Los Angeles leaders want to restore MacArthur Park. The challenge is making it last

As the holidays washed over Los Angeles in the final weeks of 2024, a pop-up market on the western edge of MacArthur Park offered bargain prices. There were toys, tools, clothes and cosmetics on makeshift tables. Everything was much cheaper than retailers.

There was a reason for that: Almost everything for sale along those two blocks of Alvarado Street was stolen merchandise, snagged by clever thieves who knew that stealing in small amounts was a misdemeanor, and that would almost never land them in jail. They fenced the goods to the merchants, who marked them up a bit, paid a kickback to the local gangs and pocketed the profits.

And for the especially adventurous holiday shopper, many of the sellers offered an even more forbidden bit of merchandise. Some of the same vendors who displayed over-the-counter drugs on their tabletops were happy to reach beneath the stands and offer up opioids, cocaine, fentanyl or other illicit drugs.

Life in and around MacArthur Park, a once-venerated Los Angeles center, had gone alarmingly awry. The park had become synonymous with homeless encampments, drug use and predatory vendors working in lockstep with area gangs. Conditions had slipped from scruffy to downright dangerous.

It got so bad that anchors of the community were ready to give up. The owners of Langer’s Deli, an LA institution, prepared to flee. The city council member for the area, Eunisses Hernandez, acknowledged the problem but also blamed “decades of neglect.” 

As the great criminologist James Q. Wilson long ago observed, decay breeds lawlessness, which in turn reinforces decay. His “broken windows” theory was painfully at work during my holiday visit in this LA neighborhood heading over a cliff. 

In January, the Los Angeles Police Department, working with other city and county agencies, local nonprofits and others, responded in force. The LAPD flooded the zone with police. Health and transportation officials shut down the vending tables and erected a fence along Alvarado Street, preventing the merchants from setting back up.

Violent crime — homicides, aggravated assaults, robberies — plummeted by more than 50% in early 2025. Graffiti was cleaned up. Some unhoused people found shelter, leaving their ragtag spots inside the park. An overdose response team jumped in to save those visibly teetering on the edge of drug-induced death.

“We interrupted the crime there,” said Captain Manny Chavez of the LAPD’s Rampart Division. “Since then, we’ve had foot beats around the park and up and down the Alvarado corridor.” Occasional sweeps with mounted police reinforced those actions. 

By March, city officials were celebrating the turnaround in MacArthur Park, declaring the restoration of order to a contested and hallowed Los Angeles center. The owner of Langer’s Deli even said he’s willing to stick around — for now.

But can that center hold?

No one really doubts that quick and overwhelming force can change the character of a small area, at least temporarily. The harder question is whether a public response can be sustained, whether it can change conditions sufficiently to make significant and lasting progress in a community.

That is the challenge that MacArthur Park — and the strategies being deployed — now face for those who live and work there. The same is true for the many more who look to Los Angeles for effective new ideas in municipal safety.

LA’s struggles are MacArthur’s struggles

MacArthur Park straddles the center of Los Angeles and mirrors its history as a city. First constructed in the 1880s, it was originally called “Westlake Park,” only to be renamed in the burst of enthusiasm that greeted Douglas MacArthur’s victories in the Pacific during World War II. MacArthur’s later disgrace and firing by President Truman did not persuade city leaders to change the name again.

The park has its graces. It sits atop a natural spring that once was a source of drinking water in this parched metropolis; a fountain in the middle of a lake dominates the landscape. It also includes a bandshell, playgrounds and walking paths. It is bifurcated by Wilshire Boulevard, which cuts through the park, running east to west and connecting the residential neighborhoods of Hancock Park and Windsor Square to the office complexes downtown.

But MacArthur Park also has evolved in ways that parallel Los Angeles itself, and not always for the better.

Once surrounded by luxury hotels, the area regressed in the 1980s. Crack cocaine overwhelmed the city and upended the park, which attracted dealers and users and the instability that they created. Gangs established their turf. Crime rose and spilled into the surrounding neighborhoods.

By the 2000s, Los Angeles also buckled under the growing crisis of homelessness, and that, too, inflected life in and around MacArthur Park. Tents dotted the grassy sections of the square and encampments spread across the area. Confrontations with police were everyday occurrences, as merchants begged for increased police activity and activists sometimes resented it.

Everything escalated when a May Day rally in 2007 drew tens of thousands of demonstrators demanding citizenship for undocumented immigrants. A day of mostly peaceful protest descended into violence when the marches made their way to MacArthur Park that evening. 

Police attempted to corral the demonstration by deploying motorcycle officers. The crowd viewed that as aggressive — an LAPD after-action report called it the “tipping point” — and demonstrators pushed back, hurling rocks and bottles at the police. Eighteen officers and 246 civilians reported injuries. More than two-dozen police officers were investigated for excessive force. 

A lingering wariness of police remained.

Turning short-term gains into lasting change

Today, MacArthur Park exists in a state of uncertainty. The actions earlier this year have curbed some of the rampant illegality that was crowding out honest merchants. Crime stats don’t paint a picture of tranquility, but they certainly offer evidence of improvement. Overall crime around MacArthur Park is down more than 40% this year.

But there are obstacles to progress. The homeless population is persistent and desperate. Addiction holds many in its cold grip.

Police want help from residents — members of the LAPD and other agencies make regular appearances in churches and community meetings to urge residents to report crimes — but these are immigrant communities, and many are afraid. Every night, the evening news carries reports of roundups, and people who live here are worried that if they come forward, they’ll end up in a Salvadoran gulag. The result is a cowed silence that perpetuates victimization and enables drug trafficking.

It falls to LAPD to try to assure these residents that they are safe, that their assistance is needed and that they won’t be punished for it. Chavez, the police captain, assured that the department has “increased our education and outreach on that.”

Those efforts run against the grain in Washington. And even under the best of circumstances, they take time.

Read More: ‘Look, there’s nowhere else to go’: Inside California’s crackdown on homeless camps

I walked through the park a couple of times in recent weeks, and though it’s not terrifying, it’s not fun, either. Groups of young men gathered in circles, huddled around pipes and drug paraphernalia. When a police car approached, they grabbed their bags and scattered.

The officers shooed men off the grass, and the men, glass-eyed and moving slowly, complied. A few minutes after the officers left, they remained off the grass, but fell into sleepy stupors on the paved pathways instead.

Even with the gains against crime here, the playgrounds aren’t getting any use. When I visited on Monday, I counted only one woman in the park, and she was a city employee, picking up trash. There were no children.

This is a plot of land with history and conflicts. It always has been. Now the challenge is to address the swirl of this city’s most pressing problems: homelessness, drugs, decay and trust. 

They come together in MacArthur Park, and for the moment, they have the city government’s full attention.

The question is whether that will be enough, whether attention and policy cannot just reclaim the peace for a moment but also hold it for the long haul. The answer will have direct meaning for Los Angeles but also implications far beyond: Every major city in California and in the country faces some mixture of the problems on display in MacArthur Park. All are looking for some path to peace.

That, as Captain Chavez said, “is a toughie.”

This commentary is the first in a string of recurring coverage on LA’s attempts to restore MacArthur Park and areas like it, and the implications for distressed communities around the state.