A decade ago, the idea that life could be restored to the Los Angeles River seemed about as realistic as a proposal to revive a woolly mammoth buried in the La Brea tar pits. The word “river” was not what came to mind at the sight of the gigantic, highly efficient storm drain carrying runoff to the ocean at freeway speed.

But that was before the movement to restore urban streams swept the nation and the flood control project that had been an icon for the triumph of man over nature became a textbook example of river abuse.
A few citizens came forward with suggestions that parks be created along the river, and some even dared to dream that the Los Angeles River could become for Los Angeles what the Seine is to Paris: the thread that binds it all together. They imagined a river greenway winding through neighborhoods, linking communities with a natural sense of place.

Undeterred by rebuffs from authorities, river advocates grew in number and pressed their case with passion and patience. Los Angeles has less park space per resident than any other major metropolitan area in the nation, they pointed out. It spends many millions to import water while also spending millions to get rid of what arrives naturally. Why not, they suggested, turn disused riverside railroad yards into parks that could double as stormwater retention basins? Allowing the river to spread into such parks would provide an extra margin of flood protection while also recharging the aquifer and thus reducing the need for imported water. The Coastal Conservancy helped propel the movement by funding studies on recreational needs, flood control alternatives, and wetland restoration options.

Like rivulets that gather to form creeks that flow into rivers, such ideas gradually moved into the political mainstream, leading to a dramatic change of course. By 2000, the Los Angeles River was the centerpiece of a wide-ranging, officially sponsored agenda designed “to restore balance” to the entire Los Angeles River–San Gabriel River watershed, a “double watershed” that drains 1,460 square miles of mountains and floodplain and is home to more than seven million people.

The political landscape shifted dramatically last year when voters passed Proposition 12, the $2.1 billion Safe Neighborhood Parks, Clean Water, Clean Air, and Coastal Protection Act, and Proposition 13, the $1.7 billion Safe Drinking Water, Clean Water, Watershed Protection, and Flood Protection Act. Thanks to Assemblyman Antonio Villaraigosa, then speaker of the Assembly and a principal author of Proposition 12, more than $100 million poured into Los Angeles River projects.

Right away, proposals that had previously seemed unaffordable were translated into action. The governor endorsed the creation of the Los Angeles River Parkway within the State Parks Department and approved funds for acquiring two key pieces of land: $45 million for Taylor Yard and $35 million for the Cornfield (a.k.a. Chinatown property). Other parks of varied sizes are in the works or being considered. Meanwhile, Proposition 13 money is funding varied studies and plans related to water quality in the Los Angeles and San Gabriel River watersheds.

“We’ve planted our flag in the Cornfield. We’re working in Topanga Canyon, Taylor Yard,” said State Parks Director Rusty Areias. “We’re very interested in working with activists who have been in the forefront.”

As the number of agencies and groups looking for a piece of the action has grown, some turf battles have developed. However, all involved now agree that the Los Angeles River has untapped potential. Although the County Department of Public Works (DPW) still stresses that “the primary purpose of the Los Angeles River is flood conveyance for the Los Angeles Basin,” it has established a watershed management division within the flood control district it administers.

“The change in the Department has been nothing short of amazing,” commented Dorothy Green, who has been working for reform in water policy for decades, was a founder of Heal the Bay, and is currently president of the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers Watershed Council, which tries to coordinate the activities of many diverse groups in the double watershed.

View from Flood Control Central

“If we can treat some of the urban slobber [air and water pollution], we could accomplish some greening,” said Vik Bapna, watershed manager for the Los Angeles River at the DPW. Toward that end homeowners are being encouraged to plant trees and shrubs next to driveways, run rainwater from roof gutters into cisterns for use in watering yards, and take other steps that, each small in itself, can add up to big changes, just as raindrops add up to floods.

The 10-acre parking lot around DPW’s headquarters in Alhambra will become an example. Three acres of concrete will be replaced with permeable paving, a portion of the rainfall will be retrieved for landscaping, and 200 trees will be planted to absorb water, reduce air pollution, and shade cars that now bake in the sun. The trees should shade 80 percent of the parking lot about a year after they are put in, Bapna said. Of the 1,700 parking spaces, only 60 will be lost. Construction is expected to begin at the end of 2002, but DPW first must find the funds. The price tag for these improvements is estimated at $6 million, mostly for the paving and trees, said Bapna.

Also in the works is a project to retrofit an entire small watershed. “We’re looking at ways to see that no water from the Sun Valley watershed goes into the river,” Bapna said. “Computer modeling says it can be done, using cisterns, dry wells, and regional retention facilities.” The Department’s consultant on both projects is TreePeople, a nonprofit urban forestry organization.

These demonstration projects are especially timely now because public and private entities are under pressure to clean up the Los Angeles River. The Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board, which has jurisdiction in 88 cities in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties, has intensified enforcement against polluters and set tougher standards. New building projects must limit urban runoff. A plan has been adopted to completely eliminate trash in the Los Angeles River within 12 years.

Increasingly, many different actions are adding up to watershed-wide changes. For decades the DPW and the Corps of Engineers have dealt with the river on a massive scale, in terms of thousands of tons of concrete. Their responsibility is enormous: to protect a metropolis built in the floodplain from flooding. When it rains, many people who work for DPW can’t sleep.

Much of the year the Los Angeles River looks harmless. In the City of Los Angeles it’s mostly treated wastewater flowing in the middle, low-flow channel of the 570-foot-wide concrete riverbed (the length of a football field is 300 feet). But one winter storm can send a torrent roaring down that wide channel. The Corps “built” this river, as the engineers put it, between the 1930s and the 1950s to expel rainwater to the ocean at maximum speed. It is so efficient that it’s a monster—a monster that sleeps most of the time, waking in a rage only when it rains.

The River’s True Nature

When Spanish explorers first saw this river in 1769, it meandered among springs and wetlands, through green meadows, shrubbery, and dense stands of trees. The streambed was wide and sandy, and during the dry season much of the water seeped underground. In winter the river widened and sometimes overflowed its banks, though major floods occurred only rarely. The Chumash, Tongva and other native people lived accordingly.

The Spaniards founded missions and a pueblo by the river. Soon, water diversions and groundwater pumping began to deplete the natural supply. As cropland and livestock cultivation expanded, trees and wet meadows vanished, replaced by dry grasslands. As the city expanded in the floodplain, demand for water kept rising, and in 1913 the City of Los Angeles built the Owens River Aqueduct, draining Owens Lake. Then it reached farther, to the Sacramento and Colorado Rivers.

Los Angeles grew with no regard to the history of the river’s behavior during heavy storms, or of the price others paid to satisfy the city’s thirst. “The city mothers and fathers never had a civic thought in their heads when developing the city,” said Dorothy Green. “It was always just, ‘How do we get the most dollars?’”

In 1930, landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and Harland Bartholomew designed a plan for a network of parkways along the river to connect mountains, beaches, and other parks. Had that plan been adopted, the river would have had room to spread, and Los Angeles would have had a green heart, as New York City does in its Central Park, designed by Olmsted’s father. But the plan was quickly shelved, and after disastrous floods in the 1930s, the river was converted to a freeway for water.

Now the Olmsted-Bartholomew plan has been resurrected. Although it can no longer be realized fully, “we’re trying to recapture its spirit,” said architect Arthur Golding, who has been working for the past dozen years with various task forces and coalitions trying to translate grand visions into specific options and projects in the river system.

Puzzle Pieces

The Cornfield is about to be acquired for a state park that will offer residents a glimpse of their city’s history. If you stand on the bluff on North Broadway at the edge of Chinatown, below you spreads the mostly empty railroad yard, which was rich farmland in the days of the pueblo. At the moment, the railroad yard is mostly a construction site for the Pasadena Blue Line, which will run through the Cornfield.

The latest conceptual plan for the new park, drafted by a team headed by Golding, includes nature study areas, a new magnet school, a Shaolin temple, and a museum and garden that will preserve the fragment of the historic Zanja Madre, or “Mother Canal,” which carried water from the river to the Cornfield. The water flowed through a waterwheel that ran a mill, and on to the pueblo. Golding envisions “water flowing through the site, connected to the river.” The waterwheel might be restored as well.

“A lot of people are interested in the idea of archeological excavation becoming a living exhibit as it goes on,” Golding said. “This happened at the La Brea tarpits. I think it could happen here too.” The specifics of the new park’s future will take a while to work out. ”It will be downtown’s park,” predicted Lewis McAdams, founder of Friends of the Los Angeles River (FoLAR).

While the Cornfield does not reach all the way to the river (it’s a block away), it is close enough to become part of the River Greenway. The biggest Greenway park now in the works is at Taylor Yard, in the low-income Cypress Park neighborhood. “Taylor Yard is the crucible,” says Melanie Winter, director of the River Project and principal organizer for a coalition of community groups. She has been fighting passionately for Taylor Yard’s transformation into a park that would connect neighborhoods to the river and provide badly wanted fields for soccer and other active sports, as well as wetland habitat and flood protection. A 62-acre parcel with two miles of river frontage within Taylor Yard is “critical to any effort to restore the river and any nonstructural flood mitigation,” according to Golding. A 40-acre parcel fronting on San Fernando Road is crucial for the active sports fields. How much acreage can be acquired will depend in part on the cost of buying development rights on the 40-acre property from the Lennar Corporation. To Winter, Taylor Yard is the test that will show whether the Greenway vision can be realized.

Some river advocates argue that State Parks’ role is to preserve natural areas, that it should not be developing sports fields, but Director Areias disagrees. He said the Department understands the need for soccer and other active sports spaces in urban parks and has recently established a recreation division “for the purpose of getting back into active recreation.”

Greenway advocates also have their eyes on the confluence of Arroyo Seco and the river. Golding said “this is geographically and historically a very important place in Los Angeles. We ought to be able to see it. Today that confluence is buried beneath freeways and railroads and highways, and it looks more like a sewer outlet than a coming together of two bodies of water.” A substantial amount of land at the confluence is in public ownership.

The big pieces of the Greenway puzzle will take a while to put into place. Meanwhile, the most visible evidence of its existence is a string of 12 pocket parks, 11 of them built by North East Trees (NET), along the Glendale Narrows, an 11-mile stretch of the river in the Elysian Fields. Here the Los Angeles River actually looks and acts like a river. Willows grow along the banks, and ducks and shorebirds are often seen. The bottom was never paved because “when water comes through here, it hits rock and wells up, and it will dissolve concrete,” explained Scott Wilson, the landscape architect and teacher who founded NET.

It is to the Glendale Narrows that poet MacAdams, who was the first to raise his voice in behalf of the river, has often brought people to see the living river since he founded FoLAR in 1986. They no longer have to pass through a diamond wire–studded double fence to get to the levee. Now there is a trail atop the levee, and those walking or riding on it can stop and rest under native trees in the delightful pocket parks.

The tiniest of these, at the end of Riverdale Avenue, is no more than some well-arranged rocks and a bench under a sycamore tree. This writer sat there with Melanie Winter on a late-summer evening, looking at the river as bicyclists and hikers went by. In the adjacent garden, a man was watering plants. He was filling his watering can from the river, walking all the way down the levee to do so.

Another neighbor stopped by and asked whether we knew what had happened to the ducks. He had not seen any this year, and a few weeks ago the water had been bubbly and strangely green. Winter told him there had been a toxic spill, and authorities were still trying to find its source. The man said that he comes here often now that trees have been planted. He also brings out-of-town visitors to show them the river and the birds. As early as 6 a.m. people are walking and biking on the trail, and he walks too, sometimes as far as four miles. All this he told us without being asked. Clearly the river and riverside people are no longer strangers to each other.

Just downstream, another pocket park features a set of stations that illustrate some yoga exercises and poses—provided at the neighbors’ request. Each little park is different.

Sometimes, NET had to persuade neighbors the parks would not be a safety hazard. When a house used for drug dealing burned down at the end of Oros Street, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy bought it for a park, and NET met with neighbors to find out what they would like. The adjacent homeowner asked for a barbed wire fence. “So our sculptor, Brett Gladstone, made steelhead with pointy tail and fin and nose, which did the job of barbed wire but was much friendlier,” Wilson said. This little park is now a neighborhood asset, and another model of what Los Angeles parks can be.

Wilson founded NET in 1990, along with two women who joined him in a volunteer project planting trees on a hillside at Occidental College. With one of them, the dynamic Lynn Dwyer, as executive officer, NET grew and now has 24 employees and 80 diverse projects. These include a watershed plan for Arroyo Seco, funded by the Coastal Conservancy and others, to be incorporated in the Los Angeles watershed plan, making projects on this tributary eligible for Proposition 13 funds.

“We work opportunistically,” Dwyer said. “We hear of something and we’re all over it: How can this make the river more interesting? How can it bring in a new audience?”

Like a River

In contrast to the way the Los Angeles River control system was built, the current river revival movement is organic, flowing from numerous sources, with meanders, eddies, and occasional rough waters. A substantial and controversial figure on the scene is Joseph T. Edmiston, executive officer of the SMMC since it was established in 1979.

The SMCC manages 50,000 acres, and Edmiston is proud of its programs that bring children and families from economically deprived city neighborhoods to the Santa Monica Mountains. “Our heart is here and the heart of our constituency is here,” he said, but the political consensus now is that urban parks should be made a priority, as parklands such as those in the Mountains tend to be enjoyed by mostly prosperous neighbors. The legislature has expanded the SMMC’s responsibilities, and “we’ve been pretty successful with various greening opportunities in park-poor urban areas,” Edmiston said. He has teamed up with FoLAR, NET, TPL, and others in park projects.

Using the flexible powers with which the state has endowed its conservancies, the SMMC can quickly buy land, then pass it on to public agencies, such State Parks, that are unable to move quickly. Through the SMMC and a joint powers agency he created, Edmiston has played a major role in river projects. These include the Cornfield acquisition and the transformation of a Spanish-colonial-style complex that used to be Lawry’s Restaurant, a favorite site for weddings in Cypress Park, into the River Center and Gardens. Weddings still take place there, and there are new photo opportunities in the garden, where landscape architect Calvin Abe has created a water feature meant to represent the Los Angeles River. NET, FoLAR, and others have offices in the building.

Edmiston is known for his political savvy, his ability to accomplish what he takes on, and for expansionist tendencies. A territorial conflict flared between the SMMC and the new San Gabriel and Lower Los Angeles Rivers and Mountains Conservancy (RMC). Secretary of Resources Mary Nichols, who worked to resolve it, said recently that it has been resolved: “They have agreed that they will work jointly and not attempt to work on projects in each other’s territory that the other objects to.”

On October 17, the Resources Agency published a report titled “Common Ground from the Mountains to the Sea: Watershed and Open Space Plan, Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers.” Prepared by the RMC in partnership with the SMMC, it contains guiding principles for the entire double watershed, in particular: “to grow greener, enhance waters, and work together.”

The more river advocates look at what seemed hopeless and unsightly, the more potential they see. They may be working with a worst-case example of river abuse, but like water wearing away stone, their vision is shaping a new future for the Los Angeles River.

CLICK HERE to read WORKING ON THE RIVER, Reflections of a Long-Distance Commuter

CLICK HERE to read TREEPEOPLE’S SUMMER STORM, a project to keep stormwater out of the Los Angeles River