Parks are good for you

Folks at LBPost.com recently came out in support of an idea by architect Brian Ulaszewski to essentially do away with Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue between Sixth and Seventh Streets–and turn it into a park. (Ulaszewski, the Post is quick to point out, is also one of the website’s columnists.)This would mean redoing–again–the traffic flow in that region, which is still one of the more challenging areas to navigate. But hey, it’d be a park, right? Nobody doesn’t like a park, yes? Well, no, they don’t (or maybe that’s yes). But parks are like puppies; you can’t not like them. Even if you’re allergic.

It’s just interesting to consider all the effort that would go into this park–which would still wind up being about one-block square. It wouldn’t even be a full square–it’d be kind of triangulated because of the way Alamitos Avenue cuts through everything like a very slow, terrible swift sword.

This is what we’ve come to in Long Beach: years of planning and palaver–more than four years, the Post estimates–for a park that would be a fraction, a decimal the size of El Dorado Park.

Are we guilty of thinking too small here–especially as long as we’re planning something people aren’t rushing to build anyway?

Wouldn’t it be great to have another park somewhere west of Redondo Avenue that’s the size of El Dorado Park, or Recreation Park–both of which, it should be said, are in east Long Beach? How could we do that? Don’t buildings come down pretty easy here?

If it came off right, people might really go to it–you know, the way they used to go to that amusement park downtown. Or the way they go to that park in New York–the one named after that coffeehouse on “Friends.”

Tags: " Brian Ulaszewski, "Friends, Armory Park, California, Central Park, Central Perk, El Dorado Park, Long Beach, Long Beach Post, Southern California, The District Weekly, Theo Douglas