Start Date: July 19, 2026
“MacArthur Park” is a song written by singer-songwriter Jimmy Web in the 1960’s. While first recorded by Richard Harris, you may associate it with the soaring vocals of the late disco queen Donna Summer.
I never made much sense of it. Something about
“Someone left the cake out in the rain”
That seems a tragedy to me, as a person who deems cake as a primary food group.
The stanza ends with
“I’ll never have that recipe again”
It is supposedly about a relationship with, and breakup from, a beloved girlfriend with whom he spent many happy times at MacArthur Park in Los Angeles.
Cherished memories lost to the harsh realities of life. Not all things are meant to last.
As to the park.
Formerly Westlake Park, it opened in 1890 and was modeled after European parks. Boaters made use of the lake, and in 1894 the city added a three-story Victorian boathouse. All from a lake and marshes that the city had been using as a dump for decades. This information comes from a 2013 article of L.A. history entitled: [1]
“Westlake (MacArthur) Park: How a Neighborhood Dump Became a Civic Treasure.”
Sadly we can now, circa 2026, ask the question about the survival of MacArthur Park, and Los Angeles itself. Has it too been left out in the rain, abandoned for too long?
If you have seen any images you know that it is now the site of massive homeless encampments, open air drug dealing, and violent crime.
For a measure of the scale of the problem consider this. Last year, 2025, city crews hauled away nearly 13 million pounds of trash [2]. It seems that Los Angeles has come full circle. The question now is
MacArthur Park: How a Civic Treasure Became a Neighborhood Dump ?
Among the trash was 142,329 pounds of human waste, 10,000 pounds of flammable materials, compressed gases and reactive chemicals. Also 24,000 pounds of discarded syringes, bongs, and liquor bottles. There were also dead animals and contaminations of all kinds [2].
I am a numbers person so I can’t help looking at the dates. This park was built from a dump in 1890. The article describing it as a “Civic Treasure” was written in 2013, 123 years later. During that century the city’s residents experienced the financial strains of WWI, the 1929 market crash, and a decade of major depression that caused unemployment as high as 25% with no social welfare net. It survived the migration of thousands of poor displaced midwestern famers during the dust bowl, more wars, oil crises, and recessions.
If you have a situation that you didn’t have in the past it is worth looking to see what else has changed. How, in roughly a decade, did the park go from being a treasure resurrected from a city dump, to a “dump” with more than 10 million pounds of trash? How can a society accomplish such a catastrophic downturn absent war or cataclysmic natural disaster?
Bad Choices.
Here is a timeline.
2013: The more than century old MacArthur Park is lionized as a “Civic Treasure”
August 2013: The LAPD re-categorized violations such as trespass and public intoxication, etc. as infractions instead of misdemeanors [3]. So living, eating, urinating, defecating, littering in public spaces, effectively became accepted behaviors. They are deemed “quality of life” crimes. L.A. chose to abandon maintaining quality of life and hence the quality of life deteriorated. That is how it works.
November 2014: CA voters decriminalized (recategorized felony to simple misdemeanor) the possession of “personal use” levels of hard drugs, including cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine [4]. Those drugs are both addictive and disabling. Once you become a user you will be unable to perform most jobs and typically unable to quit without rehabilitation. So a population of people became addicted to a substance that rendered them unable to legally earn income, inevitably leading to mass populations of homeless addicts.
2023: The MacArthur Park adjacent LAFD station was the busiest in the nation. They estimate that 80% of their calls are connected to the homeless and indicate that there are 6-10 overdoses daily at the park. One of their most commonly used tools is Narcan, a spray used to reverse opioid overdose [5].
2025: The city removes over 10 million pounds of trash including over 140,000 pounds of human waste.
Are their broader implications?
Yes.
The nearby U.S. Post Office for the Westlake area is almost inaccessible due to homeless encampments surrounding it and overtaking the parking lot. The owner of a neighborhood deli says the area is filthy and unsafe, filled with tents and rats [6].
Is it possible it could just close like a department store in a failing neighborhood?
Yes indeed it could.
MacArthur Park isn’t the only, or even the largest, area taken over by a mentally impaired homeless population. A few miles away is the vast Skid Row district with a post office suffering similar issues. It became so bad that in January 2026 the U.S.P.O. quietly shut down the station. It is out of business [7]. It was too unsafe. When stores can’t keep their customers and employees safe they leave. It seems that if your city won’t enforce the laws and maintain even a hint of security, then the services of the federal government can leave as well.
Let that settle in.
Postal workers trudge through sub-freezing, even sub-zero blizzards In Chicago, torrential rain in the southeast, and temperatures over 110 degrees in the southwest. But dealing with the addicts, mentally ill, rodents, biological waste, and garbage in one of the most temperate areas on the planet, is the existential threat.
L.A. HAS SURRENDERED.
It ceded the territory. It lost the battle. Will it lose the war? Maybe other post offices will close.
What else can go?
Increasingly street lights and cable lines go out because of criminals stripping them to sell the copper. That is probably illegal.
So the good news is that with streets and bridges going dark the LAPD formed a “HEAVY METAL TASK FORCE” to focus on those crimes in early 2024 [8]. Sadly the task force was disbanded in 2025 because of lack of budget.
Where will the money go? Likely it will join the other billions of dollars that disappeared into well paid NGOs, including the groups that hand out needles and crack pipes to the people making much of the city so unsafe. Why solve a problem when there is so much personal profit to be had from keeping it going? Los Angeles recently reported an increase of people living on the streets after having spent billions that can’t be accounted for [9] to allegedly address homelessness.
The present mayor’s solution to copper theft is solar lights. But organized criminals, being generally willing to adapt to circumstances, will probably find something to steal from them.
The problem of “copper theft” isn’t the copper. It is the THEFT.
But given that theft is increasingly legal in CA, ending it never seems to be the preferred solution.
Also there are the rats.
One of the consequences of millions of pounds of waste, including garbage and biological materials, is rats. The rats, who carry fleas, have brought back the centuries old disease of typhus [10] to L.A. In 2018 a Los Angeles Deputy City Attorney, who is not homeless and does not work outside in encampments, acquired typhus from a bug bite she got due to the vast populations of rats in the area. It isn’t getting better. In 2020, an LAFD captain emailed the city complaining that his fire station was being overrun by rats from a homeless encampment [10]. Statistics going back to 2009 indicate a 2300% increase in typhus cases in Los Angeles. I wonder if they shared this with the IOC when applying to host the Olympics.
Given that the city provides homeless drug addicts free needles and crack pipes we should not be shocked that the state has chosen to ban many rat pesticides when facing the return of a historic disease spread by rats.
Yet another “Bad Choice.”
From the standpoint of urban anthropology we can look at all of this as de-evolution
A park built from a dump returns to an even worse collection of trash, human waste and humanity’s lost souls. Basic government services cease. Lighted streets go back to a time of darkness after sunset. Disease bearing rats scurry through the streets.
MacArthur Park, the song, was about the heartbreak of a failed romance.
MacArthur Park, the place, is a symbol of civilizational failure.
“Someone left the cake out in the rain”
Will we have the recipe again?
REFERENCES
[1] Masters, Nathan, “Westlake (MacArthur) Park: How a Neighborhood Dump Became a Civic Treasure”, May 17, 2013, https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/lost-la/westlake-macarthur-park-how-a-neighborhood-dump-became-a-civic-treasure
[2] Paige, Jamie, “13M pounds of trash and hazardous waste removed from MacArthur Park”, NY Post, July 18, 2026, https://nypost.com/2026/07/18/us-news/13m-of-pounds-of-trash-and-hazardous-waste-removed-from-macarthur-park-as-staggering-extent-of-decline-revealed/?c=cp_morningreport&lctg=999999999_f162d14c9d8d85bb3c9a76468927637729e2eca5c4d8996f59b3905e844ea81e&lh_aid=999999999_f162d14c9d8d85bb3c9a76468927637729e2eca5c4d8996f59b3905e844ea81e&lh_cid=xbn2uc198x&utm_campaign=cali_morningreport&utm_content=20260719&utm_medium=email&utm_source=letterhead&di=2799f634e5a0ab3a081cb4cbb96e481b
[3] “LA Downgrades Low-Level Crimes to Infractions”, NBCLA, August 5, 2013, https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/la-downgrades-low-level-crimes-to-infractions/1957024/
[4] “How Proposition 47 Changed Drug Possession Charges in California”, Mayr Law Firm, November 19, 2025
[5] Seedorff, Matthew, “Inside one of America’s busiest fire stations: A day with LAFD Station 11”, June 1, 2026, https://www.foxla.com/news/inside-one-americas-busiest-fire-stations-day-lafd-station-11
[6] Cota-Robles, Marc, “Westlake post office parking lot overrun by homeless encampment”, ABC7LA, April 1, 2026, https://abc7.com/post/los-angeles-post-office-parking-lot-overrun-homeless-encampment/18826260/
[7] “SKID ROW POST OFFICE CLOSED: LA SURRENDERS 364 PO BOXES ABANDONED”, July 7, 2026, https://reasonabletv.com/podcast/skid-row-post-office-closed/
[8] Damien, Christopher, “LAPD quietly disbands copper wire theft task force as streetlight outages continue”, March 11, 2026, https://thelalocal.org/los-angeles-city/lapd-quietly-disbands-copper-wire-theft-task-force-as-streetlight-outages-continue/
[9] Nguyen, Jeff, “Los Angeles cannot track money spent on homeless programs, independent audit finds”, CBSLA, March 6, 2025, https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/los-angeles-homeless-independent-audit-cannot-track-money/
[10] Rufo, Christopher F., and Thorpe, Ryna, “The Typhus Rats of Los Angeles”, City Journal, August 5, 2026, https://www.city-journal.org/article/rats-typhus-los-angeles?utm_source=virtuous&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=cjdaily&vcrmeid=NxQQCe2pVECyqv52K6PQA&vcrmiid=DUtD7-F2OkGUvGL_IGVvfQ