Finally, More Parkland in Blair Hills

Jon Melvin

The former Linda Vista Culver City school land in Blair Hills had been used for several years by the Ohr Eliyahu School.  They became too large for the area and sold this land to LA County Parks, which allowed us to realize another piece of a very long term dream for our area: more park land.  This event follows more than 10 years of struggle to prevent a huge housing development from being built on the top of what is now the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook, in which Blair Hills played a key part.  Mary Ann Greene led the final years of this effort, and a video of her talking about the Overlook can be seen in the visitors center.  Lloyd Dixon has served on the Conservancy Board and has also helped.  County, Conservancy, and State people all gathered together to help purchase the land from the developer just as the bulldozers were beginning to plow the hill.

The Linda Vista school land will now be added to this park and to a long range vision for converting all of the PXP oil fields into one of the largest inner city parks in the world.  Because of the very limited access to this new land from the narrow streets of Blair Hills (access directly from La Cienega was investigated but was not possible at this time), a quiet, passive use which would draw few people is proposed.

A number of people in Blair Hills welcome this new park land with great enthusiasm, but there are also quite a number of people, particularly along the street adjacent to the land, who are very concerned that it could bring a lot of traffic in the way the stairs at the scenic overlook has completely clogged Jefferson and Hetzler Road.  Thus, this initially welcome event has become controversial.  Park people insist that passive use proposed will not draw large numbers of people, that it will be completely different that the stairs on Jefferson.  But some Blair Hills residents insist that there will be big problems and state that they do not trust park people to assess the problem properly.

The process for development of this land consists of several community meetings where plans are discussed, each person present is asked to speak, and then there is a vote on ideas which are proposed by those present and by
landscape architects involved in the project.  An initial meeting enumerated a number of ideas.  The second meeting, on 8/8/2012, allowed us to review three plans developed from these ideas and mark which plan and which
items in each plan people liked and did not like.  These included an exercise path, a small community room and office, benches, yoga platforms, native plant and water use areas, shaded walkways, and a communal farming area.  The next steps will be to combine the ideas from this meeting into a final plan, and initiate the EIR process (which also allows for citizen input).

We in Blair Hills are very proud of successfully fighting for parkland in our area during the last 20 years.   The Scenic Overlook’s popularity is a testament to Los Angeles community’s commitment to exercise and sharing this open space.  Culver City and the County and State are now working on mitigating the traffic that was an unintended consequence, both by  improvements along Jefferson and trail changes to get traffic and pedestrians off of Hetzler Road.  With the planned new park in Blair Hills and other efforts within Culver City to bring more passive use to our city parks, we will be seeing open space development needed by older citizens in our community as well.  This is a time to embrace and support all of these changes, and work together in a positive way to resolve impacts.  I hope we all come together to do so.

Jon Melvin is a Board Member for the Blair Hills Association.