The bold plan would’ve ringed Los Angeles with parks. Elites killed it: The quiet death of a 95-year-old dream
Amigos de los Rios has been working for over 20 years as a liaison between the community and public agencies to facilitate the collaborative effort known as the Emerald Necklace Expanded Vision Plan. The plan is deeply informed by the ambitious vision for the Los Angeles region by the Olmsted Brothers commissioned over a century ago by Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. Despite the significant alteration of the natural landscape over the past century, many of the core recommendations of the report titled “Parks, Playgrounds, and Beaches for the Los Angeles Region” (also known as Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan) are as relevant today as they were in 1930. There is tremendous opportunity to align a broad coalition of government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and local institutions to strive to make a world-class network of parks and public open spaces connected by river greenways for greater Los Angeles.
Erin Rode wrote a great piece for the SFGATE portal highlighting the importance of the original Emerald Necklace Plan.
The Olmsted Brothers — a landscape architecture firm run by the sons of Frederick Law Olmsted, who famously designed Central Park in New York City — were behind the ambitious vision for LA’s parks. The plan similarly prioritized massive amounts of park space while also recognizing that, in sprawling Los Angeles, green space would need to be distributed throughout the region, rather than in one large, centralized park.
Many of the early ideas laid out by the Olmsted-Bartholomew plan are now used as benchmarks when it comes to public space. At the time, just 14 miles of Los Angeles County’s 70-mile shoreline were publicly owned. The plan proposed acquiring as much of the coastline as possible and setting aside a vast stretch of uninterrupted public beach, decades before the California Coastal Act prioritized maximizing public access to the state’s beaches. The plan suggested using schoolyards as much-needed neighborhood parks, an idea that persists today as a way for Los Angeles to quickly scale up park access. And crucially, the proposal aimed to place all residents within half a mile of a park, or about a 10-minute walk, a metric now used by the Trust for Public Land to measure park access. Olmsted and Bartholomew even suggested the inclusion of high desert landscapes as part of the plan, in part to protect Joshua trees.
