Los Angeles Wants to Buy the Park Koreatown Already Uses

At Liberty Park, the sign and the lawn tell different stories. The grass beside Wilshire Boulevard hosts dog walkers, yoga classes, children kicking balls and crowds watching the World Cup. A notice at its edge says the property is closed to the public. People use the place like a neighborhood park, but they do so because its private owner continues to allow it.

Los Angeles is now considering a direct way out of that contradiction: buy the lawn. On September 17, the Board of Recreation and Park Commissioners authorized the Department of Recreation and Parks to continue pursuing Liberty Park and several other Council District 10 properties for possible acquisition. Councilmember Heather Hutt’s office has described the purchase as part of a broader effort to add green space and recreation facilities in Koreatown.

The authorization is an opening move, not a completed sale. The city still needs appraisals, negotiations, an identified funding package and a purchase agreement that would return to the commission for approval. The parks department’s report acknowledged that sufficient acquisition money had not yet been confirmed. It also warned that taking ownership would create a continuing maintenance expense.

Those unresolved details matter because Liberty Park already looks convincingly public. It was created with Beneficial Standard Life Insurance Company’s headquarters in 1967. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed the office building, while Sasaki, Walker & Associates shaped the landscape around a broad lawn, a grove of Canary Island pines, plazas and a replica Liberty Bell. The company deliberately left much of its prominent Wilshire property open rather than filling the block with another tower.

That generosity always had a property line around it. When Jamison Properties proposed replacing the complex with a 36-story mixed-use tower in 2016, neighbors organized as Save Liberty Park. Their campaign helped secure Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument status for the building and landscape in 2018. The designation made the lawn, trees, setback and plaza part of a protected cultural landscape.

Landmark status protected the physical composition. It did not give the public a legal right to sit there. The owner still controls access, maintenance and everyday rules. A security guard can ask someone to leave a landmark lawn just as easily as any other private property. That gap between preservation and possession is the useful part of this story: saving the design kept Liberty Park from disappearing, while public acquisition could keep its users from being treated as tolerated guests.

The office tower’s next chapter makes the arrangement more interesting. Jamison is pursuing an adaptive-reuse conversion of the 11-story building into 370 live-work apartments, with the existing height and number of stories retained. If that project advances alongside a public purchase of the lawn, Koreatown could gain housing inside the old headquarters while permanently securing the landscape outside it. The combination is far better than reviving the false choice between homes and every square foot of open space.

The need is not subtle. Los Angeles’s 2025 Park Needs Assessment ranked the Westlake-Koreatown new-park priority area among the city’s first-priority sites. Within the one-mile study grid, existing parks are too small for the number of nearby residents, and park acreage per thousand people is projected to decline as the population grows. Liberty Park cannot repair that shortage by itself. It has no playground, restroom or recreation center. Its main achievement is simpler: a mature, visible place where somebody can stop without buying anything.

The city intends to explore Quimby fees, which come from residential development and can pay for park acquisition or improvements, alongside other funding. Before celebrating, residents should see the price, the maintenance plan and the exact land included in any agreement. Los Angeles would be spending scarce park money on a landscape that already exists, and an owner should not receive a blank check merely because private control has become uncomfortable.

Still, acquiring Liberty Park is a sound goal. The city would be purchasing permanence, accountable maintenance and the right of the public to remain. The best result may look almost boring: keep the lawn, protect the pines, add only what the neighborhood genuinely needs and replace the no-trespassing ambiguity with rules that apply to an actual public park. Koreatown has already supplied the users. Los Angeles now has to decide whether their place is worth guaranteeing.