MacArthur Park

MacArthur Park. . , Westlake Park First , MacArthur Park and its scenic pond began to enchant visitors late in the 19th century. Then called Westlake Park, the Los Angeles Times observed in 1891, that it was "a pretty, breezy spot. The lake is well provided with boats, which are liberally patronized, and a band plays once a week." The park marked the western edge of the Los Angeles city limits, separated from the town center by Crown Hill. Beyond to the Pacific lay 14 miles of mustard grass and wheat fields, wild barrancas and crumbling rancho adobes. Hard work and the cultivation of flowers and trees transformed an alkali mud hole and trash dump that the city had obtained from the father of World War II General George S. Patton. , Postcards from the turn of the century show the park in Victorian regalia, with formally dressed families enjoying the walking paths and gardens that circled the lake. Every year on July 4, crowds came by carriage and street car to watch fireworks launched over the water. , Westlake Park was also where the queen of the annual Fiesta de Los Angeles would be ferried across the lake in a regatta of elaborately decorated gondolas. As Los Angeles grew, the park became an idyllic retreat from the stresses of urban life. It also attracted the colorful array of preachers, sybarites and eccentrics that the city was known to gather. "A vast amount of therapeutic lore was to be had for nothing in Westlake Park," a 1920s novel said. "The elderly men and women, hailing chiefly from the Mississippi watershed, who had made this pleasance their daily rendezvous...seem to have experienced all ailments, tried all cures." , Bohemian Neighborhood , Around the park a lively district of hotels, professional offices and design studios formed. Leading Los Angeles architects such as John and Donald Parkinson and Stiles O. Clements introduced a variety of styles to the Westlake District, and several of their buildings survive. Art schools such as the Otis Art Institute, the Chouinard Art Institute and Art Center created the city's first somewhat Bohemian neighborhood and filled the area around the park with students. (The elite Westlake School for Girls was located for many years on Alvarado Street facing the park.) The 1926 West Coast Westlake Theatre at Alvarado and Wilshire, a city historic-cultural landmark, featured nearly 2,000 seats for plays and first-run movies and a brilliant rooftop sign. Ceiling artwork by renowned muralist Anthony Heinsbergen can still be glimpsed inside the converted theater. , MacArthur Park Second , Westlake Park's presence at the center of an artist district led to the placement of unusual sculptures across the acreage. Prometheus Bringing Fire to Earth, located where Wilshire Boulevard enters the park from the east, is a fine example of the works added during the Federal Art Project years of the Depression. Many others were installed during a revival of interest in the park in the 1980s that included relighting of neon signs on surrounding rooftops. By then the park had been split in two by the curving Wilshire Boulevard viaduct, which opened in 1934 as a traffic relief measure. Until then, cars and buses traveling on the city's main boulevard needed to detour around Westlake Park. , In 1942 the name itself was changed to honor Army General Douglas MacArthur, commander of Allied forces in the Pacific during World War II. William Randolph Hearst, publisher of the Los Angeles Examiner and many other newspapers across the country, thought the tribute could help his crusade to run MacArthur for president against Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Hearst's political operative in City Hall pushed the change through before the neighborhood knew it was even up for discussion. For many decades after, long-time residents clung to the old name. The area around the park is still officially the Westlake District.