Calming Undulations

One thing I can safely say about the California city where I grew up is that it’s a lot different from what it was like when I was a kid.

Back in the 1960s, the area across from Santa Monica’s City Hall was a mass of parking lots, office buildings and other hard, unattractive surfaces. The famed Civic Auditorium was at one end of the street, and a Moderne-style Sears store was at the other with nothing distinguished in between except for a viaduct filled with the first few yards of the transcontinental Interstate 10.

Many of the original City Hall-area elements are still there, untouched, but there’s one huge exception: All of the across-the-street parking and commercial space has been erased, giving way to Tongva Park, which opened to great fanfare in 2013 but which I hadn’t visited until just recently.

Designed by the New-York-based landscape architecture firm of James Corner Field Operations with architectural fountains and features by Anaheim, Calif.-based Outside the Lines, the six-plus acre park includes an amphitheater, a large playground, gardens, lawns, picnic areas, trees and fountains – plus an overlook offering great views of the Pacific Ocean and Santa Monica Pier.

I had never heard of the Tongva before, but they had been a tribe indigenous to the area for thousands of years before Spanish explorers arrived in 1769. Nor did I follow all of the events leading to creation of the park, although I can imagine how hard it was to dedicate so much incredibly valuable beach-adjacent real estate to open space and win Coastal Commission approval for reworking the acreage so completely.

And it was a thorough reworking. Once the old RAND Corp. headquarters had been flattened and the old parking lots stripped of their asphalt, the entire flat plane was treated to all-new contours that have the effect of creating substantial-yet-separate activity pockets within the park.

The grandest of all these spaces is a fountain system that starts in a square fronting City Hall and flows all the way down through the park following an easy arc. The flows are burbling and spring-like at the top, then become facsimiles of ocean-style waves at the base.

Although the water captured the lion’s share of my attention (as always), the real stars here are the plants – a cast including 30,000 individual specimens representing 170 species (most of them drought-tolerant, so it’s become something of a public-display laboratory) – and some 300 trees of 21 types, including several massive figs moved to the park from areas where they would likely have fallen prey to development.

I’m not overly sentimental about my childhood hometown, mainly because I have never thought it had been changing for the better through the years. But Tongva Park is quite an achievement – a refuge from traffic, crowds, noise and commerce and just the kind of place that I would have enjoyed back in the 1960s and ’70s.

Definitely check it out the next time you’re within striking distance. It’s an easy walk over from the tumult of the Third Street Promenade and will allow you to catch your breath before plunging back into Santa Monica’s bustling array of tourist attractions.