For nearly a year, people walking down Wilshire Boulevard in Koreatown have passed a small patch of what used to be one of the few public park spaces in the neighborhood. It’s now locked behind a tall chain link fence.
Inside, the grass is overgrown and trash is piled up along the edges. The memorial to Sen. Robert F. Kennedy — built at the site where he was assassinated in 1968 at the Ambassador Hotel — has fallen into disrepair.
The Los Angeles Unified School District fenced off RFK Inspiration Park, located on Wilshire Boulevard. Nearly a year later, the district is considering reopening the space. But it’s unclear if the space will reopen to the public, or only to students at the adjacent RFK Community Schools.
The district has not finalized their plans for the park’s future, according to a district spokesperson.
That’s frustrating for some neighbors, who say the park used to belong to everyone.
“I remember the park being open and suddenly a few months after, it was gated,” said Vanessa Aikens, who lives a few blocks away. “I was just wondering why they gated the area because there seemed to be a lot of people interacting with it.”
There has been little information relayed to the community about why.
“We have a number of our members who live right around there and so there’s an angle of access to green space, the access to a safe space for our homeless neighbors,” said Yuval Yossefy, treasurer of Ktown for All, an all-volunteer grassroots organization serving Koreatown’s unhoused community. “This went basically unnoticed.”
Enrique Legaspi, assistant principal at RFK Community Schools, said the district is in early discussions to reopen the park space, but only to students for classes and student activities.
A district spokesperson said those plans have not been finalized and it would be premature to say who will have access to the space if it is reopened. LAUSD confirmed that school leaders have expressed strong interest in using the space for outdoor learning, art programs and student wellness activities.
Officials plan to involve the school community and nearby residents as plans take shape, but they have not given a timeline or said whether the park will reopen to the public.
Koreatown lacks parks
For years, the city’s Department of Recreation and Parks operated and maintained the park under an agreement with the school district dating back to 2010. At the time, the public was allowed to use the space.
Last March, the department stepped away. By then, it had already been taking on costs outside what the 2010 agreement required.
“RAP communicated uncertainty about its ability to sustain long-term maintenance due to staffing and funding constraints,” said Deirdra Boykin, a department spokesperson.
For people who live nearby, the loss of the park has been simple and immediate: there’s nowhere else like it.
“There are no parks around where I live,” Aikens said. “Now I just walk straight down the street.”
In a neighborhood with such limited park space, the memorial park went relatively unnoticed.
“There definitely isn’t enough green space here,” said Emere Alademir, 23, who lives nearby. “I’m originally from Toronto and everywhere they have green space.”
People who never used the park say they would visit if it reopened.
“I’ve never actually gone in but I would be open to coming here if it reopens,” said Wendy Kim, 70, who has lived in the neighborhood for 40 years. “Why not? It’s good for everyone.”
Kim, who splits her time between LA and Seoul, said the parks in Seoul are much better maintained than the ones in LA, and that when she craves nature, she travels out of the city for a hike.
“But every place is different and here, the homeless issue is out of hand. That’s just the reality,” she said.
The fence goes up
Public records obtained by Yossefy and reviewed by The LA Local show that city and LAUSD officials coordinated the park’s handoff around a May 22 encampment removal and cleanup, after which LAUSD took control of the site and moved forward with fencing it off. The emails do not explicitly state that the park was fenced because unhoused people were there, but they show encampment removal was a central part of the transition plan.
Volunteers with Ktown For All, who do weekly outreach to the unhoused community in the area, said they were used to seeing people at the park every Saturday.
“It’s just like all of a sudden the fence was there,” said Nicolas Emmons, who has been doing outreach near RFK since around 2021.
Emmons and others said that while some unhoused residents stayed in the park, the majority of the park was open and available.
“At its peak, it was only a small percentage of the park that was being used by people to live in,” he said. “Some of the people that lived there even took it upon themselves to clean the area around their setup.”
Eunice Jeon, another volunteer with the organization, said they had built relationships with people there over several years.
“We regularly saw people there and had built relationships with people there,” she said. “They respected and treated the park well.”
Jeon added that despite restricting access, the closure has not visibly improved the space.
“If anything I would say the park is in worse state ever since the fence has gone up despite nobody being in there,” she said.
Jeon said many individuals she encountered were navigating complex barriers to housing and services, often caught in bureaucratic loops that made it difficult to access help.
“A lot of the time they’re limited by transportation. Some services don’t allow certain things. They need an address, but in order to get something mailed, they need their driver’s license, which they don’t have because they don’t have an address,” she said.
In email chains included in the public records, officials also discussed installing permanent wrought iron fencing at the site. When asked if that remains the plan, LAUSD said the project is still in the “planning phase” and that details, including potential site features, have not been finalized.
“If the park is fenced off, nobody can access it. It doesn’t provide you any use,” Yossefy said. “There are a number of people that can’t access this park, whether they were sleeping in this park, or they used the park to exercise, if they liked to sit and read — none of those things can happen there anymore because it’s completely closed off.”
Public records show little evidence of public notice. One email mentions posting notices at the park ahead of the cleanup, but there was no formal announcement made to residents that the park — which had been open to the public for years — would be closed and no longer accessible.
“I think that a public space is meant to be used by the public, including the unhoused,” Jeon said. “That’s something they need to address instead of locking up the parks. That’s a failure of the city. Kicking them out won’t keep anyone safer if they have fewer and fewer places to go.”
LA Local reporter Marina Peña contributed to this report.
