Radio Hill Gardens

Tightly wedged between Downtown and Echo Park, the Radio Hill Gardens are situated on a spit of wild land, gone to seed and mostly inhabited (semi-clandestinely) by a contingent of LA's vast and diverse homeless population.  The land itself lies just beyond Chinatown, readily visible if one looks Northeast down Broadway or Hill Street.  I had never heard of Radio Hill, and assumed I was looking at the Southernmost reaches of Elysian Park, which in a way I was.  Elysian, the second-largest park in Los Angeles, is a 600 acre inverted-crescent of outdoor space.  It's the home to both Dodger's Stadium and the Los Angeles Police Academy.   The stadium and its sprawling parking lots take up a considerable amount of the acreage, situated in the natural bowl shape formed by the curve of the ridge.  It's southernmost tip actually stretches around Radio Hill.  So it's easy to view Radio Hill as a kind of extension of Elysian Park, even though the two areas, as I was to find out shortly, are radically different from each other.

Parks are one of the great saving virtues of Los Angeles.  That's probably true of most cities, but in hypertrophied LA, with its teeming grid of highways, endless subdivisions, and implacable expanse of hot-blue sky, it's especially true.  LA's parks, in relation to the urban and suburban sprawl, often appear overmatched, even the rangy Griffith Park, which is cut through with wide trails and roads.  But the green spaces still provide a deeply needed break from the oppressive monotony of concrete, glass, stucco, and asphalt.  For the outdoor-minded, the appearance of these quasi-wild places is itself an enticement.  They draw you in.  For many others, less inclined to partake in nature themselves, it at least makes for pleasant scenery.  Upon seeing what turned out to be Radio Hill, I was intrigued.  As soon as I saw it, I wanted to explore it.  These little oases of wilderness, meager though they are, comprise an integral part of LA's weird appeal.  Taking in the haphazard construction of the city, with its innumerable cantons, barrios, enclaves, and subdivisions, can be overwhelming, even to the point of visceral discomfort.  It has a sort of third-world feel (although my third-word - developing world, to use the current parlance - is strictly limited, I can't help but conjecture a certain affinity), implying a fevered opportunism, a frantic expansion in all directions, a city built on the wing.  More than once, the neighborhood "planning" of LA has been called a "crazy quilt."  This is a description that fits, both for its suggestion of colorful patchwork and its invocation of insanity.  It's hard to view the human-made texture of Los Angeles as the product of anything other than madness.  Glittering and endless, it resembles the vision of someone in the grips of a manic episode: limitless, opulent, jagged, impossible.  And yet it exists.

Just to suggest another overheated metaphor - Los Angeles's physical structure can seem like the scattered debris of a great explosion.  As though a bomb has detonated and flung the superdense initial matter in all directions, which has since settled and calcified into glittering hillside developments, run-down stretches tract of housing, and occasional flashes of avant-garde fancy.

In either case, LA's sprawl creates all kinds of unexpected juxtapositions.  As in the case of Radio Hill, it means that certain areas of the city just winds up being forgotten.  As Nina and I walked up the winding road, which had, inexplicably, been recently paved, we gradually found ourselves slipping into the Interzone of LA.   If you've lived here and done some exploring, you know what I'm talking about: that liminal place, situated between the settled and the wild, between the grossly overrun and the eerily abandoned.  On the south side of the hill (the park is one big hill) the background noise of the city gradually slipped away, even as the majestic view of downtown rose behind us.  Cresting the hillside, there was a tiny parking area (again, recently paved, although the main road has long been closed to any vehicle traffic) with two freshly painted handicapped parking spaces.  Off to one side was the eponymous radio tower, one of those crude, unintentional monuments of the digital communications era, bristling with drumlike transmitter/receivers and pointy antennae.  At its base was a small houselike structure, surrounded by fences.  We didn't even bother to approach it.  It had that standoffish vibe that I imagine the dwellings of trolls would have.  Off to one side was a spectacularly foul-smelling and overflowing dumpster, one of a few that had apparently been deposited here, for reasons unknown.

The flora of Radio Hill is dense and foreboding, especially by Los Angeles park standards.  There's been no obvious effort to clean it any time in the recent past, so it's littered with all kinds of trash - wrappers, tattered clothes, cruelly twisted bicycle wheels, empty cigarette packs.   It's not an out-and-out dump.  Most of the trash exists around the margins, several feet off the main path.  But there is a lot of it.   The refuse takes a while to notice; you sort of have to let your eyes adjust to it.  But once you do, you see how much of it there is, and it settles on you in that bleak, sad way; a heaviness.   But it's more than that - for me, at least, there's also that frisson, I suspect borne of danger and a certain lurid fascination with decay, that creeps up your spine.  This is a forlorn place.  Secret things happen here; mostly sad, some scary, some merely banal.  But they happen in secret, off the grid, even though they occur mere fractions of a mile from one of the Grid's great epicenters - the LAPD headquarters. 

The signs have all been painted over, in successive layers of graffiti, and are not almost totally illegible.  At one time, the top area was meant to be a protected habitat for butterflies and hummingbirds.  Now it's an unkempt patch of scrubby trees, wilderness left to its own devices.  I don't know if the hummingbirds ever stayed; on this quiet afternoon, there were none.   On the other side of the Hill, the 110 Freeway incessantly roars.  It's unbearable.  All of the park's residents seem to agree with my assessment, and live on the opposite side.  As we ventured further into the remains of the garden, past scrub oak trees and poured-concrete benches, my anxiety began to bloom.  This is one of those places where very bad things can happen.  Upon passing that initial dumpster, I felt a wave of revulsion that felt positively reptilian.  I could imagine a dead body decaying in there.  I was carrying a plastic cup in one hand, the remains of an iced-tea-to-go.  I didn't dare approach any of the dumpsters; besides the foreboding smells emanating from them, it seemed inappropriate to add to their already prodigious loads of refuse.

At the end of the sandy path is a fence.  Across the way, Southernmost reach of Elysian Park was bathed in amber light.  Compared to where we stood, it looked as lushly green and manicured as a golf course.  The fence - black chain-link - which divided the downward slope from the part of the park intended, in bygone days, for "recreation" - had a gaping hole cut into it.  Very deliberately, somebody had sliced the fence and curled up the jagged edges.  It had the look of a well-worn path.  

After seeing that, it was time to go.  We had gradually been seeing signs of the indigent inhabitants of Radio Hill.  (tbd)