92-year-old war veteran blasts MacArthur Park as ‘disgrace’

A Korean War veteran who served under one of America’s most revered generals says the park honoring his legacy has collapsed into “the last stop on the road to despair.”

For Richard Reggio, 92, a recent visit to MacArthur Park with the California Post ended with a single, bitter thought: “I wish I never saw this.”

Reggio isn’t easily shaken. He served during the Korean War era in the US Air Force as an air traffic controller under Gen. Douglas MacArthur — the five-star general who is the park’s namesake. He’s seen command. He’s seen accountability. He knows what leadership looks like.

What he saw at MacArthur Park was the brutal opposite. “If they’re going to maintain it [the park] like this, they might as well pave it over. Just looking at this place — it’s a nightmare.”

What stood in front of him looked less like a public park and more like the aftermath of a city that walked away. MacArthur Park resembles a zombie landscape left behind after civic collapse.

Trash carpets the ground — there’s rotting food, shredded clothing, busted shopping carts — and where grass once grew – it’s just dirt. Used needles lay openly along walkways and benches, turning every step into a minefield for the 92-year-old veteran.

“The smell is putrid. Overwhelming,” Reggio said.

Reggio first knew MacArthur Park as a boy — it’s the first place his father ever brought him when they moved to Los Angeles.

Those early visits stayed with him for decades, fixed in his mind as a symbol of order, beauty and civic pride.

The image he carried all those years was nothing like what stood in front of him now.

“It was pristine,” he said. “There was a beautiful lake. That’s the image I carried with me.”

What he walked into this time was something he never expected to see — and something he says he wishes he hadn’t seen at all.

“I wish I never saw this,” Reggio said. “What I saw today, I didn’t need that.”

Ironically, the famous park on Wilshire Blvd., just west of downtown, began as a literal dump, before being first turned into a park in 1886. The 35-acre site was known for its beautiful lake, which was often used for boating, as well as it’s concerts shells, gazebos and athletic fields.

The park was named for MacArthur in 1942, just the legendary general led US forces in the southwest Pacific during World War II.

The park was known then as one of the city’s cultural jewels, and appeared in shows like “Dragnet” and “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” — and was even the subject of the hit 1968 song “MacArthur Park”

But by the 1980 and 1990s the area around it had become one of the poorest in the city, and urban blight began to affect the space.

A 1995 article on the park called it “a free-fire zone where crack dealers and street gangs settle their scores with shotguns and Uzis.” There were 30 murders there in 1990, the piece in Mediamatic Magazine said.

In more recent years the troubles have continued, as it has been a site for frequent activity by the infamous MS-13 gang.

Asked what Gen. Douglas MacArthur would make of this sorry and gang-plagued new state of the park that bears his name, Reggio didn’t hesitate.

“The general stood for command, accountability, and responsibility,” Reggio said.

“If this is a tribute to leadership, it’s embarrassing,” he added. “The people responsible are flat-out ignoring their duties.”

To Reggio, the decay didn’t happen by accident. Someone who is supposed to be responsible for this place walked away. “They add programs, but they don’t solve anything,” he said. “I don’t believe anyone is interested in fixing the problem. If they came out here and looked at this responsibly, they’d be ashamed.”

The lack of will to fix the park among the city leaders could be seen in recent statements from local City Councilwoman Eunisses Hernandez, who seemed oblivious to the sorry state of the greenspace as she gave a recent new interview touting, off all things, how she had the curbs repainted.

“We redid all of them in this area,” she told the Los Angeles Times of the curbs, seemingly oblivious to the blight and troubled vagrants all around her.

“And you’re probably thinking, like, ‘Girl, like, that does not look like it’s redone.’ But the amount of labor and resources that we had to put in to get this done, even if it’s not pretty anymore, that’s just a little tiny bit of the work you do around MacArthur Park.”

For Reggio the reason for failure is obvious.

“This isn’t hope,” he said. “It’s despair. Deterioration. It’s an insult — to the community, to MacArthur.”

Reggio now lives in Pine Mountain Club and hadn’t been back in years. Returning, he said, was a mistake.

“This place meant a lot to me,” Reggio said. “I could have done without seeing it like this.”

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