Decolonize Your Park

Walking to meet a friend in London, I cut through a new housing complex. The apartment buildings wrap around a garbage-processing plant. Stinking trucks lumber in and out of the place all day long, suggesting a Victorian interior to a space that otherwise exhibits the sanitary gloss of twenty-first-century urban planning.

On a superfluous island of grass I spot a worn patch between two small trees. If this were a photograph, that spot would be its punctum. I’m sure it goes unnoticed by most who pass through here. The trees make a nice goal. They sit in front of a brick wall that bounces the ball right back to you. At least two people must play here, taking turns standing “between the sticks.” The space was designed to minimize this sort of thing. Cement sidewalks and raised curbs frame its minimal green space and direct pedestrian flow out of the complex. The grass is purposefully long, not the sort of thing you’d picnic or play on. But two kids found this one spot and stole it, leaving behind a muddy bit of denuded lawn. This sort of thievery happens all the time. It’s a small-time crime, really. Like shoplifting candy, it’s something kids are more likely to do just to see if they can get away with it—a gateway crime interesting only to novices.

London is a football-friendly city. In all honesty, taking this few feet of grass hardly merits the criminal metaphor I’m trying to stage here. The fight to claim space for this game was fought and won almost a century ago. If a park prohibits soccer in one spot, it makes room for it in another. Signs might prohibit “ball games,” but they rarely come right out and say “no football”—such a declaration of prejudice would invite vandalism. There is less at stake, too, in staging turf wars over the city’s greenery. London’s grounds are made of perpetually soft clay. The grass is thick and defiant. Hackney Marshes, a fabled park of dozens of pitches in North London in near constant use, is stubbornly verdant even if the fields are bumpy and wind-wept. I never saw a goal married to a basketball hoop until I spent a year working in London. First time I passed by one of these mixed-use courts I stopped in my tracks. Staring at a basketball hoop growing out of a cross bar, I marveled at a city where such miscegenation was no big thing. My astonishment was that of a foreigner, born and raised in a space where sports are explicitly set against each other, in a form of civil warfare.

This kind of cooperation seems to be unthinkable in my hometown, Los Angeles. Years ago, my neighborhood park (Bellevue, in Silverlake) hosted rolling nighttime pick-up soccer games. It was also home to a fair amount of criminal activity—drug dealing, mostly, with the periodic shoot-out. Eventually, folks decided it was time to do something. The park was closed for a couple of years and re-built: with two large, fenced-off baseball fields. Each field has a set of bleachers, and a covered area for players to sit while waiting for their turn at bat. But there are almost never baseball or softball games there. I run in this park. Sometimes I take a walk around its packed dirt track to clear my head. In all my years of using the park I’ve only seen a handful of teams using the diamonds. Most of the time, they sit empty. They take up more than half of Bellevue’s open space. The rest of the park consists of picnic areas, a basketball court, two jungle-gyms for kids, and a set of rings and pull-up bars. There isn’t much open space left—and what is there, isn’t flat and is broken up by large, old trees. Any grassy expanse that might have invited play has been deliberately broken up by boulders that were placed to make such a thing impossible.

For those park users who haven’t gotten the landscaped message, signs ring the park and declare “No Fútbol” and “No Se Puede Jugar Soccer.” Most of those signs show a stick figure kicking a ball, crossed out. There are a lot of other signs in the park (“No Scooters,” “No Bikes,” “No Skateboards,” “No Golf”) but the “No Soccer” signs are one of only two sets of edicts in Spanish. The other is “No Bebidas Alcoholicas.”

The worn patch of grass between two trees in Holloway reminds me of these battles fought closer to my home. In Bellevue, in spite of all that fútbolphobic design, some players initiate a small game of five or six a side in the early evening—they play on a little mound (using the curve to curl passes around each other). They use two garbage cans to make one goal, and two gorgeous fir trees as the other. The trees couldn’t be more perfectly spaced, and, in fact, even when there aren’t enough people to make a full game, you see one or two kids practicing shots with a friend tending goal between the trunks. There is no grass there. It’s been worn off by criminal keepers, stealing this space between.

• • •

Fútbol must be the largest subculture in Southern California. No music scene competes with it. The game seems to grow up from the ground here. Players instead of grass. A park like Bellevue, which has chosen to adopt a defensive stance in relation to us, must constantly stamp us out. Microgames make the park officials anxious. So they drop another boulder. Put up another fence. Set another lock. It is hard not to see this as a form of border control.

Other parks are more conflicted toward the game, and their stories harder to tell. Thanks to Donna Summer’s disco cover of a Jimmy Webb love song, MacArthur Park is one of Los Angeles’s most famous. Built in the 1880s, the park enjoyed a few decades as a vacation spot surrounded by luxury hotels. One hundred years later, it had become notorious as one of the most dangerous places in LA. Famously, when its lake was drained in the 1970s, workers found hundreds of discarded firearms.

Things turned around a few years ago. Most attribute the drop in crime to the LAPD’s patrols and security cameras. Gradually, the park seemed to open its arms to its neighbors. During the day, it’s carpeted with picnicking families, teenagers, workers eating lunch, loafers taking naps, and street vendors selling everything from toys to roasted corn and ice cream. On the weekend, streets around the park are taken over by carnivals. The park’s social fabric reminds people of hometowns in Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala even as the park’s design and geography (open, exposed to the sun, sliced in half by a wide boulevard) couldn’t feel more different from a Oaxacan or Honduran village square. But here, people feel recognized and welcome in a city that often does not acknowledge them as Angelenos. It is no accident that the recent marches on behalf of the immigrant and migrant communities in Los Angeles ended here—peaceful marches that the LAPD met with batons, rubber bullets, and tear gas. Video footage of the LAPD’s 2007 May Day assault on the neighborhood shows them advancing with their weapons across a dirt soccer field.

There are no official fields in MacArthur Park. But until October 2008, two were chalked out on packed dirt in its northern half. A community center employee had hijacked this section of the park and organized leagues from the abundant informal games that animated almost every spot they could. He did this without asking for permission—if he had, it surely would have been denied. If stealing the space between two trees is like shoplifting, claiming the north end of MacArthur Park for weekday and weekend leagues is large-scale embezzlement. (In her dissertation on the park, urban studies scholar Kelly Main speculates that the park’s renaissance owed less to the LAPD security cameras, which they don’t have the funds to maintain, than to the presence of these squatting leagues that brought scores of the same people to the park every day, and gave them a reason to care about what was happening there.) The community center employee’s scheme was so successful, in fact, that the games played here came to represent Los Angeles soccer culture. In the past decade, when the media has needed to invoke images of local fútbol culture, it has turned to this pirate cancha.

The 2005 international hit movie Goal opens with a young Mexican migrant worker being scouted for the English Premiership while playing in an independent, “Latin” league here. The Los Angeles Times mines this part of the park for soccer stories when it wants to paint a quaint picture of the communities that define the city but perhaps not quite the paper’s readers—as in a 2008 feel-good profile of a Guatemalan women’s team in which squad members describe feeling most like “American women” when they step onto the dusty ground in their uniforms. And in 2006, when Adidas mounted a series of television spots in which two players from rival national teams meet up and recruit people off the street to play improvised showdowns, the USA vs. Mexico game was staged in this dusty bowl. The ad implicitly reproduced the racial geographies of the city: the USA squad was recruited from Venice Beach, the Mexico side was recruited from the neighborhood around MacArthur Park itself. They might have easily recruited from within the park, but had they done this, both teams would likely have been entirely Latino, and posed problems for viewers who imagine Americans otherwise. In any case, the fact that the neighborhood around MacArthur Park is largely Salvadoran, and that Los Angeles’s most celebrated Mexicano neighborhoods are farther to the east, was perhaps not relevant to the Adidas folks, who were more after a Mexican “look” than a Mexican, or Chicano, reality. USA won, on penalty kicks. MacArthur Park, apparently, is not the Estadio Azteca.

In the past five years, as this part of the park became a favored cinematic location, and even as crime in the park nosedived thanks to its popularity, neighborhood “stakeholders” organized to try to force the squatting leagues out. In the same month that the Times ran its profile of the Guatemalan women players, the city broke ground on the “MacArthur Park Improvement Project.” The Department of Parks and Recreation promised to add a new artificial turf field to the half dozen they manage across the city. An environmental impact memo explained that “expected improvements include reconstruction of an existing dirt soccer field with artificial turf, installation of … light poles approximately 50 feet in height around the soccer field.” A local city councilman hosted a “soccerfest” carnival, celebrating the fútbol community of MacArthur Park and heralding the park’s future playing space. The Times ran a story about the temporary displacement of the leagues and how much everyone was looking forward to returning to the new and improved field. In the meantime, the city relocated the informal leagues to Vista Hermosa. Tucked into a forgotten corner of Los Angeles in a former oil field near the Hollywood Freeway, Vista Hermosa was the first park opened in this part of Los Angeles in nearly one hundred years. (The location was the site of public scandal in the 1990s when the city had to abandon the construction of a high school over the toxic, methane-pocketed land.) To get to Vista Hermosa from MacArthur Park, you have to take a bus.

People around MacArthur Park were excited about the new field being built there. The artificial surface would be much safer to play on, and, given its central location, it would have become a marquee ground—a great place to play before a crowd. It is hard to overstate what such a thing would mean for the neighborhood—to have this pastime, so fundamental to social life, embraced and even showcased. As the contractor put down the turf and the improvements began to take shape, however, a complex reality emerged. A gently sloped and curved expanse of green plastic replaced the dirt field. It is almost as long as a field, but far too narrow to host league matches. The field is ringed not by floodlights, but by fake gas lamps. Such changes are symptomatic of the investment of Los Angeles property owners and city officials in pastoral fantasies of green “passive use” parks—fantasies rooted, in fact, in the geography and climate of a city like London. For many, park improvement means green grass, romantic couples in paddleboats, and other pretty pictures. The huge parks that ring Los Angeles (like Griffith Park, one the largest municipal parks in the US) certainly invite such ambitions, but they are also home to mountain lions and wildfires, hardly the stuff of bourgeois daydreams. Some Angelenos long to have their own Central Park—a tasteful urban oasis. Set between an ocean and a desert, and hot and dry most of the year, the city is the most densely populated urban area west of the Mississippi River; a park here will never be green unless it is fenced off and the grass continuously nursed. And MacArthur Park isn’t big like Central Park, or the Bois de Boulogne, or Chapultepec; it will never be a “quiet” space unless you push out the noisy people who use it. Roughly the size of six large city blocks, it is a bit of rare open space in a neighborhood where buildings swell and eat up every inch of grass, in a city so indifferent to its landscape that it even paved over its river.

When the mayor broke ground on the project, the city said it was building a soccer field. A few months later, they started calling it a “synthetic children’s meadow.” The contractor who laid the turf said, “It is definitely not a soccer field.” A walkway of packed dirt rings this bean-shaped playground. Where there should be corners, there are curves. The surface slopes so much that with a little momentum, a kid can roll on her side across it. There was a moment when we thought fútbol here were done. But leagues are back—small games played uphill and down, but with (portable) goals and a referee, and a serpentine touchline like no other I’ve ever seen. It is still the best place in Los Angeles to watch a game. Meanwhile, rents in this part of town have more than doubled, aggravating overcrowding for some as they pack even hallways to make the rent, and pushing others out as they give up on the neighborhood. In making the park friendlier to its neighbors, in facilitating the reduction in crime, the leagues may have also made the park safer for this kind of gentrification. The players who insist on staging games on that bean-shaped synthetic meadow are an occupying force. The battle continues.

Where once MacArthur Park’s fútbolistas played under the surveillance of LAPD cameras, they now play under the watchful eyes of neighborhood developers. In 2008, the Community Redevelopment Agency of Los Angeles purchased the Westlake Theater, which faces the park. The historic movie palace opened in 1926 with the premiere of the pre-Hayes code Other Women’s Husbands. Since 1991, however, it’s been a fabulously chaotic swap meet catering to “illegals” (as one conservative blogger put it) and the subject of controversy: for one set of residents, it’s a resource; for another, it’s a source of constant grief. There are plans to turn it into a performance center. Or a mall.

• • •

If you head east down 6th Street, you are likely to pass Lafayette Park without even noticing it. It is small. It has no symbolic importance for Los Angeles. It is hidden behind an old library and the LA Superior Court Building. Right now, Lafayette loves fútbol. You can play it on the basketball courts, in between the park tables and benches, around the palm trees. You can take over whatever flat ground you can find—and we do. The guys in the skateboard park at the park’s western edge are a bit territorial, but that’s it. The park tried to keep us off the grass. I remember one year when they covered some of the ground with netting to protect seedlings, only to have it torn to shreds by those of us who just played over it. For weeks we were all picking plastic threads out of our cleats. Rather than push us out, the park gave up on the grass and put down sand—for beach fútbol. The first time I saw that sand and the small ragged goals—easy to steal but left there with confidence they’d be safe and sound—it was as if a lost love, someone who had thrown me crudely aside, had turned up in the doorway with flowers, and a compelling apology. This park loves us back.

The futsal-sized turf field at Lafayette is easily one of the best places to play in the city. Games played on small pitches like this are fast-paced. Guys dance like Fred Astaire and the Nicholas Brothers. The lights used to be on all night long. I’ve played games there that started around eleven pm, and have gotten home at two in the morning, euphoric. There’d be no more than a dozen of us (the field doesn’t accommodate more than this). We would get so lost in the game, it was as if no one else in the world existed.

But even here, the city is taking notice. We couldn’t have made much noise—the field is deep in the park, and no residence actually borders it. I can imagine us laughing, cursing at each other and at ourselves, cheering each other. But mostly I remember hearing myself breathe. Nevertheless, someone complained about these sounds, and now the lights are out promptly at ten pm (in spite of city statistics on the dramatic reduction of violent crime around those parks that do offer midnight games).

I was devastated, but only momentarily. Fútbol Angeleño is meant to be played on the run.