Welcome to Los Angeles! (Just try not to touch anything)

In an effort to promote positive first-impressions for visiting cruise goers, the City of Los Angeles built a very attractive new gateway, adjacent to the parking lot where the massive cruise ships come in, at the base of the Vincent Thomas Bridge in San Pedro.

The new park is about 1/4 mile long and runs the length of the parking area for the cruise ships. It includes lots of palm trees and fancy benches, as well as a really beautiful water feature. I mean, this water feature ROCKS. There is a sound/light show every 20 minutes and water shoots 50 feet in the air while bold classical music plays.

At night, the cool factor is magnified by amazing lighting.


But as we walked the length of the ribbon-park, which includes fancy chess-board-topped granite tables and benches, I started to get mad: this was a gorgeous Sunday afternoon, yet we were almost the only ones in the park. Perhaps it was the fact that, when you are actually in the park, you look through a barbwire-topped, chain-link fence at a sea of a parking lot. Having just moved back from NY, where parks are packed and thrive, this just seemed like such an LA-park: $14 million spent on a space that is beautiful to look at but will never be used!

Confirming my gut-feeling that this park was meant to be seen-but-not-touched were at least a dozen of the most awful, sloppy-looking sandwich board signs, warning park users (yes, all three of us) not to dare go in the water, under threat of the fountain turning off! How insulting. And random? Why would I want to swim in an 8-inch-deep fountain, with all sorts of metal hardware sticking up in it?