Environment: Los Angeles’ Lost River

On a Sunday afternoon, venerable Balboa Park smells exactly as it should—like charred hot dogs. From atop bicycles and in strollers, beneath kites or behind dogs, English, Spanish, Hebrew, Farsi, and Russian voices exchange the news of the day in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley. Couples picnic on the grass with deli takeout, alongside extended family barbecues and inflatable castles full of bouncing nine-year-olds. There are even a few weddings beside the park’s centerpiece, Lake Balboa. The newlyweds don’t seem to mind the paddle boaters, or fly fishermen, or children chasing ducks and geese around the lake. The man-made, curvaceous body of reclaimed water, with its decorative cascade and flower-trimmed gazebos, captivates everyone in the Valley’s heat.

Twenty miles east, City Councilmember Ed Reyes is walking precincts in his working-class, largely Latino district just north of downtown LA. Neither the rain nor the pitbull at his heels deter him from describing the area’s future. “Open space and development of natural settings [are] important in creating relief for all the kids and all the families in these corridors,” he insists. “We’re rivaling Manhattan in terms of density.” But there are precious few parks. A trained urban planner, Reyes sees the neglected Los Angeles River, which runs south through his district and then into downtown, as a logical place to begin renewing the city center. William Mulholland, the early 20th century Los Angeles water and czar who reengineered an entire state’s water supply to allow the building of a city in the desert, once called the river “a beautiful, limpid little stream.” Today, partly thanks to Mulholland, the river lies straitjacketed into a concrete channel. Nobody would think about getting married here. 

“If we use our natural habitats wisely and we strategically locate them in areas that need this kind of investment, then you’re gonna have a magnet to create multiple uses in one site—like live-work space,” commercial investment, and desperately craved recreational space, believes Reyes. Reyes wants to create a new equivalent of Balboa Park in his neighborhood, with the river at the heart of the enterprise. He repeats his rallying cry, the one that gets quoted in all the papers: “We’ve been treating the river as the city’s backyard. It’s time that we make it our front yard.”

Performance Art Spawns Vision for River

Nearby, ex-beat poet and avant-garde art historian Lewis Macadams recounts how this chapter in the struggle to revitalize the river began 17 years ago as a performance art series. Part One involved cutting through a wire fence with two friends, “going down to the river and asking if we could speak for it in the human realm. We didn’t hear it say no.” Thus was born the Friends of the Los Angeles River (FoLAR), Macadams’s non-profit environmental advocacy “artwork.” In 1989, Macadams spoke for the river by saying things like “Over our dead bodies!” when the chair of the State Assembly Transportation Committee proposed to turn the riverbed into a freeway. Now that the state and local governments finally are catching up with FoLAR’s restorative vision, Macadams’s Loraxian voice sounds just like the politician’s: “Once people come down to the river and it becomes part of their life, then it becomes part of the city… It’s a way of making the river the front yard.” But for Macadams, a front yard is wilder than the neat patches of green grass that stand before L.A. homes. Suggest to most folks that you want to open up green space along the river, and they might think about sweeps of meadow and playing fields along the banks, with playgrounds cooled by the river breeze. The river of Macadams’s dreams is open space for “not just the two two-leggeds but the four-leggeds and the flying ones and the swimming ones.”

“I got into this to take out concrete,” says Macadams, but he has yet to see the jackhammers. Nevertheless, he is optimistic, not urgent. “I can’t afford to think in those terms,” he says of the time gone by and the concrete that hasn’t budged. He focuses forward while savoring the victories so far, like FoLAR’s office in the 5-year-old Los Angeles River Center adjacent to the intersection of the I-5 and Highway 110.

The 5/110 interchange that FoLAR’s office overlooks is not just freeway, after all. It is L.A.’s original front yard. Here at the confluence of the L.A. River and the Arroyo Seco, El Pueblo de Los Angeles was settled in 1781. The ocean and the mountains that today are the city’s defining natural icons were several days’ horseback ride away then.

From River to “Flood Control Channel”

For 120 years, the freshwater mecca served as L.A.’s hub and main water source, so people more or less paid attention to the river’s health. But they were also sucking it dry. By 1900, the water demands of an exploding population were about to exceed the river’s supply. In 1913, Mulholland’s Los Angeles-Owens River Aqueduct began delivering all the water the metropolis needed from hundreds of miles away, and the L.A. River became most useful as a dumping ground.

The river continued its seasonal flooding amid the pollution. Little more than a creek most of the year, the river swelled in winter with runoff from the San Gabriel Mountains, and refused to follow a fixed course through its increasingly-developed basin. In 1930, parkland innovator Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., along with Harlan Bartholomew, proposed a chain of riverside greenways for the dual purposes of flood control and recreation. Developers, hungry for property in the basin, quashed the public space plan before it was widely known.

Within eight years, two floods killed 87 people, damaged property, and provided a perfect excuse for a flood-control project palatable to real estate interests. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers embarked on a 30-year paving project to reign in the unruly river, conveniently freeing land in the former flood plain for private construction. The project “was a holocaust” for wildlife, notes Macadams. Five native fish species are now extinct; the remaining two are precariously close. Five cramped soft-bottomed areas (totaling 11 miles) provide crucial habitat for 400 species of birds displaced from the overdeveloped city. The other 41 miles of the river are concrete-lined, an inaccessible eyesore slicing through the neighborhoods of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

The Army Corps’ paving job removed the river from the public’s sight and imagination. The severe concrete encasement disguised a natural resource as a public works project. The county renamed the river to reflect its new purpose, christening it “Flood Control Channel” on maps and documents. The enormous, mostly dry channel is a convenient catch-all for household, agricultural, and street runoff, storm drain contents, illegal toxic dumping, graffiti, and those ubiquitous shopping carts and plastic bags. In a heavy storm, the equivalent of a year’s water supply for the City of L.A. can wash these toxins straight down the channel into Long Beach Harbor.

Restoration for People or Restoration for Birds?

Ed Reyes tells a story about the river’s problems and promise: “As a kid my friends and I, when we thought it was too dangerous to hang out at the local park because of the gang situation, we would maneuver our way to the rail tracks, unbeknownst to our parents, and find ourselves in the river. We had a little pond area that was surrounded by trees and shrubbery. Only after a few smelly weeks of coming home did we realize what was really going on there, and we realized it was very dangerous [because of the pollution]. But it just goes to show that it has great potential as a recreational facility.”

But Macadams cautions that recreation is not the only demand that a revitalized river needs to serve. “It’s not like I’m not in favor of parks,” says Macadams. “I have kids too and I know what the park situation is now. It’s egregious. But more than 95%—I would venture to say more like 98%—of the wetlands in Los Angeles County have been destroyed. That’s a screaming need to restore riparian habitat.” An ecologically restored river might be able to coexist with the recreation areas that neighborhoods want, but it will require some crossover compromise between these parallel visions of a new L.A. River—some give and take between people and nature.

Last fall, Reyes convened four other councilmembers into the Ad Hoc Committee on the Los Angeles River. They are the City Council’s answer to front yard detail. The committee is pursuing $2.7 million in federal funding to sketch out ideas to rezone and remake the 30 miles of river within the City of Los Angeles.

A coalition is already at work on the river’s first major transformation. The abandoned Chinatown Cornfield rail yard is in the process of becoming Cornfield State Park. These 32 acres exemplify an urban ecological dream: historical open space (the land really was planted with corn at an earlier time) rescued from misuse and returned to the public and the earth. The Cornfield Advisory Committee (CAC), an ethnically diverse group of representatives from neighborhood, environmental, and religious organizations, has shepherded the park since a FoLAR-backed lawsuit enabled the state to purchase the riverside land.

The Cornfield illuminates the challenges that face the Los Angeles River. If a relatively small project with dedicated land and dollars, and many dedicated stewards, takes so long, other, more grandiose and less well-backed ideas will have even greater problems taking hold. State and city budget deficits call funding sources into question. Likewise, there is no guarantee of federal funding, points out Joe Linton, FoLAR board member and Ad Hoc Committee staffer. River-friendly progress ebbs and flows with administrations.

With Reyes at the helm, the Ad Hoc Committee is looking at the whole river system. Reyes thinks in green design terms, like “adaptive reuse” (converting existing buildings for new purposes) and “polishing the water” (employing riparian flora and microorganisms to create a self-cleaning river). But Reyes acknowledges that committee members have local priorities. In a downtown scrambling to revive itself, he speaks of creating a public recreational lake by setting inflatable rubber dams in the river that can be deflated quickly in floods. His colleagues want to create rivulets off the main channel, to bring scenic waterways to neighborhoods where the river currently doesn’t run. Because individual neighborhoods have individual needs, and more than 30 governmental agencies have jurisdiction over the river, the best way to effect change at the river might be segment by segment.

The risk of a segmented approach is that flashy, user-friendly recreational projects might impress people and win support without really doing anything to heal the river. “Very few people are interested in riparian restoration… It’s turned out to be the most difficult thing. I think we have not accomplished it at all,” reflects Macadams. But a recent studio project by Harvard landscape architecture students shows that habitat restoration downtown can be viable, creative, and appealing to the masses. Their designs portray bike paths through bird habitat, and beaches along flooding basins. Before L.A. can host a river that supports neighborhood children and native fish, someone must turn these student sketches into a real place. Taylor Yard, sixty acres just north of the Cornfield, is Macadams’ choice. In place of the empty rail yards and the channel’s concrete trapezoidal walls, he envisions space for floodwaters to gather and sustain wetlands. There, people will engage with a piece of L.A.’s natural heritage, while the watershed begins to restore itself.

For all of Macadams’ organizational efforts, he believes the secret to a revived Los Angeles River is simple: “Add water and that’s about it.” Time and nature will do the rest. Ed Reyes takes the “Field of Dreams” approach: he hopes to lay the groundwork for river revitalization projects downtown that will encourage community and commercial investment. In any event, the emerging coalition’s strength derives from the fact that it cares enough to take on projects that may not come to fruition under its current leadership. Its members are willing to work in service of a long-term vision that could turn Los Angeles’ concrete desert around. Enough people see now what Macadams has known all along: despite decades of abuse and ignorance, in the heart of L.A., “the river’s there.”