The Warriors of Summer : Armed with special municipal funds, directors of suburban parks battle problems usually associated with the inner city.

Children played basketball outside Sepulveda Recreation Center on a recent Wednesday afternoon. A mother pushed her baby on the swings. In other words, the park was being used by the sorts of people who wouldn’t have stepped foot there a few years ago.

Back then, the most common activities on the playground involved drugs and violence.

“The first day I got here, there was one guy snorting coke and another guy smoking a joint. That was just outside my office,” recalled Chuck Singer, Sepulveda’s director. “I was scared to death. I thought, ‘What have I gotten myself into?’ ”

Sepulveda was one of more than a dozen Valley parks that had slipped into disarray. At the Van Nuys Recreation Center, gamblers and drug dealers worked the parking lot. Street gangs had turned Pacoima’s Hubert Humphrey Recreation Center into their exclusive hangout.

“Those kids were used to doing crime as a recreational activity,” said Pat Kanan, Humphrey’s director.

The stereotypical suburban park is verdant and safe, a place like Northridge Recreation Center or the one in Woodland Hills, where there are acres of lawns and trees, baseball diamonds and tennis courts.

In the Valley’s 15 designated troubled parks--which are almost exclusively in low-income neighborhoods east of the San Diego Freeway--people like Singer and Kanan are battling the types of problems that were previously associated only with inner-city parks. Using special municipal funds and some seat-of-the-pants ingenuity, they are trying for a Cinderella-like transformation.

The money has come from a 2-year-old Urban Impact Parks project, which identified the 66 worst parks in the city and devoted $2.8 million to increased maintenance, staffing and security. Other parks, designated as “borderline,” have been given extra part-time staffing.

The ingenuity--perhaps even more effective--has taken shape in unusual ways.

This summer, as Valley residents turn to their parks for respite from the concrete and crowding, they will find significant improvements. The stories of directors Singer and Kanan and Mike Wooden, at Van Nuys Recreation Center, provide a brief example of how parks are adapting to a changing population in changing times.

SEPULVEDA RECREATION CENTER

This place used to be known as “the armpit.” A crowd of unemployed men nearly always hung around the gym. Crime was routine--one regular was stabbed to death trying to break up a fight on the basketball courts.

The first thing the city did was remodel the outside of the gym. Recessed doorways and nooks were removed so people couldn’t hide in them while using drugs.

But Singer still had to contend with the regulars. He couldn’t force them to leave, and the police couldn’t come by every five minutes to do it for him. So Singer negotiated. First, he handed out paper bags to hide liquor bottles in. Next, he set a picnic table in the far corner of the park.

“I said, ‘This is your bench,’ ” Singer recalled. “ ‘I’m never going to call the cops on you if you drink over here.’ ”

At the same time, Virginia Corbin, his assistant, visited schools and mailed flyers to attract other types of people to the center’s baseball league, karate classes and senior citizen program. As these classes and activities grew more popular, the crime rate decreased.

“If you bring in baseball teams and that sort of thing, the people involved are good citizens,” said Officer Tim Bergstrom, who explained that the Los Angeles Police Department has worked with Singer to increase patrols that go by the recreation center.

But problems still crop up.

Hoping to improve the park’s reputation, Singer persuaded a women’s club to hold its gatherings at the center.

“It took them just one meeting,” Singer said. “The guys playing basketball went over to the steps and started talking. It was ‘-------- this’ and ‘-------- that.’ The ladies never came back.”

The problem is that public parks are for everyone, even unemployed men who use crude language.

“The regulars are a part of us,” Singer said. “There’s not much you can do about it.”

At least, Bergstrom said, “We haven’t had a murder in that park since Cinco de Mayo ’90.”

VAN NUYS RECREATION CENTER

In the early 1900s, parks weren’t exclusively for baseball or swinging on the swings. The landscaped areas within cities often abutted settlement houses. Later, public organizations used parks as meeting places. Parks were entwined with the community’s social life.

More recently, with the proliferation of gyms, fields and courts, parks have become known primarily for their games. Today’s recreation directors find themselves grasping for new ways to involve the community, and not just inside the chalk lines of a ball field.

This task can be especially difficult in immigrant areas where the population changes continually. At the small Van Nuys center, tucked behind Van Nuys Boulevard, Mike Wooden took a long look at the neighborhoods around him.

“At Northridge, people want to take tennis classes. In this area, they don’t have the money for that,” Wooden said. “But these people still have needs. It’s my job to figure out what their needs are.”

So he advertised in flyers that his gym was available for rent at a low cost. Aliancia Mexicana, an education service for Latino women, began teaching classes there. Narcotics Anonymous moved its meetings into the park.

“We get to sit out on the grass for some meetings,” said a Narcotics Anonymous staff member. “I guess it gives us a different perspective.”

And every second Tuesday of the month, the center hosts a group of bondholders who are trying to get their money back from a failed savings and loan.

“In the Los Angeles park system, it’s been a traditional recreation program of classes and activities,” Wooden said. “A lot of centers in my type of area should become more of a community center.”

Van Nuys is also hoping to open a preschool for children of working parents as soon as the city erects wrought-iron fencing around a portion of the grounds to keep out “undesirable types.”

HUBERT HUMPHREY RECREATION CENTER

Last November, the regulars at this Pacoima park were on hand to greet the new director.

“There were gang members smoking dope in the lobby,” said Pat Kanan, recalling his first day on the job. “I told them to leave or I’d call the police. They didn’t believe me, but I did call. The next day, they came into my office and asked me why I did that.”

Kanan had transferred from Eagle Rock Recreation Center, a thriving park in a more-affluent neighborhood. He chose Humphrey because it looked like a challenge.

The center had fallen into such disarray that it hadn’t offered youth baseball--a traditional staple at most Los Angeles parks--for more than a decade. When Kanan organized tryouts, 90% of the youngsters who showed up couldn’t afford gloves.

Parks suffering from situations like this are caught between a rock and a hard place. The city’s recreation centers raise some of their money from class and activity fees. A center in a poor neighborhood must charge low fees because the residents can’t afford to pay much. For instance, Humphrey’s baseball league costs each child $25 while other parks charge as much as $60.

Because it collects lower fees, Humphrey had only $49 in its park-generated savings account and couldn’t afford to buy gloves for its young baseball players.

Kanan came up with a solution.

He purchased a block of cheap tickets to a Dodger game and took all the youngsters to Glove Night, when the stadium hands out free gloves to each child in attendance.

“This rec center is like an old car,” the director said. “It’ll run, but there are always problems.”

Bringing younger youths back to the park, which for years was considered off-limits because of gang activity, is Kanan’s primary goal. He visits elementary schools and offers free, after-school sports clinics.

“It’s almost too late for the teen-agers,” Kanan said. “The younger kids, that’s where we try to change their way of thinking.”

So one of the volunteer baseball coaches took his team on a hike through Vasquez Rocks County Park in Saugus. The park is also offering an overnight camping trip, and the baseball league, which started from scratch, now has 75 players.

“At first, parents were leery about leaving their kids at the park,” the director said. “Now they let their kids come here even when there isn’t baseball practice. They’re using the rec center like it was meant to be used.”

Parks were peaceful places when John Maghakian first started working for the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks in 1959. He staffed centers all over the city before becoming the Valley’s principal recreation supervisor. Maghakian said that, with all the problems that recreation directors face today, there is no way he would go back to working in the parks.

“We say to our directors, ‘We’ll give you a facility and grow some grass and paint over the graffiti. But we can’t give you much money and we can’t help stop the drive-by shootings,’ ” Maghakian said. “Yet, they run a hell of a program.

“Recreation people are different and they’re strange,” he said. “They go through hell, but they love it.”

Troubled Parks

The city’s Recreation and Parks Department places troubled parks into one of two categories. The worst are “Urban Impact Parks,” which receive special funds for maintenance, staffing and security. “Borderline” parks receive extra staffing.

Urban Impact Parks * Hubert Humphrey in Pacoima * Lanark in Canoga Park * Pacoima * Sepulveda * Victory-Vineland in North Hollywood

Borderline Parks * Branford in Arleta * Delano in Van Nuys * Fernangeles in Sun Valley * Lake View Terrace * North Hollywood * Paxton in Pacoima * Sun Valley * Sylmar * Valley Plaza in North Hollywood * Van Nuys