The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce is proposing the “Hollywood Freeway Central Park,” a freeway park deck from Bronson Avenue to Wilton Place above the 101 Freeway in Hollywood, California.
The Hollywood Central Park will provide direct benefits to the public, is precedent-setting example for new land use in the region, will create positive environmental impacts, will promote more active and healthy lifestyles, and will encourage the use of mass transit through transit-oriented development.
The 101 Freeway at the proposed location (Bronson Avenue to Wilton Place) is below street level, with the proposed park deck creating a brief tunnel for vehicular traffic while affording a street-level park for pedestrians. This specified location of the park would also provide a nexus between East Hollywood and Central Hollywood–alleviating the strain on the community from the initial creation of the freeway through this section of Hollywood.
In addition to the many obvious benefits of creating new park space, by placing a “cap” over one of the world’s most congested freeway system, the necessary ventilation system would be required to clean the air before re-circulating it back into the environment - creating a positive improvement in the air quality in Los Angeles.
This park will create an unprecedented 24 acres of new green space in Hollywood, directly adjacent to a high school currently under construction. Currently, the resident to open space ratio is the lowest of all of the City of Los Angeles. In fact, taking the City of Los Angeles as a whole, there is approximately 0.012 acres of open space per resident. Within the community of Hollywood, this figure is only 0.005 acres of open space per resident.
The Trust for Public Land conducted a study in 2003 and found that two-thirds of children in Los Angeles do not live near a park, playground, or other safe place to play. By comparison, New York City’s parks are much more equitably distributed with more than 91 percent of its children living within walking distance of a park. The Trust for Public Land state:
The case for new parks in Los Angeles is perhaps the most compelling of any American metropolitan area. More than 1.5 million children in Los Angeles County do not live within walking distance of a public park, and existing park space is disproportionately concentrated in the region’s wealthy neighborhoods. As a result, studies based on U.S. Census Bureau data show that Latino, African-American, and Asian Pacific Islander youth are dramatically less likely than their White counterparts to enjoy access to open space, playgrounds, and other exercise facilities.
The 80,000+ residents including approximately 21,000 children that live within one-mile square mile in this neighborhood will benefit from the promotion of a more active and healthy lifestyle. With local transit, individual transportation, or simply by walking to the park, the population that will benefit from this park is innumerable. To give a sense of the demographics of the area, the region of Los Angeles, Riverside, and Orange County combined rank 43rd in the nation with a median household income of $45,913. The median income for this one-mile area is $23,481 - nearly half the region’s median income level. In addition, 75.2 percent of this one square-mile population is non-white minorities according to U.S. Census bureau statistics with 53.3 percent of Hispanic ethnicity.
Also, utilizing the air space above the Hollywood Freeway where it is below-grade is not only an exemplary illustration of efficiency and an alternative form of land use, but it is also financially prudent. Preliminary costs to plan and construct the Park are estimated to be less than the cost of purchasing the raw land in the surrounding neighborhood.
To both the east and west of the proposed location, there are Metro Red LineTM subway stations within walking distance and several transit stops nearby, making this a transit-oriented development.
Locally, there is a strong local base of support for this project quoted in every local major media outlet; with all four neighborhood councils endorsing this plan; and with the strong support of elected officials and several government agencies. The Hollywood Central Park Coalition, comprised of these supporters meets bi-monthly to discuss the progress, address questions from the community, and/or develop solutions related to Hollywood Central Park.
http://www.hollywoodfreewaycentralpark.org/
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