Commentary: The dog park I once adored has changed too much

I am but one of thousands of residents who were not born in lovely Costa Mesa but came from somewhere else. This is my story.

It started in the spring of 2004, when one day I found myself in what was arguably the most unusually attractive dog park in Los Angeles County. It was nestled in the Hollywood Hills, in an area officially designated as national forest.

In that park, you would feel like you were in the bottom of a tiny canyon, and you would look up at the forest of trees way above you. We could see a few homes way up there, and one could wonder what movie star might be looking down upon us.

On that day I struck up a conversation with a stranger, a lady who turned out to be a walking encyclopedia on the subject of dog parks in Southern California. When it came to dog parks, this lady had been everywhere.

At the time I was planning to leave L.A. for Ventura. I had some friends up there, and I wanted a change from the hustle and bustle and overcrowding of L.A. I had never set foot in Orange County, except for a tourist boat excursion of Newport Harbor with visiting relatives back sometime in the 1970s.

During this one-time encounter, which lasted less than half an hour, I asked her, out of curiosity, if there were any similarly attractive dog parks in Orange County. Without hesitation, she proclaimed there was only one in the entire county: the small dog park in Costa Mesa.

I decided to check it out. In the process, I found a quiet, laid back city with a sleepy small-town feel to it. No traffic jams, plenty of free parking everywhere, and affordable housing relative to other coastal towns. (At this point in time, the developers had not yet been given free rein to inflict the high-density projects recently dotting our communities.)

And yes, that small dog park was indeed a gem. It was a genuine section of Costa Mesa’s trophy park, TeWinkle Park. And while it did not share the ducks and geese and waterfalls and lakes of the latter park, it was special in its own right, with its ocean breeze. Most of the 60-yard chainlink fence that set it off from the parking lot was covered with numerous melaleuca trees with arching branches that provided shade for the park patrons, a very effective sound barrier, and an unusual sense of privacy.

Inside that small area were additional old trees and mostly beautiful established grass, with no artificial turf or man-made amenities. You could not readily see what was in the parking lot, nor hear the noise along Newport Boulevard and the freeway, and you could conduct conversations in a whisper, if you wanted. It was in some ways like a secret garden. It was one of the premier small dog parks in Southern California, for those of us who love nature.

Unfortunately, most of the established grass was lost in 2007, six years after that small dog park was created, and as of a few months ago, every single original melaleuca tree is now gone.

Notwithstanding recent well-needed, and appreciated, improvements to that park, all that now separates it from the huge parking lot is a naked chainlink fence with attractive doggy silhouettes mounted on it and a few non-shade bearing crepe myrtle trees, for the most part. It has, in my view, made the transition from a bona fide section of TeWinkle Park to a sub-section of the parking lot that serves the entire dog park and the skate park.

This saddens me.

Here’s the thing: had the small dog park looked back in the spring of 2004 the way it looks today, I seriously doubt that that mystery lady would have directed me to Costa Mesa, and today I most likely would be living in Ventura.

Costa Mesa resident AL MELONE says he plans to run for City Council in 2016.