By James Preston Allen, Publisher
The symbolic swearing-in ceremony of Councilman Joe Buscaino took place simultaneously with the grand re-opening of the 290-acre Ken Malloy Harbor Regional Park at Machado Lake on June 17. The former home of Reggie the Alligator, Harbor Regional Park is the crown jewel of Proposition O-funded projects to improve the water quality across Los Angeles. The park renovation cost some $111 million and took 54 years from the time the city purchased the property in 1971 to the present. For most of those years, the regional park was mostly ignored except by one man — Ken Malloy — who spent those years inspiring new generations with his vision. Malloy died in 1991, across from the park at Kaiser Hospital, never seeing the end results of his efforts.
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, locals still referred to the area as Bixby Slough, named after the cattle rancher who once owned much of the surrounding area and grazed his cattle on the hills of Palos Verdes.
It was mostly ignored by commuters driving off the hill heading to the aerospace factories in El Segundo and Hawthorne, before the Harbor Freeway was extended from Sepulveda Boulevard into San Pedro.
The “slough” was one of the historic wanders of the Los Angeles River that led to the bay, down to what is now North Gaffey Street, an area where the water table still resides just below the asphalt.
In the obituary that ran in 1991, Malloy was described, as the “San Pedro preservationist,” a retired longshoreman, one-time grocery store owner and early member of the California Conservation Corps. He was perhaps best known for leading the fight for the purchase of the 320-acre park by the City of Los Angeles. During his lifetime, Malloy not only spearheaded the development of the park’s overnight youth campground and wildlife sanctuary, “but also personally tended the grounds as meticulously as a gardener would care for a flowerbed.”
In our story covering the 2014 ground breaking, we wrote:
Ken Malloy’s love affair with Harbor Regional Park began before it was even considered a park. In 1937, when he bumped his car into some grazing cattle, it was pasture land bordered by oil wells to the south and east. According to a brief biography, written by his son Thomas, Malloy was a Teddy Roosevelt conservationist who loved the outdoors. Malloy was a member of several nature or environmental clubs, including the Izaak Walton League of America and the Sierra Club.
Malloy couldn’t leave the park alone, returning again and again until he was moved to organize like-minded people to lobby the city to buy the land and turn it into a park. Malloy fought many battles over the years, such as leading the charge to prevent the military from taking the White Point Navy property back to build Air force housing for its officers. Malloy’s efforts and mentoring turned out to be seeds he planted along the way.
Though they never met in life, Martin Byhower took up Malloy’s torch. He, along with his mentor and Audubon Society President Jess Morton, visionary and Park Advisory Board President Frank O’Brien and Park Advisory Board members JoAnn Valle, Joyce Fredericks, Greg Donnan and Roxy Lowe should have been celebrated for their volunteer efforts over the years to restore this park. Instead, the restoration of the park was used as one more “selfie” event to be posted on the councilman’s endless digital re-election campaign.
Even so, this landmark environmental restoration project with all of its family-friendly amenities can, in the end, only be viewed as a flawed solution. As I will once again remind the citizens of this area, along with exorcising many of the invasive species from Machado Lake, the Recreation and Parks Department also evicted some 167 homeless souls onto the streets of the surrounding communities, exposing one of the city’s greatest hypocrisies: a rogue alligator received better treatment than people in need.
Clearly, with any kind of forethought, the council office and the City of Los Angeles could have carved out one acre of the 290 for the purposes of creating an emergency shelter to address the homeless crisis. But they did not. It is a sad commentary om our elected leaders and our agencies that they are be so myopically focused on solving one problem. Then, when they literally stumble across a much bigger one, they don’t stop and ask, How do we solve both problems with one solution?”
Read more about Ken Malloy Park in the RLn archives at The 21st Century Johnny Appleseed, April 2014 RLn and see historic pictures of the area at http://www.utopianature.com/kmhrp/historical.html, and at http://tinyurl.com/Martin-Byhower.