Despite its name, South Park is park-poor. That could change

In downtown Los Angeles, parking lots are often placeholders, eventually giving rise to future development, but in the district known as South Park, one parking lot might just stay low.Surrounded by residential towers, this ordinary patch of asphalt at 11th Street and South Grand Avenue, smaller than an ice-skating rink, may soon become a public park.

Where cars sit idle beneath the open sky, trees might one day arch overhead and couples linger in a waning twilight.“New urban parks are incredibly rare because of the market dynamics of acquiring land in downtown,” said Nolan Marshall, executive director of the South Park Business Improvement District.“This is huge for us.”Since coming to South Park in 2022, Marshall has been scouting locations and pushing hard for a park.

An executive director who knows the talking points, he speaks less of its bucolic allure than its economic benefit.A park can be “a catalyst for development in an area,” he said.“If you’re a land owner who owns multiple sites — with an ability to develop on multiple sites — having one go to public space will only increase the value of the others.”Owned by the entertainment giant AEG, the 0.31-acre property — assessed in 2023 for $10.3 million — was to become a hotel, but a plan never materialized.

Today a private lot for AEG, it is open to the public only when events at nearby Crypto.com Arena or L.A.Live spike the need.On Tuesday, the Los Angeles City Council directed city officials to negotiate its purchase, with the goal of turning it into a park.But transforming asphalt to grass is not easy, and the city and AEG would have to work out the details of the sale.

Marshall said that when he approached AEG late last year, it told him it was “willing to consider” selling the lot.The city would probably fund the purchase with development fees called “air rights” collected from other publicly owned sites in South Park, Marshall said.

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