Vying for Space in the New L.A.

Life’s not easy in the crowded new Los Angeles.

I know you’ve heard speeches from politicians and other boosters about how size and diversity has made the place so exciting. For reasons of their own, they neglect to add that life in the big city is much more difficult now that we’re bumping up against each other.

Overcrowding has added a new dimension to politics. Mayors and city council members, used to the traditional laid-back suburban-style politics of the Southland, must act as referees in close-quarters disputes between suspicious strangers.

That’ll be the test of the next generation of local politicians in L.A., Orange County, the Inland Empire, wherever the wide-open spaces and laissez-faire spirit of the old Southland is being overtaken by a huge immigration, a booming birth rate and a sharp rise in the number of seniors.

I got an earful of that future recently from Bernard Rosen, vice president of the West Wilshire Senior Citizens Club, who told me about tense times at the recreation center at Pan Pacific Park.

The park is in a diverse, crowded neighborhood. There, Jewish seniors and young Orthodox Jewish families live in apartments, condos and classic Los Angeles Spanish-style single-family homes. Retired people and young professionals, white and black, are in Park La Brea, the neighborhood’s towering apartment complex. A few blocks away, crowded apartments south of Wilshire Boulevard provide housing for Latino immigrants.

All of them come together--not always happily--in the park and its recreation center. Longtime homeowners complain about the large numbers of immigrants. And the seniors, who use the center for lunches, reading and meetings, are unhappy with teen-age basketball players and small children at the center’s after-school club.

Bernie Rosen and other club leaders have been demanding separate quarters for seniors since 1983. The city councilman in the area, John Ferraro, agrees with them. But oddly enough, City Council President Ferraro has been helpless in the face of the bureaucracy.

When I met Rosen at Park La Brea, I saw that Ferraro faced a formidable foe. Rosen is an 83-year-old retired trial lawyer who’s recently resumed playing tennis. That cuts into his time for contract bridge, visiting family and friends and fighting City Hall. His wife worries that all the activities are too much of a strain. But Rosen told me that “it’s awakened me. I feel alive as a result of this.”

Unhappy with Ferraro, Rosen had sent to Mayor Tom Bradley a letter of complaint. “The space alloted to us was a closet converted into an office; a kitchen and one room, severely limiting our effort to assist and help senior citizens who need a place for companionship, hot lunches, social activities. . . .” Rosen wrote.

Ferraro has tried. He assigned his ace constituent trouble-shooter, field deputy Tom LaBonge, to the case. LaBonge found that more than $600,000 in city funds had been set aside by the city Recreation and Parks Department to enlarge the facilities.

But an unimaginative bureaucracy has blocked the project. The city planning department said a bigger parking lot would be needed if the center is expanded. True, most of the seniors don’t drive there. But that doesn’t matter. Rules are rules.

Expansion of the parking lot would wipe out a lawn and a playground area. So that’s out. Ferraro proposed building a separate seniors center in a vacant portion of the park. That sounded sensible, but it won’t fly, either, because the land is owned by the state.

Technically, Pan Pacific is a state park even though it’s operated by the city and the county. Last August, an especially unimaginative state official, Henry F. Agonia, the director of beaches and parks, ruled that “the senior citizens recreation center is too limited for a state park, which is dedicated to the use and enjoyment of the general public.”

I’m sure this will probably be settled. Ferraro’s got some muscle with state legislators. He’ll get them to talk sense into Director Agonia and convince him that Pan Pacific is an urban park, not Big Basin State Redwood Park. A senior citizens center wouldn’t spoil the view. And, since $600,000 won’t buy much of a building these days, Ferraro can probably supplement it by forcing area developers, trying to curry favor with the city, to help finance a new seniors center.

But it will have taken almost a decade--too long a wait for some of the seniors. In the old wide-open L.A., Ferraro would have simply have had the city build the seniors a new center on a vacant lot. He can’t do that anymore. We’ve run out of space.