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Why You Can't Enjoy Angel's Knoll Or Its '(500) Days Of Summer' Bench
"500 Bags of Summer" (Photo by Mark Sebastian via the Creative Commons on Flickr)
I have bad news for you, if you were hoping to reenact your favorite scenes from (500) Days of Summer that take place on top of Angel's Knoll: you'll no longer be able to share a tender moment with someone special (or tell your ex the brutal truth that he was never good enough for you) on the park's iconic bench.
Access to Angel's Knoll and the bench inside has been blocked off by a gate since July 30, and The Downtown News has a recent article explaining why (h/t Curbed LA).
Angel's Knoll was always supposed to be a temporary park, but it sounds like its demise was hastened by the death of the state's redevelopment agencies and complaints from neighbors. That strip of land was set aside for skyscrapers that never ended up materializing thanks to a bum market for office space—and to this day there still aren't any concrete plans for developing it.
The Community Redevelopment Agency that owned the land passed it on to a "successor agency," and that agency says that lately they've been getting an increase in complaints about trash, litter and loitering at the park. They decided to just fence the whole thing off in order to "enable the asset's value to be maintained." The plan temporarily backfired: someone forgot to empty the trash cans inside the park. The first fence put up didn't have a gate, so the trash sat there long enough for an infestation of rats to find it. Whoops.
You can still hit up Angel's Flight and the neighboring stairwell.
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