L.A. Youths Dig Beautifying a Neighborhood
Not far from the notorious site of the Belmont Learning Complex near downtown Los Angeles, Adam Deras and his younger brothers spent a recent Sunday morning gardening. Hoisting a pickax and shovels, they loosened stiff, stone-laden soil in front of an old apartment house.
The brothers were taking part in an urban beautification experiment unfolding in the Temple-Beaudry area. Artful miniature gardens are springing up along crowded streets dotted with active and abandoned oil wells, bringing back a touch of nature to the urban core.
The gardens are the product of Spiraling Roots, a collaboration of artists, scientists and neighborhood residents who have joined forces to revitalize the neighborhood’s ailing ecology. Spiraling Roots wants to improve not only the area’s appearance, but also its environmental health.
By filling median strips with California poppies and white and black sages, the group hopes that the plants once native to what is now a concrete jungle can dig deep into the ground, helping break down petroleum-based pollution.
“We’re trying to answer the question: Can you improve the wildlife conditions above ground and the contamination below?” said Travis Longcore, a research assistant professor at USC’s Center for Sustainable Cities.
Longcore, who also is science director of the Urban Wildlands Group, a Los Angeles-based conservation organization, launched Spiraling Roots with the folks from ARTScorpsLA, a collective of artists dedicated to resident-oriented community development.
The art gardens are an effort to “look at how we can make this area more active and healthy,” said Tricia Ward, founding artistic director of ARTScorpsLA.
So far about 10 art gardens have been planted on roughly 40-foot-long strips of soil that line residential streets in the Temple-Beaudry area, a low-income neighborhood west of the downtown Civic Center. Plans call for 20 more gardens over the next two years in the project area, which is bounded by Glendale Boulevard, Beaudry Avenue and West 1st and West Temple streets.
Ward surveyed the oldest Spiraling Roots garden, which was planted about a year ago, as Mary Proteau, an ARTScorpsLA development associate, cleared the site of litter. Decorative stepping stones had been interspersed with seedlings that have grown into tall, bushy plants, which residents were later shown how to trim.
“It’s kind of a mess,” Ward said. “It needs to be pruned.”
Longcore wants to see if native plants are superior to grass at cleansing soil because they are adapted to the climate, have deeper roots and require less maintenance.
Several dozen volunteers gathered Jan. 25 at Spiraling Orchard Artpark -- a rundown lot transformed by ARTScorpsLA into a community gathering place off Court Street -- to tend the existing gardens and ready a site for a future one.
The volunteers included Deras, 20, and his brothers, who live on Bixel Street.
“We’re helping the community look better,” Deras said as he took a break from prepping a site for a future planting. “Usually it has a bad reputation because of all the gangs and all the garbage.”
As Deras pierced the soil with a pickax, his little brothers, Erick, 13, and Joseph, 11, used shovels to break down thick chunks of earth. A third brother, Edwin, 18, had momentarily wandered away. “It gives them a little physical activity and gets them involved in the community,” Deras said of his siblings.
Members of the El Segundo High School Key Club tore at a scruffy strip of sod a few feet away. “We’re trying to find something that helps out another community,” club President Mychael Castillo said of fellow Key Club members Joe Concialdi and Davey Miltenberger.
Around the corner, William Todd, chairman of the Studio City Beautification Assn., helped clean up a fledgling garden littered with weeds and dozens of cigarette butts.
“It’s really started to expand my base of knowledge from beautification -- which I thought was just planting trees -- to urban renewal,” Todd said.
Volunteers previously had beautified a curved retaining wall above the garden Todd was tending with blue, red, brown, yellow and green paint, which abruptly stopped at graffiti.
Ward hopes to complete the painting, but said local gang members would be asked first if volunteers could paint over the graffiti. “If you want them to respect you, you have to show them respect as well,” Ward said.
Kathy Morales, lead organizer of Vecinos de Spiraling Orchard, a neighborhood group that works with ARTScorpsLA to build community support for the park and gardens, said the gardens have given residents a sense of pride in their community and an incentive to keep their streets clean.
Some locals are concerned, however, that the improvements could attract developers to the neighborhood with its proximity to downtown Los Angeles.
“We’re afraid it’s going to backfire because it will look better to outsiders and they will want to take [our neighborhood] away from us,” Morales said.
Longcore hopes the project will serve as a model for cleaning up oil-contaminated soil in other neglected neighborhoods.
In addition to monitoring the miniature art gardens, Longcore is using dirt from the Temple-Beaudry area to run a controlled experiment back on campus with Joe Devinny, a professor of environmental engineering at USC.
They want to see which plants cleanse the soil best.
Entomologist Ken Osborne is keeping tabs on whether the gardens in the Temple-Beaudry area will attract more native insects to the community.
He captured the interest of a group of young volunteers with a display of several dozen butterflies, bees and other insects previously collected in the gardens.
“Can anyone explain why this fly benefits from looking like a bee?” Osborne asked.
“So that other bugs won’t mess with it,” replied Sarah Cowan, 11, of Westchester.
“You got it,” Osborne said.
Sarah was one of several members of Temple Beth Am who spent Jan. 25 gardening and catching bugs.
“It’s good to teach the kids the importance of helping,” said Sarah’s father, Randy.
