Gravel paths, wildflowers, and landform barriers in Watts provide much-needed green space, shielding pedestrians from traffic.
By Timothy A. Schuler
For most kids growing up in Watts, nature is a distant fantasy. This densely populated South Los Angeles neighborhood has roughly half as much tree canopy as the citywide average, and what few parks exist are mostly ball fields and unshaded lawns. Residents of Jordan Downs, a 700-unit public housing complex, have had an especially contentious relationship with their environment, characterized by historic—and, in some cases, continuing—battles with the city’s housing authority over unsafe levels of air, water, and soil pollution.
When Tina Chee Landscape Studio was hired to design a pair of gateway parks for the redevelopment of Jordan Downs, founder Tina Chee, ASLA, says she “really wanted to emphasize nature. We approached it [less] like a park and more like a botanical garden.”
The second gateway park will have a visual and formal relationship with its neighbor across the street. Image by Tina Chee, ASLA.
The full redevelopment will introduce hundreds of new housing units, some affordable and some market-rate, and nine acres of green space. The first of the two gateway parks, the 1.25-acre Freedom Tree Park (named for an important ash tree that was lost), features more than 40 species of native grasses and wildflowers. It was conceptualized as an ecological laboratory for nearby schools, as well as a play space and respite for residents. Opened last fall, the triangle-shaped park is organized as a series of planted berms and crushed-gravel paths loosely arranged around a new central tree, an 84-inch Quercus engelmannii. “The way I was sketching it, it was like these icebergs, drifting in ever so slowly, to form that central space,” Chee says. Avoiding the tropes of bright colors and ground-painted murals, the material palette is natural, elemental: stacked logs, granite boulders, and water.
The design had to work within certain prescribed lines, particularly the extension of Century Boulevard through the redevelopment site. The roadway’s gentle S curve, which creates the two irregularly shaped sites that Chee was given, is an impediment to visibility for pedestrians crossing the street. Without a midblock crossing and a requirement to avoid any sort of fencing, Chee and her team introduced landforms along the park’s roadside edge to discourage park users from dashing across the boulevard. “We created these soft barriers that give it a sense of semi-enclosure,” she says.
A central oak is framed by geometric gabion benches. Photo by Here And Now Agency.
Scheduled to open in 2026, the second of the two gateway parks will feature a similar landscape vocabulary. Also in the works is a six-acre central park with a pool and a community center, which, according to the city, will increase the amount of public parkland in Watts by 80 percent, an expansion of thoughtfully designed open space that is well overdue.
Timothy A. Schuler is a contributing editor to the magazine.
Feature photo by Here And Now Agency.
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