One of Fresno’s largest public art displays now covers the 180 freeway pillars in this South Tower park

Robert Amador’s eyes kept welling up when he was trying to work on his murals in Fresno’s San Pablo Park.

It wasn’t because of lingering Fresno allergies. Or the exhaust from the semi-trucks barreling by above the park, which sits underneath the 180 freeway. Instead, it was at the sight of so many fellow Fresno artists at work in the same place at the same time.

“This is, for sure,” he said, “almost like a mecca that’s being created in Fresno. I can’t really think of anything else that’s like this.”

He wasn’t the only one that felt that way, working on the new murals adorning 20 freeway overpass pillars in the South Tower park.

Teresa Flores, who grew up near Fashion Fair but now lives in East Los Angeles, came back to town to work on the project.

“I don’t think a lot of artists ever really get to see something like that,” she said of her similar view of a park full of artists, oftentimes from 20-plus-feet in the air on a scissor lift to scale the imposing columns.

“It was like a studio without walls.”

The San Pablo Park murals represent the largest public art installation in Fresno since the Fulton Mall, according to Lilia Gonzáles Chávez, executive director of the Fresno Arts Council.

The project, funded through CalTrans’ Clean California Beautification program, brought together almost a dozen Fresno artists as well as a handful of muralists from across the state. 

But the park itself, and the unique canvas the murals are painted on in San Pablo, come with a troubled legacy.

The construction of the 180 freeway through the South Tower neighborhood in the 90s echoes the story of other American highway construction projects over the past century: It cleared out homes and disrupted the neighborhood irrevocably, said longtime resident Kiel Lopez-Schmidt.

“The whole intention of the 180 freeway was to enable sprawl,” said Lopez-Schmidt, who is now executive director of the South Tower Community Land Trust. 

“It was not intended to be a benefit for our neighborhood.”

Some have also criticized the city for building a park like San Pablo right underneath the freeway. Studies — as well as guidelines from the state Attorney General’s Office — have urged the maintenance of buffer zones between truck routes on major roadways and sensitive sites like parks to ward off adverse health effects from particulate matter.

That makes the over decade-old South Tower park, in some ways, emblematic of a time now past, when the city was desperately trying to build parks without the proper resources, said Fresno City Councilmember Miguel Arias.

But it’s a new day with the revenue the Measure P sales tax has generated for Fresno parks since voters approved it in 2018. And bringing more color and beauty to San Pablo Park is just one step toward delivering the kinds of public spaces that South Tower residents deserve, said Lopez-Schmidt, whose organization coordinated three of the 20 murals.

“Hopefully, that’s followed up with some city investment in the amenities in this park,” he said, “so that we can really make sure the park is well used and for everybody.”

A walk in the park

Strolling through San Pablo Park, you can see familiar Fresno sights enshrined across the towering freeway infrastructure in the new murals.

Local icons, from activist Gloria Hernandez to writer William Saroyan, peer out from some of the pillars.

There are also multiple homages to the city’s street vendors.

That includes Flores’ pillar, which features monumental, over-20-foot-tall elotes on each side. Surrounding the elotes are jumbo chicharrones — blown up from their typical 2 or 3-inch scale to “like 5 feet,” Flores said.

By showcasing “the grand scale of the elote” and other beloved Mexican street foods, she said, she was hoping people would sit a little longer with the food they might typically scarf down in a matter of minutes (or seconds).

“Yes it’s culture, but there’s a lot of work that goes into preparing it,” she said, from the farm workers who harvest the food to the vendors who assemble it into the street foods everyone knows and loves.

Right beside Flores’ pillar is one of Amador’s, depicting a paletero.

“It’s a tribute to the on-foot ice cream men that I saw growing up,” said Amador, who spent his early years in southeast Fresno.

He designed the mural about two years ago, when the Fresno Arts Council — which administered the project — first sent out a request for proposals. It’s taken on a new meaning for him since then, both following additional attacks on street vendors throughout California and the launch of an aggressive crackdown on immigration under the Trump administration.

“Every single time I see them,” he said of the neighborhood paleteros, “I have that heart drop — this fear of like, hopefully that man makes it home. Hopefully nothing happens to him.”

Another thing several of the murals have in common is bright blue skies, despite the perpetual shadow the overpass casts over the park.

Caleb Duarte’s murals take that a step further. 

His pillars feature colossal sequoias on one side and children relaxing in nature on the opposite. Above the children Duarte and his team painted blue semicircles, representing “portals,” he said, or almost “a cracking of the freeway” to the sky above.

“Our kids haven’t even been up there from our communities,” he said of the national parks near Fresno, home to the giant sequoias and wide open skies, “because of lack of access.

“So we’re making it here.”

Fighting for green space in South Tower

Lopez-Schmidt and his South Tower neighbors have watched the highway transform their neighborhood over the past several decades.

It set them back from cultivating a “healthy business corridor” along nearby Belmont Avenue, as gas stations and liquor stores clustered around the freeway entrance.

That leaves them worried about the park that now stands under the 180. Lopez-Schmidt said they often find broken glass and discarded needles in the woodchips surrounding the playground structure.

“For a lot of parents,” he said, “I’ve heard that this is not a safe place.”

Arias, the councilmember who represents South Tower, said the park was built at a time when the city was “resource-poor.”

“We were trying to give kids something to do with zero money,” he said. “Now, we have an abundance of resources thanks to Measure P. The state and the city are now actively funding these things.

“Now, we can actually build parks to standards and in areas that actually fit the expectations of good planning, best practices and ensuring the health and safety of users,” he added, “especially kids.”

In addition to the murals, the land trust is pushing for the city to make other investments in San Pablo Park as well.

That includes a redesign that would replace San Pablo Park’s woodchips with rubberized material that can’t as easily conceal dangerous debris. The redesign also proposes removing the playground structure and installing things like basketball courts and a skateboarding plaza instead.

The next step is to allocate funding for construction of the San Pablo Park redesign, which Arias said the city is still working on. 

The city has already found funding for another park in the South Tower neighborhood: Broadway Parque, which is slated for a ribbon-cutting later this month, Arias said.

That park is the product of years of advocacy efforts from Lopez-Schmidt and his South Tower neighbors, who fought to have it built on the site of a decommissioned police substation on the corner of Broadway and Elizabeth Street.

‘That’s my kid’s favorite’

Fresno artist Steven Camacho Nuñez used to live across the street from the Ted C. Wills Community Center, around the corner from San Pablo Park. He remembers playing hide-and-seek around the neighborhood before the park existed.

It’s hard for Camacho Nuñez to believe that he’s now one of the artists that took on a massive mural project in his old neighborhood. He designed his pillar with the next generation of young people that will come to the park in mind.

“That pillar I wanted to be kid-friendly, so I used a lot of bright colors, a lot of recognizable landmarks,” he said, which includes the Tower Theatre’s iconic spire. “I kept the design really simple, not to overcomplicate it for the kids.”

Amador’s heard his paletero mural is popular with the kids in the area already.

Some neighbors who stopped by while he was working on his second mural would ask which other one was his, and when he told them it was the paletero, “They’d go: That’s my kid’s favorite,” he said.

“I’ve heard a lot of people say, that looks like my grandpa,” he added. “That looks like my uncle.

“It’s like, yeah — it looks like my grandpa, my uncle, too.”

The Fresno Arts Council is hosting an unveiling of the new murals Saturday, July 26, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at San Pablo Park (511 N. San Pablo Ave). Find out more from Council District 3’s social media page.