LA State Historic Park (#0632)

LA State Historic Park is a park near Chinatown and Union Station, built on what was formerly a Southern Pacific depot and railyard. The railyard was, for many years, referred to as the Cornfield due to the corn that had sprouted from seed leaked from the rail cars.

These signs are apparently a memorializing of the efforts to create the park. The railyard became available in the 1990’s and was initially slated to become a warehouse district but community and environmental activists, spurred by the lack of public green space in Los Angeles, protested that the area should be a public park and not commercially developed (the signs document that protest). In 2001 the state purchased the land and turned it over the California State Parks for development, but budget issues delayed the development of the park for 16 years – when I lived in LA this was a large and accessible, but mostly unstructured green space. It was only in recent years that the area was landscaped for use, and the park officially opened in April of 2017.

Sources:
History of park activism: thisparkismadebypeople.net
LA Times story: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_State_Historic_Park
Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_State_Historic_Park