The Right to Party Left Intact

“The city put the wrong signs up…’no alcohol at Kate Sessions Park’…that’s illegal,” said a concerned Pacific Beach resident on the afternoon of June 7. “Park and Rec were anticipating a ban — that is my guess — and jumped the gun and had a sign made.”

At the park were two new brown metal signs: one planted at the edge of the park near the corner of Lamont and Loring; the other off to the right, just inside the entrance to Kate Sessions Park.

The signs declare six regulations, which include: no camping, no littering, no fires, no motorized vehicles, dogs must be leashed, and the words “No Alcoholic Beverages” under an image of a bottle behind the international symbol that means “no.” A photograph of one of these signs was posted to a Kate Sessions–related Facebook page on June 6, just before 8 p.m.

“The City said they’d remedy this by the end of the business day,” said the Pacific Beach resident who’d informed me of the City’s action. At approximately 4 p.m., a woman named Angel, a representative of the Pacific Beach Rec Center, arrived and began peeling the “No Alcoholic Beverages” segment from the sign at the corner of Lamont and Loring.

When asked who had given the approval to post the signs, Angel replied, “The City…well, what it was, ma’am, this sign was…we had a different sign up here, we had a sign that said 8 to 8… So, don’t know how it happened.”

“And so this one, the wrong one, went up when?” I asked.

“I just got a phone call today,” said Angel.

“And do you know there’s another sign up there, too?” I asked.

“Up at the playground, yep,” said Angel, pointing in the general direction of the second sign.

“And are there anymore, or just these two?” I asked.

“That I know of, these are the only two,” said Angel.

When our conversation concluded, I relocated myself just inside the park’s entrance and waited for over an hour for Angel to remove the second “no alcohol” sign, but Angel never arrived. A photograph taken later that evening indicated that the second “no alcohol” sign had not been removed by the end of the day.

Calls placed to Clay Bingham and Cathy Anzuoni, deputy director and district manager, respectively, of this particular community parks division, have not been returned.

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