Ladera Linda translates into “lovely hillside” in English, so it’s an apt name for the 11-acre park with the amazing ocean views nestled against the coastal Rancho Palos Verdes hills.
With the city’s announcement that a long-planned $18.7 million complete renovation of the park and its community center will become a reality, a look back at its history seems in order.
The site on Forrestal Drive just north of Palos Verdes Drive South and the Trump National Golf Club abuts the 155-acre Forrestal Nature Reserve. Before it became a school, and then a park, it was the site of the Livingston Rock Quarry, which operated there until the late 1950s.
During its operation, the quarry produced granite and crushed stone used for ocean breakwaters and other construction projects, as well as barite, quartz, dolomite, gypsum, and basalt.
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors first included plans for a 195-acre park that included the quarry land in November 1955, but it never was built.
After the quarry’s closure, the land remained vacant until 1966, when the Palos Verdes Peninsula Board of Education announced plans to open a K-5 elementary school on the site to be named Ladera Linda.
Ladera Linda elementary would become the first school to serve the Seaview area, a 190-home development designed by architect Paul Revere Williams that had opened in 1960. Ground was broken for the new school in April 1967.
Drainage problems delayed the school’s planned September opening by a month. Before the opening took place, a major controversy arose from the construction of a 124-step flight of stairs. The stairway rising up the hill from Dauntless Drive would serve as the main entry point to the school from the SeaView neighborhood.
Neighborhood parents became alarmed when they saw how steep the stairs were, and how few resting landings, four, the stairway contained. They felt that it would pose a safety hazard when crowded with students, and 219 of them signed a petition calling for the construction of a new, safer stairway on the Forrestal Drive side of the school.
Schools superintendent Dr. Thomas E. Woods estimated a new stairway would cost $14,000, and altering the old one would cost $4,000, money not in the construction budget. The parents contested his claims. Four of the five school board members tested out the new stairs, with three of them seeing potential problems with the set-up.
The school opened on Oct. 9, 1967, and Palos Verdes Peninsula News photographers were there to document the student traffic flow up and down the stairs before and after school, and no major problems occurred.
The debate, which included an unsuccessful lawsuit, raged on until the following March, when the school board made a final decision to keep the stairs despite continued pressure from neighborhood parents.
There were no further problems with the stairs, but the school’s existence turned out to be relatively short-lived. Falling enrollments led to its closure by the district 13 years later, at the end of the school year in June 1980. Its students were transferred to the Point Vicente and Mira Catalina schools.
The site was then used as a makeshift community meeting hall. Funds were allocated to renovate the hall in 1981, and the new Ladera Linda Community Center was dedicated on Jan. 23, 1982.
The remainder of the land was transformed into Ladera Linda Park. It grew to include paddle tennis courts, a children’s playground, basketball courts and two large soccer fields used regularly by AYSO leagues.
Over the years, the old school buildings and the community center began to become dilapidated. In the early 2010s, the city began plans to renovate the center and the park. A master plan to do so was formulated in 2015, based on a 2013 engineering report that found the community center’s infrastructure to be inadequate.
Another controversy erupted in 2016, when community members began to raise concerns that fill dirt trucked in from a Torrance construction site to an area of the park above the soccer fields contained asbestos that could contaminate the grounds.
The fields were closed. After an investigation lasting more than a year, state toxic waste experts determined the soil was safe.
Meanwhile, the plans to renovate Ladera Linda Park continued to take shape. Some community members expressed opposition to the scope of the plan, which called for greatly enlarging the community center building.
In April 2021, the plan, then estimated to cost $15.7 million in total, received final approval from the RPV City Council.
By the time the project’s budget was approved in March 2022, its total cost had risen to $18.7 million. The renovation, designed by Culver City architecture firm Johnson Favaro, is expected to take about 15 months to complete.
It will create a new 6,790 square-foot Community Center, an outdoor, tiered seating area, a 54-stall parking lot and a new children’s playground. The soccer fields will not be affected by the renovation plans.
Note: Special thanks to Megan Barnes, Senior Administrative Analyst, City of Rancho Palos Verdes.
Sources:
Daily Breeze archives.
“City of Rancho Palos Verdes Ladera Linda Community Center and Park,” Johnson Favaro website.
“Livingston Quarry (site),” Wikimapia.org.
Los Angeles Times archives.
Palos Verdes Peninsula News archives.
City of Rancho Palos Verdes website.
Torrance Press-Herald archives.
