A $588-million bridge. Four years of deterioration. Now a $62-million park set to open beneath it.
The Sixth Street PARC — Park, Arts, River and Connectivity — is nearing completion under Los Angeles’s 6th Street Bridge in what city officials and designers describe as the structure’s missing civic half. But as the Los Angeles Times reported, the bridge it will sit beneath has already had its copper wiring stripped from the arches, its spiraling approaches buried in graffiti, and its walkways clogged with trash — all within four years of opening. The question now is whether PARC can do what the bridge above it could not.
Open Access and the Risk Already Visible Before Opening
Clinton Jacob Machoka, an iGaming content writer who follows how different regulated online-casino markets handle player protection, sees a familiar structural problem in what PARC is already facing.
Before a single ribbon has been cut, graffiti covers shipping containers, bridge columns, and the signs announcing the project. Litter catches against freshly installed landscaping. The Arts District Business Improvement District, led by executive director Miguel Vargas, will support the park only within its own borders, because its funding comes from local property owners and cannot be spent elsewhere. The Boyle Heights side has no BID at all and no guaranteed maintenance or security beyond a city government that has lost the neighborhood’s trust.
Machoka notes that the dilemma — giving people a genuinely open space to use freely while keeping structural guardrails in place so it doesn’t slide into disorder — is one that surfaces in other discretionary domains too. In Lithuania’s regulated online-casino market, CGLT maps out which sites carry proper licenses and which do not, providing the layer of orientation that keeps open access from becoming a free-for-all. The park, Machoka observes, needs an equivalent: something that keeps the gates open while making the rules legible.
“The park’s situation is a reminder that open access without clear stewardship is a formula for deterioration — you see the same dynamic in regulated markets where players can’t easily distinguish licensed operators from unlicensed ones. The infrastructure matters, but so does the guidance around how to use it.”
What PARC Is and What It Promises
The park itself is ambitious by any measure. Designed by landscape architects Hargreaves Jones and engineers Tetra Tech, and led by the LA Bureau of Engineering, PARC will stretch 12 acres from Mateo Street in the Arts District to the edge of the 101 Freeway in Boyle Heights. Funded by a state grant and an additional $2 million from the city, it was conceived as a physical connector between two neighborhoods that the 6th Street Bridge — designed by Michael Maltzan Architecture and HNTB — was always meant to stitch together.
“The park was always fundamental to the overall conception of the bridge,” said Michael Maltzan, founder of Michael Maltzan Architecture. “It’s this idea of changing the role of infrastructure from one of dividing communities to one that really weaves them together.”
The surrounding industrial corridor has already started shifting. Warehouses near the PARC site have been converted into major production facilities, including East End Studios Mission Campus and Ace Mission Studios. Ace Mission has hosted the Balloon Museum, the art park Luna Luna, and the Skyline Festival electronic music event, which drew tens of thousands of visitors. That studio economy has transformed the stretch of river between the two neighborhoods into one of the city’s more active creative corridors, and PARC is designed to anchor it at street level.
A Governance Gap That Splits the Park in Two
The park’s 12 acres do not fall under a single authority, and that split is where the project’s most serious risk lives.
Vargas was direct about the boundary his organization cannot cross. “We’re funded by local property owners, and we cannot use local property owner funding to service an area that’s outside of our boundaries,” he said. What that means in practice is that the Arts District side of PARC has organized private support while the Boyle Heights side does not.
A coalition of local property owners applied in May to the Los Angeles City Council to create the Boyle Heights Industrial Flats Business Improvement District, which would tax businesses to fund private security patrols, street cleaning, and landscape improvements. For some residents, the proposal arrived without adequate outreach. “The BID doesn’t feel like part of the community because they didn’t reach out,” said Boyle Heights resident Derek Mejia. He also questioned the logic of additional security in a neighborhood that is already heavily policed.
Gentrification is the sharper fear. Verita Topete, a Boyle Heights resident and member of Centro CSO, pointed to wealthier visitors already crossing the river from the Arts District and downtown. “We’re already seeing it now,” she said. “So people are wondering, ‘Am I gonna be able to afford my rent?'” Not everyone in Boyle Heights shares that alarm. Margarita Amador, a lifelong resident and secretary of the Boyle Heights Neighborhood Council, said investment has made the area safer and expressed confidence that the community would resist displacement. “We have a lot of organizations and citizens that work together. We will fight. We’re not going to get kicked out of our own home.”
Hargreaves Jones associate principal Megan Esopenko defended the design process, describing public meetings, workshops, surveys, and neighborhood site tours. “We met with them. We talked to them. We designed with them. This park is for them,” she said.
A Nonprofit Proposal Waiting for a Hearing
Developer and activist Yuval Bar-Zemer, a former member of the Sixth Street Viaduct Design Advisory Committee, has a different proposal entirely. He and nonprofit LARABA are pushing for a single nonprofit organization to oversee management of both the park and the bridge on each side of the river, modeled on Friends of the High Line in New York and Friends of Griffith Park in Los Angeles, with operations supported by city funds, internal fundraising, and revenues from filming on the bridge.
Bar-Zemer’s frustration with the bridge’s condition frames the urgency. “I don’t understand how someone can invest hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure, then it’s like, ‘We finished. Now let it go to hell.'” His pitch to the city is direct: “Whatever the city has in the budget for the park, let’s have it. If the responsibilities are not carried out, you can fire us. The risk for the city is nothing.”
The concept has been presented to Councilmember Ysabel Jurado’s office but, as Bar-Zemer put it, is “not even in the hey, let’s put it on the agenda phase.” Jurado’s office issued a statement indicating that any management model must pass through community review. “My priority is ensuring that neighborhood voices remain at the center of those decisions. Any long-term model should reflect the needs of the people who live and work here and strengthen, rather than replace, public accountability.”
For now, the governance question remains unresolved as the opening approaches. Maltzan holds to the original vision but frames it conditionally. “If this area is successful in navigating these pressures and inevitable frictions — but also potential — then the bridge and the park will do what we hope we wanted them to do,” he said, “create a model for the way physical space can help support a better version of a future Los Angeles.” Whether that happens depends on whether leadership, residents, and businesses on both sides of the river find a way to share the work. Nothing about the bridge’s first four years suggests that will be easy.