PLANNING FOR DOWNTOWN LANCASTER PARK MOVES FORWARD 12-ACRE AREA TO BE CENTERPIECE OF REVITALIZATION EFFORT.

Byline: Charles F. Bostwick Staff Writer

LANCASTER - A downtown vision for which city officials demolished dozens of aging apartments is moving toward fruition.

Design work is under way for a downtown park that will take up most of three city blocks, closing off parts of three streets, to serve the surrounding neighborhood, including new senior citizen apartments that have recently opened or are under construction.

``We want to keep it really a place for the community to go,'' Parks, Recreation and Arts director Lyle Norton said.

The 12-acre park is the centerpiece of the multimillion-dollar north downtown revitalization effort that began in 2001 with acquisition of aging apartment buildings. The first major construction project began in 2003 with the building of the 76-unit Arbor Gardens senior apartment complex, which is now open.

The same developer is now building the 150-unit Arbor Grove complex, new offices for the Children's Center of Antelope Valley are under construction, and another project will combine a building for mental-health programs with a 100-unit affordable apartment complex.

Construction could start early next year on a new campus for the Antelope Valley Seventh-day Adventist School, which will share the new downtown park's athletic fields during school days with Sacred Heart School, city housing program manager Elizabeth Brubaker said.

The Seventh-day Adventist school's existing campus on Date Avenue is being bought by the city so it can build a larger one at Fern Avenue and Kettering Street, the southwestern corner of the new park. Sacred Heart School will be on the park's eastern edge.

The school construction is awaiting the city's transfer of the property.

``We are working together in this,'' said Bob Dennis, associate superintendent for Southern California Seventh-day Adventist schools. ``We are trying to do this with deliberate haste.''

City Council members are expected next month to approve an agreement for transferring the land for the new school. The 75-pupil school, operated by five Antelope Valley Seventh-day Adventist churches, will stay in its existing buildings until the new campus is done.

A park master plan, being drawn up by Riverside landscape architecture firm RHA, is expected to go to the City Council in February.

The present concept for the park, which will be almost twice the size of 6.8-acre Jane Reynolds Park in downtown, calls for it to contain soccer and ballfields, an entrance plaza on Kettering, a second plaza suitable for weddings or other events at Fern Avenue and Jackman Street, and a walking and jogging path around it.

The athletic fields won't have lights because they are intended for use in informal games, not by leagues or city recreation programs, Norton said.

To be named for retired City Manager James C. Gilley, the new park will close Fig, Elm and Date avenues between Jackman and Kettering.

The original cost estimate for creating the park once the land was cleared was $4 million, but how close that is to reality is unknown because construction costs have been escalating rapidly, Norton said.

City officials expect to tear down most of the old Seventh-day Adventist school to convert it into park space, but plan to keep its gymnasium for exercise classes or other city programs.

``We need indoor space,'' Norton said.

City officials have not yet decided what to do with a home built of adobe on the southern edge of what will become the new park. Built before World War II by the widow and children of an Antelope Valley High School principal, the single-story home's unreinforced walls make it unusable as a public building, city officials said.

But the house might be filled with dioramas or other history displays, which visitors could see by looking through its windows from outside, officials said.

Charles F. Bostwick, [phone]

chuck.bostwick(at)dailynews.com

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Photo:

(color) Work crews tear down the last building in the old apartment complex at the site of the new park.

Jeff Goldwater/Staff Photographer