MacArthur Park Sunset Fountain Countdown Timer

People say this is the ugliest park in America. They said it in a song in 1968 and the joke never quite died. I stood here anyway, on the west side, with the fountain going and the sky doing something absurd, and I want to report that the joke is out of date. The water was flat enough to hold all of it. The pink, the orange, the low cloud catching the last light, the skyline stacked up behind like a cardboard cutout. Two men were fishing. Somebody had a radio on. A woman walked past with a cart full of returnable cans and did not look at the sunset, which is fair, she had other things going on. That is the part the postcards miss. This park sits at the edge of a neighbourhood that has had a rough few decades, and the prettiness of this view exists inside all of that, not instead of it. A duck crossed the path in front of me, unhurried, completely unimpressed by any of it. I took three frames. The fountain shut off at seven. The colour went, the city lit up, and the park went back to being a park.