You Can Has Freeway Park!

Pssst...readers! Wanna be more Militant? Wanna be more involved in the community? Wanna play an active role in our City's future?

The proponents of the Hollywood Freeway Central Park are having a community-wide meeting on Saturday morning, January 26 at Selma Ave. Elementary School in Hollywood to discuss the proposal with members of the community and initiate community's thoughts and input on the park. Wanna see it happen? Militant Angeleno says, "Be There!"

The Militant may or may not be there, of course. But a number of his operatives definitely will be, as well as councilmen Eric Garcetti and Tom LaBonge, two local officials who the Militant is known to hang out with.

For those of you just catching up, the Hollywood Freeway Central Park is a proposal to build a structural cap over the below-street level section of the Hollywood Freeway between Bronson Ave. and Santa Monica Blvd. and create a 34-acre greenway and recreation space on it (Yeah, it's gonna cost a lot of dough...).

One of the Militant's first posts talked about the park plan as he attended a meeting of involved community members back in June of last year (and wrote about it in the first person, no less). Our City is extremely parkspace-deficient, especially in the Hollywood area, and though it won't even bring the area up to acceptable parkspace-per-resident levels, any addition of parkspace in the Hollywood area will be beneficial.

Sounds like a crazy idea? Other freeway cap parks exist in the country in places like Boston and Seattle. More closer to home, the half-mile long Margaret T. Hance Park in Phoenix, AZ sits over the 10 Freeway and is home to that city's Central Library and a Japanese Garden. Even closer, there are short freeway cap parks in San Diego (over the 15) and Memorial Park in La Cañada Flintridge (over the 210).

Though already some have come out in opposition. Aside from those who naturally have issues with the possible structural integrity (see Boston's Big Dig), terrorism or those asshats who would rather see the freeway widened and double-decked, there are some ultra-paranoid tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theorist freakos in the community who believe the City is supporting a park that will "never get built" and is just fronting it as a ploy to re-zone the area for superdensity and use eminent domain to kick out all the existing residents (Um, if the park never gets built, what incentive is there for developers to build a large parkside condo if there's no park in the first place?).

Of course, if you like to believe that stuff, kindly go to the nearest gun store, purchase a pistol, load it with bullets, point it to your own head, and pull the trigger, since anyone who's that cynical might as well not continue living anyway.

The proposed park over the Hollywood Freeway would be another jewel in Hollywood to benefit locals and tourists alike. Most of all it would provide a means for people, especially children, in the community to have somewhere to play (as opposed to the streets or private parking lots, like they do now), and it would ultimately re-unite neighborhoods that were divided when the freeway was built.