For nearly a year, people walking down Wilshire Boulevard in Koreatown have passed a small patch of what used to be one of the few public park spaces in the neighborhood. It\u2019s now locked behind a tall chain link fence.<\/p>\n
Inside, the grass is overgrown and trash is piled up along the edges. The memorial to Sen. Robert F. Kennedy \u2014 built at the site where he was assassinated in 1968 at the Ambassador Hotel \u2014 has fallen into disrepair.<\/p>\n
The Los Angeles Unified School District fenced off RFK Inspiration Park, located on Wilshire Boulevard. Nearly a year later, the district is considering reopening the space, but only to students at the adjacent RFK Community Schools.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s frustrating for some neighbors, who say the park used to belong to everyone.<\/p>\n
\u201cI remember the park being open and suddenly a few months after, it was gated,\u201d said Vanessa Aikens, who lives a few blocks away. \u201cI was just wondering why they gated the area because there seemed to be a lot of people interacting with it.\u201d<\/p>\n
There has been little information relayed to the community about why.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have a number of our members who live right around there and so there\u2019s an angle of access to green space, the access to a safe space for our homeless neighbors,\u201d said Yuval Yossefy, treasurer of Ktown for All, an all-volunteer grassroots organization serving Koreatown\u2019s unhoused community. \u201cThis went basically unnoticed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Enrique Legaspi, assistant principal at RFK Community Schools, said the school and the district are discussing using the park again, including for classes and student activities. LAUSD confirmed that school leaders have expressed strong interest in using the space for outdoor learning, art programs and student wellness activities.<\/p>\n
Officials plan to involve the school community and nearby residents as plans take shape, but they have not given a timeline or said whether the park will reopen to the public.<\/p>\n
Koreatown lacks parks<\/p>\n
For years, the city\u2019s Department of Recreation and Parks operated and maintained the park under an agreement with the school district dating back to 2010. At the time, the public was allowed to use the space.<\/p>\n
Last March, the department stepped away. By then, it had already been taking on costs outside what the 2010 agreement required.<\/p>\n
\u201cRAP communicated uncertainty about its ability to sustain long-term maintenance due to staffing and funding constraints,\u201d said Deirdra Boykin, a department spokesperson.<\/p>\n
For people who live nearby, the loss of the park has been simple and immediate: there\u2019s nowhere else like it.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are no parks around where I live,\u201d Aikens said. \u201cNow I just walk straight down the street.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a neighborhood with such limited park space, the memorial park went relatively unnoticed.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere definitely isn\u2019t enough green space here,\u201d said Emere Alademir, 23, who lives nearby. \u201cI\u2019m originally from Toronto and everywhere they have green space.\u201d<\/p>\n
People who never used the park say they would visit if it reopened.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve never actually gone in but I would be open to coming here if it reopens,\u201d said Wendy Kim, 70, who has lived in the neighborhood for 40 years. \u201cWhy not? It\u2019s good for everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kim, who splits her time between LA and Seoul, said the parks in Seoul are much better maintained than the ones in LA, and that when she craves nature, she travels out of the city for a hike.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut every place is different and here, the homeless issue is out of hand. That\u2019s just the reality,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
The fence goes up<\/p>\n
Public records obtained by Yossefy and reviewed by The LA Local show that city and LAUSD officials coordinated the park\u2019s handoff around a May 22 encampment removal and cleanup, after which LAUSD took control of the site and moved forward with fencing it off. The emails do not explicitly state that the park was fenced because unhoused people were there, but they show encampment removal was a central part of the transition plan.<\/p>\n
Volunteers with Ktown For All, who do weekly outreach to the unhoused community in the area, said they were used to seeing people at the park every Saturday.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s just like all of a sudden the fence was there,\u201d said Nicolas Emmons, who has been doing outreach near RFK since around 2021.<\/p>\n
Emmons and others said that while some unhoused residents stayed in the park, the majority of the park was open and available.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt its peak, it was only a small percentage of the park that was being used by people to live in,\u201d he said. \u201cSome of the people that lived there even took it upon themselves to clean the area around their setup.\u201d<\/p>\n
Eunice Jeon, another volunteer with the organization, said they had built relationships with people there over several years.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe regularly saw people there and had built relationships with people there,\u201d she said. \u201cThey respected and treated the park well.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jeon added that despite restricting access, the closure has not visibly improved the space.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf anything I would say the park is in worse state ever since the fence has gone up despite nobody being in there,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Jeon said many individuals she encountered were navigating complex barriers to housing and services, often caught in bureaucratic loops that made it difficult to access help.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of the time they\u2019re limited by transportation. Some services don\u2019t allow certain things. They need an address, but in order to get something mailed, they need their driver\u2019s license, which they don\u2019t have because they don\u2019t have an address,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
In email chains included in the public records, officials also discussed installing permanent wrought iron fencing at the site. When asked if that remains the plan, LAUSD said the project is still in the \u201cplanning phase\u201d and that details, including potential site features, have not been finalized.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf the park is fenced off, nobody can access it. It doesn\u2019t provide you any use,\u201d Yoseffy said. \u201cThere are a number of people that can\u2019t access this park, whether they were sleeping in this park, or they used the park to exercise, if they liked to sit and read \u2014 none of those things can happen there anymore because it\u2019s completely closed off.\u201d<\/p>\n
Public records show little evidence of public notice. One email mentions posting notices at the park ahead of the cleanup, but there was no formal announcement made to residents that the park \u2014 which had been open to the public for years \u2014 would be closed and no longer accessible.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think that a public space is meant to be used by the public, including the unhoused,\u201d Jeon said. \u201cThat\u2019s something they need to address instead of locking up the parks. That\u2019s a failure of the city. Kicking them out won\u2019t keep anyone safer if they have fewer and fewer places to go.\u201d<\/p>\n
LA Local reporter Marina Pe\u00f1a contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For nearly a year, people walking down Wilshire Boulevard in Koreatown have passed a small patch of what…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":786294,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[1582,276,2961,224,5337],"class_list":{"0":"post-786293","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-california","10":"tag-la","11":"tag-los-angeles","12":"tag-losangeles"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116549730636645145","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=786293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786293\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/786294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=786293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=786293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=786293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}