing a street worsens the traffic, we can’t do that.” However, Ulaszewski charges that Roseman didn’t apply the same criteria to both plans. Troubled by what he describes as “seemingly vast differences” in the conclusions of the studies, Ulaszewski took both of them to the City Traffic Engineer of Newport Beach for what he called “an outside neutral” verdict on their merits. According to Ulaszewski, the Newport Beach traffic engineer says “traffic would likely improve” with the Armory Park plan.

“Brian has been very persistent,” Roseman says diplomatically. “He wants green space. We are all in agreement on that. But I don’t think we should sacrifice everybody’s mobility for one goal.

“I don’t have all the answers. I’ve just tried to analyze things the best I can. From the time I first started with Brian, that’s been the question: Can we make it work? That’s why I spent so much time on it. But the side effects are worse than the benefit.”

Ulaszewski sounds unconvinced. “I’ve tried not to make this personal, but . . . ” he says, and he pauses to consider which way he wants to take that thought, “but could it be that there is an air of infallibility by the traffic engineer? Could it be that his department just improved that intersection, and a couple of years later I find a way to improve it more—and add a park?”
Armory Park isn’t dead, and probably won’t be while Bonnie Lowenthal is on the City Council. Lowenthal has aggressively searched for more open space in her densely populated First District, and her support for Armory Park was etched in stone—well, her campaign fliers, anyway—when she ran for re-election to the council in 2005. Lowenthal hasn’t forgotten that promise, and isn’t likely to—especially if she goes through with her plan to run for the 54th Assembly District seat this year. Many of those constituents will be the same people going to the polls if she seeks higher office.
“I’m continuing to push for Armory Park,” says Lowenthal, “and I’m really optimistic about our new city manager’s commitment to make this work.”

Actually, Lowenthal’s tone of voice as she says this doesn’t sound so sweetly optimistic as it does flat-out determined. Same goes for what she says next: “I’ve brought Brian Ulaszewski in to meet directly with the new city manager [Pat West], and I have asked the city manager to work with other city departments and come back within 60 days with a recommendation. The city manager is going to talk to the city traffic engineer and say, ‘Find a way to do this.’”

West doesn’t sound quite so . . . so . . . optimistic—“The traffic engineer has a very powerful signature,” he warns. “I can’t emphasize that enough”—but he acknowledges that Armory Park is back on everybody’s radar.

“I’ll be asking the traffic engineer to take another look at it,” says West. “He feels, for reasons he has to explain, that it is unsafe and would create more of a problem than we have now. When he didn’t sign off on the project, Armory Park kinda went away for a little bit, but it’s always been out there. I’ve recently met a few times with Brian, and now we’re all going to take another look at it.”

Roseman insists he never intended that his rejection of the existing plans for Armory Park be interpreted as the final word on the project.

“I’m not a judge or a jury—neither one,” he says. “I still think there is a possibility to do something. Maybe we can go back to the beginning and run something through an update of the city’s general plan for the next 10 or 20 years. The plan needs updating and we can address some of the hot spots—including the one at Seventh and Alamitos. I’ve sat down with staff and discussed it.”

Ulaszewski has not been a part of those discussions.

“We know what Brian’s goals are,” says Roseman. “We’re going to see if there are other ways that would potentially make that project viable, ways that would be bigger than what Brian’s thinking.”

Ulaszewski shakes his head in exasperation.

“I’m talking about maybe an acre—a drop in the bucket,” he says. “It’s such an overcrowded area. And that Armory is such a neat, neat building.”

Tags: " Brian Ulaszewski, alamitos ave, Armory Park, Long Beach, martin luther king ave, open space