Riddle: When is a miracle also bound to be a disappointment?

Answer: When the miracle is a project of the state of California.

A case in point is the recent opening of the Los Angeles State Historic Park, an event that contains many miracles.

Miracle one: It’s a large (32 acres) park—with broad grassy fields large enough to fly a kite or hold a big concert, buildings with community meeting space, and a signature bridge with selfie-ready views of the downtown skyline—in the densely crowded center of park-poor Los Angeles. Miracle two: It was built on a historic rail and industrial site that required costly soil decontamination and was originally planned for business redevelopment, before the intervention of the state saved it for parkland.

Miracle three: The state’s woefully underfunded parks department built this park with public funds. Miracle four: The park didn’t die during a 16-year odyssey that coincided with a crippling recession, multiple budget crises, and an accounting scandal inside the parks department.

So why do all these miracles add up to disappointment? Because, for all its wonders, the Los Angeles State Historic Park still lacks many elements of a great park.

Just getting the park opened in the face of obstacles required many compromises, not the least of which was a reduced $18 million price tag for a park that was once planned as a $55 million facility. In a state where it’s so hard to do anything impactful, doing something truly world-class is next to impossible.

The story of the park mixes the above miracles with missed opportunities. The park represented, in the words of one state press release, a “once-in-a-century” opportunity for California. The state park could reshape a transit-connected parcel that extends from Metro rail’s Chinatown station to the Los Angeles River.

The park still may achieve that kind of status (more on that later). But the park that opened this spring, with a big ceremony that included Gov. Jerry Brown, is missing very basic things.

Like shade.

In a warming city, there are no shade structures, and small, newly planted trees provide little relief from the blistering sun. Many of the features of the original plan for the park, first advanced a decade ago, haven’t materialized. The park’s current configuration contains none of the elaborate gardens or fountains (a victim of the drought) or railroad-influenced design elements that were part of earlier plans. There isn’t a children’s playground. And the park, which is supposed to be a community asset, is open for limited hours—8 a.m. to sunset—and is cut off by fencing and the Gold Line trains from the two thoroughfares it borders, Broadway and Spring Street.

My first visit, with my three young (and quickly bored) sons, left me angry. Here again was the California disease: We dream big, but our ambitions aren’t matched by dollars or management follow-through. If this park—with so many champions, from high state officials to local activists—can’t be better, what hope is there for the many plans around California to create new and dynamic public spaces?

This is not merely about a state government with a dysfunctional budget system, and byzantine planning and regulatory processes. Rich folks in New York ponied up millions in donations to make the High Line (a $152 million project) brilliant. Chicago and its philanthropists devoted $475 million to Millennium Park, which is of a similar size to the L.A. State Historic Park. Why haven’t our rich people and corporate interests stepped up and done something grand here?

The answer to that is a very long story about a lack of cohesion, generosity, and imagination. (I still carry a torch for architect Thom Mayne’s 2006 idea for the park property: Move Dodger Stadium to the park space, and instead create an even grander park where the stadium now sits, paid for by selling some development rights.) Instead, the state parks department—with a budget under so much stress that it nearly had to close dozens of state parks in recent years—had to perform a cut-rate miracle. Couldn’t billionaire Eli Broad have sold off a few pieces of his art collection to add more to this park?

Despite such frustrations, let’s stay positive. What’s not done is not done. And the good news is that there’s still time and opportunity to make the experience of this park truly great.

Already, developers are starting to transform the industrial space around the park into resident-friendly locations. There’s a brand new nonprofit friends group that should support the park. An in-park restaurant and a new water wheel project from artist Lauren Bon and the Annenberg Foundation are on their way. There’s plenty of space to add a children’s playground, shade structures, and a bridge over the Metro Gold Line tracks to connect the park with people who live along the Broadway corridor. Perhaps hours could be extended to something that matches the life of the neighborhood—6 a.m. to 10 p.m.

“Now that the park is open, you have the canvas from which to create the future,” says the tireless Sean Woods, superintendent for the Los Angeles sector of California State Parks, who has been working on the park since its 2001 beginnings.

All that will require is more money—and the miracle of Californians taking full advantage of an opportunity to do something great. Until that happens, enjoy the park, but bring lots of sunscreen.

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I’ve been by the park hundreds of times. Several years ago, I had the windows on my Honda tinted at the shop across the street (I felt mildly vindicated to see that the shop now displays an “Under New Management” sign–but that’s another story). In high school we’d pass by the park’s ivy-covered walls on our way to a liquor store that sold beer without asking our age. I knew some of Pío Pico’s history, probably thanks to Huell Howser, patron saint of the modest California landmark, but the walls of the park had always presented themselves with the uninteresting and infrastructural familiarity of power lines, and I always drove past.

I visited on a recent Sunday and first discovered that the ivy isn’t ivy at all. The park walls are topped with grapevines, and they give the place an air of serenity befitting a monastery or the sort of prison where crooked stockbrokers get sent. Even with the nonstop commotion of car traffic from Whittier Boulevard to the north and the freeway’s faint din, I had the sense of being shut away from the larger world.

The park’s north end is enclosed by a stand of tall, broad-leafed oak trees. I took a seat at one of the picnic tables to regard El Ranchito, the vaguely Western, single-story structure that Don Pío called home. It’s made of adobe bricks and is coated in cracking white plaster. Surrounding it is a five-acre expanse of lawn and gardens dotted with young orange trees. There are more grapevines being cultivated on the west end of the property. It was easy to envision families from all over the San Gabriel Valley enjoying a weekend afternoon here, as El Ranchito is a picturesque sight. But when I started toward the house, the oranges revealed themselves to be undernourished, and I noticed that a third of the trees were dead, their branches withered to tinder. The grass underfoot was green, but it crunched as I walked.

The exhibits inside El Ranchito pieced together a trite, disappointing impression of life in Don Pío’s time: bedside ephemera, shards of an old bowl, a sturdy plow once used to plant corn. There was an instructional diagram on adobe and small wooden blocks meant to be a hands-on demonstration of how El Ranchito was built. In the parlor, I passed a piano to enter another room with a dinner scene. One door opened to a screening room with crooked rows of folding chairs and a wall-sized screen displaying menu options from an unmanned video station. A messy stack of instructional DVDs lay atop it. A remote control had also been left out, but there weren’t any instructions on how to use it.

Don Pío was a complicated figure, a proud Mexican whose walking stick bore the Spanish king’s seal, a Californio whose indigenous and African and Italian bloodlines formed a complex family tree. Even after the Mexican-American War, he remained one of the richest men in California. Known for his grandiose hospitality, he built the most lavish hotel in Los Angeles. Eventually, though, he lost hundreds of thousands of acres of land by signing a contract that he was unable to read. In the end, irreversibly leveraged by a lifetime of extravagance and a weakness for gambling, Don Pío was evicted from El Ranchito at the age of 91 with whatever could be piled onto a horse-drawn buggy.

There was one smaller display attempting to present several facets of Don Pío’s life. Composed of multi-sided panels, it seemed to be the most honest object in El Ranchito. The leftmost panel disdained him for seeming like a mule, while the rightmost one suggested that he should be a role model of perseverance and bravery. But the wheel to reveal the other panels was broken. And because the displays and literature in El Ranchito aren’t forthcoming or direct about the details of Don Pío’s life and the prickly implications behind them, I exited feeling insulted. I left feeling lied to.

The most peaceful place in the park is at the rear, near the train tracks, where a shaded picnic table overlooks a glen. Sitting there, it was easy to imagine Don Pío entertaining early Angeleno society in the Victorian-era clothing he favored. While the city of Whittier and the park’s supporters have rallied to save Pío Pico State Park, it would be a shame to let the rest of the orange trees die this coming December, to let the grapevines dry out and wither. But in six months I will still be part of a society that routinely votes down initiatives that would keep parks like this open without the need for last-minute heroics, a society that instead encourages me to rent rims for my car and to try the new Taco Bell taco because the shell is made of Doritos. I will still be part of a society that doesn’t read the fine print and instead prefers to think that the multitude of vacant storefronts and foreclosures around us is someone else’s fault.

Don Pío’s story ended tragically because of deep, human flaws: Indulgence. Pride. Greed. (And that’s before we get to his desire to control the region’s water rights.) But we don’t really like that sort of story when it hits so close to home. Perhaps that’s why people drive by Pío Pico’s park without stopping in to visit–and why I was there alone on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

Michael Jaime-Becerra teaches Creative Writing at UC Riverside.

*Photo courtesy of California Pete.

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