Santa Monica Airport Is Becoming a 192-Acre Park — And the Designs Just Dropped
For decades, the small planes buzzing low over Santa Monica's neighborhoods were a noise complaint on wings. Now, with first designs revealed this month for the 192-acre park replacing Santa Monica Municipal Airport when it closes in 2028, those complaints are finally cashing out — and what's coming looks genuinely extraordinary for West LA.
The City of Santa Monica dropped the first detailed design framework on April 2nd. Developed with landscape architecture firm RIOS, the plan divides the 191.6-acre site into eight distinct districts, each with its own character and purpose. Think less "flat grassy rectangle" and more a layered, living park designed from the ground up with years of actual community input driving every decision.
“This is the largest new park to land in West LA in a generation — bigger than Tongva Park and Palisades Park combined. It’s the kind of transformation that only happens once per neighborhood, per century.”
The Eight Districts
The framework names eight zones, each with a distinct identity. The Heart is the civic core — where architecture, movement, and gathering converge into a central anchor. The Stroll is the green gateway from the Clover Park area on the south side, designed to pull surrounding neighborhoods directly into the park. The Lawn is large, flat, and intentionally flexible: the kind of space that handles pickup soccer on Saturday morning and a free concert on Saturday night without breaking a sweat.
The Meadow is an intimate, softer landscape — the place to go when you want nature without the crowds. Immersive Nature is the wildlife-forward district, built around habitat restoration and the kind of ecological richness that's largely absent from Santa Monica's hardscaped urban core. Active Sports is self-explanatory and long overdue. Arts & Culture gives the creative community a permanent home in the park. And Urban Edge stitches the whole thing to surrounding streets and transit, making the park porous rather than walled-off from its neighbors.
What's Actually Getting Built
The specifics get compelling fast. The plan calls for five miles of new trails weaving through the site — a genuine distance, enough for a real run or a long morning walk without repeating yourself. There are 22 acres of sports facilities that include soccer fields, baseball diamonds, pickleball courts, tennis courts, and basketball courts: enough to absorb the sports leagues and weekend pickup games currently scrambling for any available patch of grass west of the 405.
A 5-acre community farm. Fifteen acres of urban forest and 8 acres of open meadow. A 2-acre event lawn with a 2,000-seat amphitheater — the outdoor music and performance venue West LA has been conspicuously missing. Fitness stations, an outdoor gym, and a nature playground round out what will be one of the most programmatically dense parks in the city. An aquatics center topped the community wish list and is still being designed into the plan.
Why This Took So Long — And Why It's Worth It
Santa Monica Municipal Airport opened in 1923, making it one of the oldest continuously operating airports in the country for most of its life. For decades it operated quietly. But as residential Santa Monica built up around it, the low-flying single-engine planes became a legitimate quality-of-life problem — noise, emissions, and safety concerns combining into one of the city's most persistent political battles. The Airport2Park coalition, years of FAA negotiations, ballot measures, and litigation eventually led to the 2017 agreement that set the 2028 hard close date.
What makes this moment feel different is the specificity. Previous airport conversion conversations in LA (looking at you, every LAX expansion discussion ever) have a way of producing vague renderings and dissolving into bureaucracy. This framework has eight named districts, measurable acreage per feature, an identified design firm, and secured funding. The community that pushed for this for two decades is getting something proportional to the fight.
