A wealthy town, annoyed by the condition of its neighbor’s side of a shared park, builds a fence down the middle to keep the riffraff out. The residents are furious. At a public meeting, one of them suggests building a second fence around the first fence. Another suggests burning it down. The wealthy town, meanwhile, holds its own meeting and politely votes to keep the fence up.
This is the plot of a 2011 episode of Parks and Recreation, the NBC comedy set in the fictional town of Pawnee, Indiana. The writers researched local California politics for the series. When they needed to film Eagleton’s immaculate parks, they drove to the Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California.
San Marino doesn’t build fences. It doesn’t need to. It just charges you to walk in.
The Gated Park
Lacy Park sits on thirty acres in the center of San Marino, a city of about thirteen thousand people in the San Gabriel Valley. Rose gardens, walking loops, tennis courts, towering trees, a monument to General Patton. It is, by all accounts, beautiful. It also requires non-residents to check in at a gatehouse and pay for the privilege of entering on a weekend.
The fee dates to 1988, imposed after Proposition 13 squeezed property tax revenue. Before that, the city’s solution was even more blunt: the park was simply closed on weekends. The fee has since been challenged in court and reimposed, most recently at four dollars backed by a consultant’s cost study. The rationale is maintenance. The LA Times reported in 2007 that San Marino had received hundreds of thousands of dollars in state and federal block grants earmarked for exactly that purpose. The fee kept going anyway.
What makes it sting isn’t the four dollars. It’s the gatehouse. It’s the implicit sorting of people into those who belong and those who are visiting someone else’s space. San Marino is a city with no apartments where it’s illegal to park a car anywhere other than a garage. The park fee functions less as a revenue tool and more as a velvet rope, a way to make the park feel private without technically making it so.
Undesirable Types
A few miles east, in August of 2019, Arcadia’s Eisenhower Park was in the middle of a $6.3 million renovation. The old basketball courts had been demolished, and the new plans didn’t include rebuilding them. Mayor Pro Tem Roger Chandler explained why: the courts attracted unsanctioned tournaments and the wrong crowd. “I personally observed some of the folks, and they’re not the type that I would drive into Arcadia,” he told the council. Sean Brown, a lifelong resident, pointed out there wasn’t a single police report tied to the courts. He showed up to the subsequent protest wearing a nametag: “Hello, my name is ‘basketball type.'”
More than sixty residents rallied outside the park. The council eventually voted 3-2 to restore one court, down from the original two. Chandler voted no.
No Resorts Here
And then there’s the story that makes all of this look quaint. In 1912, a Black couple named Willa and Charles Bruce bought beachfront property in Manhattan Beach and built a resort. When the Bruces wouldn’t leave, the city condemned their land through eminent domain in 1924, claiming it would build a park. They demolished the resort, banned new resort businesses in the area, and then left the land empty for thirty years. No park was built. It took nearly a century and a state law for the land to be returned to the family’s descendants.
The Reality
There is a fair case for the other side. San Marino residents pay property taxes. Parks cost money. Not every fee is a dog whistle. But when a city charges non-residents to enter a park, or removes a basketball court, or says they will build a park but never do, and the effect is that certain people stop showing up…. is anyone in charge bothered by that, or quietly relieved?
It took a wildfire for San Marino to answer, briefly. After the Eaton Fire devastated the San Gabriel Valley in January 2025, the city suspended the Lacy Park entry fee, saying it wanted the park to be “more accessible while the region heals.” Visitors still checked in at the gatehouse. Still gave their zip code. But the fee was gone. It was a kind gesture, and an inadvertent admission that the fee had been a barrier all along.
In Parks and Recreation, Eagleton eventually goes bankrupt and gets absorbed by Pawnee. Leslie Knope, who hated Eagleton more than anyone, proposes the merger herself. The real world doesn’t wrap up that neatly. San Marino’s fee is back. The gatehouse is still there. And somewhere in Arcadia, a kid is shooting hoops on the one court they got to keep, half of what they had, but more than what a councilman thought they deserved.
Woe
Public spaces are public for a reason. They’re where a city stops being a collection of private lots and starts being a community, where you encounter people who don’t live on your street, don’t share your tax bracket, don’t look like you. The prophet Isaiah had a word for those who add field to field until there is no room left and they dwell alone in the midst of the land. He didn’t call them successful. He said woe.
