Letter to the Editor: Plummer Park Is a Home in a Foreign Land

is so much more than a park. For me and the people in my community, Plummer Park is a haven, a refuge, a place of nature and calm amidst a concrete urban jungle. Plummer Park is home.

Plummer Park welcomed me with open arms in 1978 when I was a 3 ½-year-old girl who had just come from the Soviet Union. Like me, it welcomed so many others, weary for a place of rest and belonging in a foreign land. 

Its towering trees provide shelter from the sun on sweltering days and its historical buildings and open grassy areas make Plummer a place where one’s soul can find rest from the hustle and bustle of life zooming by on surrounding Santa Monica Boulevard and Fountain Avenue. Once you enter Plummer Park, you can take a deep breath and relax.

Plummer isn’t flashy or fancy. It doesn’t have state-of-the-art playgrounds or buildings, but it is real. It is wild and untamed in certain areas and that is part of its beauty. It is the closest you can get to wilderness in the heart of West Hollywood. It is like our own little forest, and it is magical. 

Plummer Park was the place where I had my first American birthday party, learned to ride a bike, learned to roller skate, learned how to get across on the monkey bars, met many of my first friends, watched parades and ceremonies that honored the sacrifices of my grandparents during WWII, and more recently took both of my children on their first outings as newborns. 

Since I had my daughter four years ago, Plummer Park has once again resumed a central role in my day-to-day life. I have watched my children play, learn and dream at Plummer Park and to grow to love it as much as I do.

I have lived in this neighborhood for the last 33 years and I know how vital Plummer Park is to this community. The thought of losing this park for two years is unimaginably horrid in nature.

Where will all the children go? Where will all the elderly, whose lives revolve around the park, go? Where will all the other people who frequent this park on a daily basis go? Where will the hundred-year-old trees and the historic building with so much character go? What will become of the park that is such an essential part of all of our lives?

Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not opposed to change and understand that it is constant in life. Neither am I opposed to renovation and vision and progress. All these things are good and necessary. However, what I am opposed to is needless destruction and demolition and a disregard of the past and history. 

I was born in St. Petersburg, Russia—a city with some of the most exquisite architecture in the world. I spent the first three years of my life walking through the Summer Gardens of Peter the Great on a daily basis. When I went back to Russia for the first time in 1995, after being away for 17 years, I did not find the Summer Gardens replaced with a more modern version. Sure, some renovation had been done, but the park hadn’t been torn down and replaced with something that looked nothing like the original gardens. 

Why must Plummer Park be changed so dramatically? Why must Fiesta Hall be replaced by a smaller version of the Disney Concert Hall? Why must hundred-year-old trees and green areas be replaced with an underground garage that will only add 69 parking spaces? Why must preschool children play on the roof of a building during their recess? 

Plummer Park is Plummer Park. It doesn’t need to be the Getty Museum. In a society where the majority of people suffer from nature deficit disorder, do we really need to modernize and pave the precious little urban nature we have left in order to make things more aesthetically pleasing for some? Is that really progress?

I am all for cleaning up the park and fixing and renovating Fiesta Hall and Great Hall, but can we keep the original design intact? Can we make the park better without uprooting such amazing and significant trees? Can we improve the park without making it off limits to the community for two years? Can the people who live in the community and call Plummer Park home have some say in the park’s fate?

Please understand, if we lose Plummer Park, we lose so much more than a park.  So much more. Thank you for your time. 

—Sofiya Turin, West Hollywood resident

West Hollywood Patch accepts Letters to the Editor from residents. Please e-mail yours to Local Editor Danielle Jacoby.