‘Central Park’ of L.A. Is a Jewel, Regardless of NFL

It was summer in the park. Somewhere, high rollers were wheeling and dealing. Somewhere, the very image of Los Angeles was supposedly at stake. But here and now--under a tall tree where it is said the NFL must be installed or we’ll all be sorry--the pizza man Lino Castro and his boy, Johnnie, were having a little picnic. Just because it was summer. In the park.

In a while, they would maybe go and kick a soccer ball around on the grass beyond the Coliseum. Maybe they’d do it over there, past where Sara Grijalva lay on a blanket with her baby, Estrellita, and her 4-year-old, Angel. “Whooo!” Sara cooed, holding Estrellita in the air like a chubby airplane, so that, looking up, there was this perfect view: her baby’s face and blue sky and white clouds. Angel laughed. “Mucho calor en la casa,” Sara explained, gesturing toward her suffocating little apartment on 40th Place, on the other side of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. But here, on this emerald knoll, there was sweet mercy. It was one of the nicer sides of summer here, she said. This park.

Oh, this park. It’s so urban, so big, the scene lately of so much big-dollar drama. The standoff over whether to resurrect pro football, and at what cost, and at whose profit, has painted the place itself almost as a tear-down-to-be. Lost in the posturing has been its pricelessness in this metropolis of private spaces, the fact that it’s Exposition Park, a public amenity.

Not that “park” means as much in the modern lexicon, when a park might also be of the office or industrial variety. Not that the worth of one has even come up lately, except in terms of refeathering the home of the Coliseum as a nest for golden NFL geese. To those bickering over pro football, the vast public acreage around the historic stadium has been not a common treasure but a “venue,” an “investment,” an “opportunity” that must be made to “happen.” As if they were talking about some vacant lot rather than one of the few public spaces that actually function in this park-starved city. As if the name were “Exposition Development Site.”

But on this summer morning, great throngs of common people trooped through this place that was said to have an uncommon need for some NFL franchise, one that would be paid for by, uh, them.

At the California Science Center, there was a contingent from a youth program run out of the Norwalk sheriff’s station, and a busload from a Jewish Family Service day camp. There was a group of veiled Muslim women and a dad in the Rose Garden yelling at his kids in German. There was a suburbanite named Christine Camelia, in from the South Bay with a daughter, a son, two nephews and the neighbor’s baby; it was the first time she’d been here in two years.

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At the city-run Exposition Recreation Center on the other side of the Coliseum, hundreds of children in pink and brown “Camp Expo” T-shirts chomped down brown-bag lunches; the laughing and squealing was so loud that you had to shout to converse. Two 7-year-old girls with beaded braids walked along with arms slung best-friend-style around each other’s shoulders. Three 10-year-old girls perfected an intricate line-dance stomp.

“See that soccer field over there?” gestured Keith Cruickshank, executive director of a nonprofit called Kids In Sports that is headquartered in the park. “On evenings and weekends, you can’t find an inch of spare space on it, so many people come over here to play soccer from the community. And when you hear about the soccer games at the Coliseum, attended by 90,000 or whatever? You wouldn’t believe how many of those people walk here.”

Cruickshank mentioned master planned improvements for the park that have nothing whatever to do with this on-again, off-again NFL business: a new senior center, a new day-care center, a repair job (finally!) for the historic swim stadium, which was built for the 1932 Olympics and has been yellow-tagged since the Northridge quake. A second soccer field. Yes, a pro football team would be great, he said, but with or without it, there was plenty going on around the Coliseum.

“This,” he said, “is the Central Park of L.A.”

And so it shall be, whether the NFL takes it or leaves it, whether anyone ever makes money from it or not. Somehow, while no one was looking, Exposition Park turned into that most valuable of L.A. commodities: a decent, life-affirming, communal space that works. To wander it now is to find yourself picturing all sorts of lovely “public investments”--for example, an investment in ripping up some of the asphalt that is still too abundant, and replacing it with soft grass and shady trees. Trees like the one that, the other morning, watched as a boy and a girl stood entangled in a summer kiss that seemed to last forever, there in the park, pricelessly.

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Shawn Hubler’s column runs Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.