Commentary: They found a new park hiding in plain sight in the middle of Los Angeles

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Just past noon, a young man appeared on the north side of San Vicente Boulevard, a block west of Hauser, and eyeballed the flow of westbound traffic.When he saw an opening, he slid across to the median strip, where he waited for eastbound traffic to let up before crossing over to the south side of San Vicente to pick up some takeout food.And then he retraced his steps across the 150-foot wide thoroughfare that knifes through the heart of the city along what once was the Red Car line of the Pacific Electric Railway.He should have used the nearby crosswalk, but there aren’t enough of those on the boulevard, so pedestrians routinely skitter and scoot across the street like they’re in a game of Frogger.I watched this drama the other day from Dam Good Coffee, where I met with two guys who live in the neighborhood and, in their spare time, have been doing a lot of thinking.

They’re fine-tuning a pitch to reengineer the boulevard, reduce traffic, improve access to two new transit lines and transform the Mid-City portion of San Vicente Boulevard — from the Beverly Center on the west to just past La Brea on the east — into a 3-mile, 30-acre linear park.Ambitious.Outlandish.

Insane.It’s all of that and a longshot undertaking, given the countless obstacles that can derail their dream.But Oren Hadar, a sound engineer, and Michael Wacht, an architect, are serious, along with a small coalition of neighborhood believers.“One of the things I always say is L.A.

needs to get back into the business of taking big swings,” Hadar said.He is motivated in part by the fact that his two young kids don’t have a nearby park to play in.The big swing comes at a time when Los Angeles has just fallen from 90th to 93rd in terms of park acreage, investment and accessibility in the annual Trust for Public Lands ranking of the 100 largest cities in the U.S.

You’d think a city with great weathe...