Los Angeles River in Places Journal

There is no shortage of articles written on the Los Angeles River, and I’ve covered some of the broader hidden hydrology work being done there in a previous post here, Beyond the LA River. I do however have a special affinity for the quality of scholarship on Places Journal, and an essay from May 2018, Willful Waters by USC’s Vittoria Di Palma and Alexander Robinson doesn’t disappoint.  This longform essay provides a great background and historical framework for anyone wanting to understand the river and it’s long and contentious history, as well as recent efforts of revitalization and reconnection.   It also comes with a great collection of historical imagery, which elevates our thinking out the past, present, and future river beyond the concrete ditch we tend to associate with the Los Angeles River.

I’d recommend the essay in its entirety, so I’ll just include a few snippets and comments I thought were compelling.  At first I was a bit confused about their allusion to the Thomas Cole series The Course of Empire in this context, but after some explanation, it’s an interesting framework in which to think about hidden hydrology, in terms of binaries such as life/death or sin/redemption, and as a “cyclical” journey from wildness through some sort of apex and back through destruction and desolation.  That narrative begins another cycle of  “revitalization” and “restoration”.  As the authors mention: ” If not for the galvanizing effect of a set of historical ideas — the belief that a site, destroyed and degraded by human industry, could be transformed into something evocative of its original condition through the power of “nature” guided by enlightened design — Los Angeles might have continued to forget that it ever was a river city.”

From a historical viewpoint, the idea of a soft, meandering river is hard to comprehend, but also is the origin of the city itself, supporting described as “…a stream trickling through a wide sandy bed.”  with “The river basin was overspread with springs, marshes, and shallow ponds (the very name of La Cienega Boulevard recalls the landscape’s original swampy character), and the debris from the mountains, deposited over centuries, created a layer of alluvial silt that in some areas lies 20,000 feet thick.”  This lack of structure meant lots of variability, which created unpredictable volatility during storms and “rain events” in which “…waters would rush down from the mountains, carrying gravel, silt, boulders, and trees.”  This factor would ultimately lead to the demise of the river itself.

The other interesting idea was the concept of zanjas (irrigation ditches), in which there were miles built as shown in the above map:  Quoting John Shertzer Hitell, “The “zanjas, or irrigating ditches, run through the town in every direction.” They “vary in size, but most of them have a body of water three feet wide, and a foot deep, running at a speed of five miles an hour. They carry the water from the river to the gardens, and are absolutely necessary to secure the growth of the fences, vines, and many of the fruit trees.”   The image below showing how these canals were parts of the fabric of the city, enclosed but still open and visible, and enlivened the place, as mentioned in a reference to visitor Emma Adams, who commented on “…the soft murmuring of water as it glides through the zangas [sic] in some of the beautiful suburbs of the city is sweet music to the ear, a happy voice sending out joy and gladness. Wherever it is heard are sure to be seen verdure, flowers, and fruit.” In this way, the wild and unpredictable Los Angeles River was remade into a tractable urban water source.”

The manipulation of the river for utilitarian purposes followed many others before it, but foreshadowed larger interventions of control.  As the authors point out, “Los Angeles was shaped by a dual need to be at a safe distance from its unpredictable, flood-prone river, and in close contact with the river’s highly controlled, artificial reincarnation: the zanja madre and its network of ditches. This relationship between city, river, and ditch is illustrated by the map drawn up by Ord and the surveyor William Rich Hutton in 1849.  Agricultural lands occupy the area between the river and the city up on the Elysian Hills, with the southerly extension of both fields and city closely conforming to the route of the zanja madre. At the same time, the problematic nature of the flood-prone river is indicated by this inscription: “sand over which the River spreads its waters which are wasted.”  They go on to conclude that,“The zanja madre was, in other words, the Los Angeles River tamed and perfected by the improving force of human culture.”

The river at the time was still natural in most places, but the canals soon depleted water levels, and created a trickle, which was the impetus for Mulhollad’s hyperbolic yet apt “Titanic Project to Give [the] City a River”.  After this change to more consistent supply, which included piped water from the Owens Valley some 233 miles away via aqueduct, the Los Angeles River only emerged during rain events, those “… “intermittent moments when it flowed with a violence that only intensified as galloping urbanization further hardened the city’s watershed. No longer valued as a natural resource, the ever-wilder river was now feared as a “predator,” able to roam and strike wherever it wished.”  This unpredictability and ensuing series of floods changed how people thought, thinking of the river as a “menace” and thus “perceptions of the river were changed irrevocably.”

The flooding was the final impetus to use new technology to “train” the “unruly dog” of a river, which seemed to be the particular bailiwick of the Army Corps of Engineers, and creating what amounted to a “water freeway” that we know today. In a few short years, the Corps“ …systematically transformed the Los Angeles River from an intermittent, meandering stream bordered by willows and cottonwoods into the concrete storm drain we see today.”  The authors point of the lesson of this today.

“In a textbook example of the triumph of reason and human agency over willful nature, the Corps created the ultimate Los Angeles fantasy of a river: a “water freeway.” That a drought-prone region would celebrate the speed at which water could be drained off to the ocean was an irony not then appreciated by either the military engineers or the public.”

Perceptions changed in the 1970s, and the media, politicians, artists, and environmentalists rediscovered the river in a variety of ways.  A series of articles in the Los Angelse Times by Dick Roraback in 1985 entitled , ” “Up a Lazy River, Seeking the Source: Your Explorer Follows in the Footsteps of Gaspar de Portola.” provided a poignant story about the forgotten waterway, where “… the  author narrated his expedition from the river’s mouth to its putative source, chronicling the riparian habitats of its flora and fauna. Roraback’s picaresque tale turned the Los Angeles River into an incongruous backdrop for a cast of quirky urban characters (the blonde waitress, the salty sea dog, the mussel gatherer, the dog-walking divorcée) engaged in various activities, both licit and illicit, in the river and along its banks. By presenting the river as a neglected urban feature, the series brought its paradoxical charms to the attention of a large new audience, and, crucially, positioned the river as a postindustrial terra incognita — an attractive, slightly dangerous, and alluring urban landscape.”  

Further work by artists and others who started exploring the waterway, and ultimately went on to found the Friends of the Los Angeles River, started to think about the area in different ways, and through exploration,  began as a “…characterization of the river as a paradise lost, a place of discarded things and marginalized people, served to ignite a potent landscape imaginary. It also introduced the idea of the river as a space for environmental action. ”  This was aided by the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant which added 20 million gallons of water per day, which had an effect of revitalizing the ecology of the river.  “This infusion of wastewater generated a verdant riverscape, which in turn, and somewhat improbably, inspired comparisons with the earlier paradise described by Father Crespí and sparked talk of a riparian rebirth. As the changing river increasingly evoked that lost, idealized waterway (particularly in the unpaved eleven-mile stretch known as the Glendale Narrows), it also inspired residents to take up walking, bike riding, bird watching, horseback riding, and even kayaking and canoeing…”

The kayaking wasn’t always for pleasure, as it was interesting to learn that a waterway has to be navigable to be eligible for the Clean Water Act, so a group of people in 2008 kayaked the length of the river to provide its navigability.  This meant that maybe “The fantasy of transforming the flood control channel into an arcadian waterway began to seem real. Kayaking has also become a powerful means of introducing visiting dignitaries to a vision of a newly green and civic river.”  The final part focuses on the long and winding road of Revitalization, including master plans in through the 1990s and more recently efforts by interdisciplinary design teams, government agencies, and non-profits.  These focused on ecology, hydrology, and recreation, amongst other factors, either as technical studies but more often than not art intervetions or designs.  One such example is the Piggyback Yard Feasibility Study (image below), done by Mia Lehrer + Associates, which “…integrates economic and hydraulic modeling with community design considerations, but such efforts such are still few in number and small in scale.”

The mix of design, art, tours, and other creative methods of interpretation, often using minimal intervention, hint at “…the remarkable activity generated by the Los Angeles River — which as yet remains largely a concrete channel bisected by a thin course of water — testifies to the profound power of the city’s desire for ecological redemption and urban rebirth, and to ways in which civic or even poetic acts have found purchase within a byzantine network of managerial interests.”

Endnote:

The post in Places referenced above is an excerpt from what sounds like a great book, River Cities, City Rivers published by Harvard University Press and edited by Thaisa Way.  Will track down and report on at some point on this book, but here’s a summary from the site:  “Cities have been built alongside rivers throughout history. These rivers can shape a city’s success or cause its destruction. At the same time, city-building reshapes rivers and their landscapes. Cities have harnessed, modified, and engineered rivers, altering ecologies and creating new landscapes in the process of urbanization. Rivers are also shaped by the development of cities as urban landscapes, just as the cities are shaped by their relationship to the river.  ¶  In the river city, the city river is a dynamic contributor to the urban landscape with its flow of urban economies, geographies, and cultures. Yet we have rarely given these urban landscapes their due. Building on emerging interest in the resilience of cities, this book and the original symposium consider river cities and city rivers to explore how histories have shaped the present and how they might inform our visions of the future.”

 

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HEADER:  Los Angeles River, view from 6th Street Bridge, 2010. [Ian Rutherford] –  image via Places