MONROVIA – Gwendolyn Jones remembers visiting Live Oak Cemetery near her home with her 5-year-old daughter Whitney two decades ago.
After her daughter had noticed the cemetery and asked her mom to go and play, the pair looked at the tombstones and ultimately had a picnic right there on the grass.
“That was the best we could do at the moment,” Jones, a resident since 1976, said this week.
While there are seven parks in the city, most are centrally located and none are south of Huntington Drive. Jones says it’s about time that changed.
“My children are adults but I see children playing in the streets,” she said.
City Council members say they’ve committed to making room for a neighborhood park between Huntington Drive and the 210 Freeway and have already begun setting aside funds to do so.
At the request of Councilman Tom Adams, the city has requested staff look into buying a home on the 600 block of Los Angeles Street that is going into foreclosure.
While the house is already in escrow with one potential buyer, the city has made an offer in case that deal falls through, Adams said.
“It’s a corner lot – a great spot for a neighborhood park,” he said.
In addition, city officials are looking into creating a park in the city’s Station Square Transit Village area, where a mixed-use development is planned on 80 acres designed to complement the city’s future Gold Line station.
“With the creation of the Transit Village planning area, we felt it was a great opportunity to provide substantial new park space for the city, and that would serve the community south of Huntington,” said Steve Sizemore, the city’s community development director.
And city employees are now preparing a survey that will soon be distributed – with the help of its Monrovia Area Partnership program – to evaluate residents’ views on creating open space in their neighborhoods, he said.
Community meetings will likely also be held during in the future.
Monrovia has long been deficient in park space compared to surrounding communities since it’s an older city that does not have land available for development, Sizemore said.
Anything that gets built in the city requires purchasing existing development, tearing it down and building something else.
But now there is an opportunity, he said, “to really make some big changes in a part of town that’s long been neglected,” Sizemore said. Since “the (210) Freeway came through and divided the community (in the sixties), there hasn’t been a lot of private or public investment in the area south of the freeway.”
The only city amenity south of Huntington Drive is the fire station on Myrtle Avenue, Sizemore said.
Resident Frances Charles, a retired cosmetologist who lives on E. Los Angeles Street, agreed that something had to be done.
“We really don’t have too many things to go to,” she said. “There is no place really to take kids.”
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