It was the crystal ball that anticipated the fractures that would jag through every facet of American life
MacArthur Park revolves around a thirty-two-acre village green that slopes inward like an amphitheater before spilling into a turbid, mushroom-shaped lagoon, a body of water that shimmers from afar and, closer, simmers with foamy debris. Barely a mile west of downtown LA’s corporate fortresses, it was once the city’s most fashionable district, an early 1900s resort ringed by swanky hotels and smart boutiques.
As the affluent migrated toward the ocean and the middle class headed for the valleys, MacArthur Park’s glamour faded. It became a pensioner’s haunt, a bohemian retreat, and by the 1980s, as economic turmoil swept Mexico and civil war convulsed Central America, an immigrant crossroads: a modern-day Ellis Island.
The sudden concentration of so many dreamers—refugees and exiles, former soldiers and onetime insurgents, wanderers, castaways, pilgrims, Spanish speakers, K’iche’ speakers, Zapotec speakers, and other Indigenous peoples escaping pogroms across the Americas—made MacArthur Park feel both futuristic and primal.
No other place in Los Angeles thrums with its subversive energy or labors under the weight of so much trauma.
“A sampling of the human condition”
The first story I ever wrote about MacArthur Park appeared in the Los Angeles Times in 1987: “A Mind Game Is Class Act in City’s Core.” I’d been in LA only a couple of years at that point, and I was still finding my way, figuring out its social geography—the places that advanced the image the city wished to project and those that the majority seemed wary of or embarrassed by. MacArthur Park, unruly and unkempt yet also exhilarating and resilient, seemed to belong to that latter camp.
Amid the chaos of the crack epidemic, when something like a thousand smokers and suppliers congregated on the ryegrass every day, I found a recurring cluster of devout chess players, some legit US Chess Federation masters. In the freedom of the park, they’d lose themselves in thought. There were surely more serene venues for executing the complex sequences they had to visualize, but they seemed to relish the tumult—the ability to think elegantly amid the messiness of existence.
One of the elite competitors, a retired psychologist named Rogie Rogosin, told me: “The whole setting is a portrayal of life itself. It’s a sampling of the human condition.”
Could this once-grand, now-overburdened park be all that? Did it hold the key to something larger, more transcendent? I was twenty-four and not sure about a lot of things, but I was excited by the question—one that would stick with me across the decades.
A collision of serenity and gloom
A quarter-century after my first visit to MacArthur Park, I moved there. It was 2011, shortly after my son’s graduation from high school and just before his departure, out of state, to college. Life would be lonelier without him in the house, and a loft in the immigrant-rich core of the city seemed the right antidote to my single-dad, empty-nester blues.
I woke up every morning to a view of the lake, at once glassy and viscous. Those early hours tended to be when the bodies washed up, one every year or so. I soon learned that few had been dumped. The lake’s victims mostly appeared to be deeply unwell—some choosing the water for their final exit, some too addled to avoid falling in. It got me thinking about the dark beauty of the lake, how a civic asset could also spell peril for the despondent and self-medicated.
My obsession with the lake’s allure sent me on a ghoulish hunt through more than a century’s worth of newspaper accounts—search terms included “body” and “sinking” and “floating”—and into the coroner’s archives. I took the photo below of my first encounter with a lake victim in 2012. After Los Angeles magazine published my story “Fatal Attraction” in 2015, the tally didn’t end. Bodies were pulled from the lake in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022, 2023, and several times in 2024.
MacArthur Park is melting in the dark
It’s been called the worst song of all time. One of the most baffling hits in pop music history. A masterpiece in ludicrousness. It also earned composer Jimmy Webb a Grammy for Best Arrangement in 1969 (for the Richard Harris original); Waylon Jennings a Grammy in 1970 for Best Country Performance; and Donna Summer a #1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 for her 1978 disco version.
“MacArthur Park” is about the MacArthur Park: Webb used to meet his lover, who worked at a Wilshire Boulevard branch of Aetna Life Insurance, for lakefront picnics. When the romance ended, he channeled his melancholy into those famously trippy verses about a “cake out in the rain” and “all the sweet, green icing flowing down.”
In the 1960s, Aetna Life Insurance inhabited the top floor of the American Cement Building, its facade a mod exoskeleton of X’s. The units were converted to creative loft space in the early 2000s, about a decade before I moved in. It took me some years to make the connection: her office had become my home.
In 2013, Jimmy Webb performed “MacArthur Park” in MacArthur Park. The video I shot hasn’t stood the test of time, but you can view a stellar version here.