The Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook, a stretch of park overlooking Los Angeles, has new park visitor centers designed by Safdie Rabines Architects. Early planning phases of the landscape architecture were done by Pamela Burton, and later taken over by the San Diego office of Wallace Roberts and Todd and the restoration ecology firm, Earthworks. Although the landscape architecture work is in progress, Christopher Hawthorne of the LA Times views the park as successful: ”The ensemble of architecture and reshaped topography comes together at the park in an compellingly frank whole. The design strives to update the popular notion of what a state park can achieve architecturally, trading the ranger station tucked away in the shade of a pine tree for a crisp ensemble of buildings squeezed almost entirely dry of romanticism.”
The land for the park was purchased by the state government parks department in 2000. According to the LA Times, the parks deparment used funds provided in large part by Proposition 12, a statewide bond measure, and spent USD 41 million for the 68-acre property. “At the time, that was a record price per acre for undeveloped land in the L.A. metro region, although the state itself soon broke the mark by paying $30 million for the 32-acre “cornfield” property on the edge of Chinatown, where it is now developing an ambitious plan by landscape architect George Hargreaves and architect Michael Maltzan.”
The LA Times explains how the park project has already reached USD 50 million. “After spending more than $40 million to purchase the land for the park, the state dedicated $10 million to building it, a figure that includes the new buildings and trails and landscape work that is now reintroducing a range of native species. That 4-to-1 ratio of land cost to development cost suggests the challenges of trying to shoehorn new park space into an expensive and built-out urban region.”
The LA Times says the state government seems to be taking the lead on the ambitious parks project. “Those projects, along with a new state park at the Taylor Yards site along the Los Angeles River north of downtown, suggest that the most significant effort to create major city parks in Southern California is being coordinated in Sacramento, rather than in L.A.’s City Hall or in Washington. All three have been overseen by the state park department’s Urban Strategic Initiative Team, which for years has looked for opportunities to build new green space in crowded sections of our biggest cities.” One of those opportunities may be the plan to connect a series of parks in LA so wildlife can move through a protected green corridor. The goal is to eventually cover 1,300 acres, from the beach and to the mountains.
Image credit: Los Angeles Times
