The United States of the Pacific

A River Runs Through the City of Angels

After finishing guide school, I began my apprenticeship guiding commercial trips. I also decided to become involved with WARS, believing strongly in their ethic of river preservation. While attending a membership meeting in Oakland several months later, the president of the organization passed out to the audience an article that he had recently published entitled, “The Los Angeles River, What If?” 

I found it particularly interesting because Villa had recently been exploring solutions to LA’s dearth of public parks. In recent visits to Los Angeles, I could not remember seeing anything that resembled an actual river. Upon finishing the article, I realized why. The wide concrete flood channel that ran beside the 5 Freeway past Griffith Park and Dodger Stadium? That was the near dead Los Angeles River.

This alluvial waterway was originally the home of the Tongva people, hunters and gatherers who lived along this stream, which ran seasonally across a flood plain that is now occupied by Los Angeles and Long Beach, among other Southern California municipalities. 

In 1769, the Portola expedition camped near the river during its exploration of Alta California, and it was then that Fray Juan Crespi, a Franciscan missionary traveling with Portola, named it El Río de Nuestra Señora La Reina de Los Angeles de Portiuncula. Crespi chose this name in honor of the small Portiuncula Chapel, the site in Assisi, Italy where the Franciscan order was established. The name was later shortened to the Los Angeles River. 

This ephemeral desert river ran dry for much of the year, but would flood in wet years, causing immeasurable damage over the ensuing centuries. Until the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913, the river was the primary water source for the LA basin. Flooding was unpredictable and devastating, culminating in the catastrophic flooding of 1938. Calls for a solution to the episodic flooding led the US Army Corps of Engineers to undertake the ambitious project of completely encasing the river’s bed and banks in concrete, leaving a bare trickle of water flowing down the center channel in all but the wettest of seasons. 

It was this dead river that was being discussed in Oakland. The river is best known to the public as a location for car chase scenes in Los Angeles-based movies and TV shows. The article argued that the LA River was the most debased and abused river in the country. It was a polluted flood channel that occasionally still rose from its banks, causing devastating losses, because in hardening the natural channel in an attempt to rush the flood waters through the city and out to Long Beach Harbor, the Corps’ one size fits all approach to flood management had tragic effects when the waters inevitably overflowed the ever higher concrete embankments. 

The WARS board president, a geology professor at UC Berkeley, posited that if the LA River could be restored to a more natural stream by utilizing modern concepts of flood control, the symbolic impact of this bold action would have unknown knock-on effects for their movement. I found the whole thing vaguely amusing. RBB and I dueled incessantly over which locale, my home state of New Jersey or Brotsky’s beloved Los Angeles, deserved the moniker of the most polluted and unnatural bioregion in the country. Cal was completely on board. When told about the plan, she was excited.

Despite working for a Senator representing East Los Angeles, I maintained my somewhat negative impression of my boss’ hometown. In my only “slightly” biased east coast/northern California perspective, LA (excepting the boss’ working class district)  was a cultural wasteland; one thousand suburbs looking for a soul, a dystopian hellscape of brown air, contaminated beaches, and raging wildfires populated mostly by self-important, shallow, silicone- injected movie industry wannabes - and these were its best features! I was truly convinced that, as Woody Allen had once opined, if you spent too much time in the LA sun then you would become so mellow you would rot! 

People back east (that is anyplace east of Nevada by most native Californians reckoning) do not understand at any level how different northern California and southern California actually are. In easterners' minds we are one state. Nothing could be farther from the truth. At its most basic, the difference can be boiled down to a simple dichotomy, and here I will attempt to provide a completely unbiased, even scientific based primer to guide your future travel plans. 

In the north we have the iconic San Francisco Bay. In the south - Hollywood. The Bay is natural - of indescribable beauty. Watching the fingers of fog reaching through the Golden Gate is a magical, dare I say, nearly religious experience. Los Angeles, on the other hand, is make believe. Fantasy, human made, botox and collagen pumped wanna be celebrities cruising (if 5 mph in traffic clogged freeways is cruising) to polluted overcrowded beaches. 

We have Golden Gate Park, majestic redwoods, the pristine Big Sur coast, Monterey Bay, Lake Tahoe, Yosemite National Park, numerous wild and scenic rivers, and the Napa Valley. American food and wine culture found life in the vineyards and farms of the Napa, Sonoma, and the Sacramento Valleys.

How does Socal (as the residents of those living over the Grapevine call their resource deficient region), compare. They have Hollywood, Disneyland, multiple freeways, Beverly Hills, thousands of indistinguishable stripmalls, and Dodger dogs. I’m sure there is more, it’s just hidden behind the thick as pudding polluted air, and, well, you get the picture. I swear this is an objective, scientific, unbiased view of the Los Angeles region. Did I mention LA would not exist without water imported (stolen) from the north. 

A statewide politician from the Bay Area, whose name shall be hidden to protect his career, once opined in a staff meeting, that the best thing that could be done for the environment of Los Angeles was to line up a thousand Caterpillar D7 dozers wheel-to-wheel just south of Santa Barbara, and drive in the direction of Tijuana, not stopping until they reached Camp Pendleton in San Diego County. “Knock it all down and start over” was his policy solution to that, in his northern California aligned mind, ill-placed metropolis. 

This did not even address the issue of the erstwhile Brooklyn Dodgers, who broke the hearts of loyal borough fanatics when relocating the Bums in 1958. In the process, the City and O’Malley family decimated a cohesive Mexican American community in Chavez Ravine to make way for the new team, just one more instance in the history of LA where institutional racism, backed by the city’s power structure, screwed Mexican and African American communities in the name of anti-communism and progress. 

But I digress. I took the article home, and on Monday morning placed it in the Senator’s inbox without giving it too much thought. I left for lunch and was in total shock when I arrived back at my desk to find the article on the top of my inbox with a yellow post-it containing two words in black magic marker: “Do it!” 

I waited for Villa to finish afternoon hearings. When I found the boss relaxing in his office later that day I stormed in, exasperated. “What do you mean, do it? It’s a flood control channel! They use it for bus chase scenes! And even if we wanted to do some small thing, it’s a federal project. Have you ever dealt with the Army Corps? We might be more successful pissing in the Pacific Ocean and waiting for the tides to rise than expecting the Corps to change how it operates in Los Angeles!” 

Senator Alex Villa sat there looking vaguely amused. “Are you finished with your rant?” He calmly asked. “If you’re done, please have a seat and we can discuss this rationally.” He started by reminding me that he represented East Los Angeles, which was working class and below, heavily Latino, and seriously lacking in recreational and park facilities. He pointed out that LA had less park acreage per 1,000 residents than any major city in the US, and that much of what did exist was in the Santa Monica Mountains and thus as useful as Mars to inner city residents. He told me that recent studies showed a direct correlation between lack of public parks and numerous toxic impacts on youth, including juvenile delinquency and gang activity. 

Therefore, particularly in a city as expansive as LA, every opportunity to provide additional public spaces should be explored, even if it alone would not solve all the problems affecting the community. “Besides,” the Senator mused, “based on your highly subjective view of the City of Angels, it is probably a good idea if you spend some street time among my constituents.” 

I went back to my office seriously perplexed as to where to begin. I was surprised by Cal’s response when I ran the project by her.  “This could be evidence of progress. I can use this!” she said. This would be the type of progress the boys and girls upstairs are demanding. Let’s unfuck that sad river!”

I went about gathering information from as many sources as I could find. I understood that I needed a far better understanding of Los Angeles and the bioregion surrounding the river than I currently possessed. I discovered that there was a nascent river preservation movement in Los Angeles that could be counted on for support. 

From a science and flood control standpoint, the answer became fairly obvious. The Corps had straightjacketed the river and its tributaries, confining flood waters in a concrete channel. For the most part this worked well and was consistent with LA’s traditional approach to nature. As late as 1856 the city owned eighty percent of the riparian corridor. 

Unfortunately for future residents of the City, LA gave most of this precious resource away for virtually nothing to big businesses, led by the Southern Pacific Railroad octopus, and land speculators, cheered on by the business elite. 

The mild Mediterranean climate that made LA so appealing was a result of the fact that deserts surrounded it on three sides, with the Pacific on the other. LA is, in reality, drier than Beirut. As the nation slid inexorably towards conflict in the 19th century, LA remained, to quote a local paper, “A torpid, suppurating, stunted little slum.” A filthy pueblo, a beach for human flotsam washed across the continent on the slightly less bloody side of the Civil War, was a most unlikely locale for a great city to rise.  

That would not stop the real estate speculators from selling the growing city as an arcadian paradise of one-acre plots, each with a pretty cottage with luxuriant lemon and orange trees, the ground covered in shrubs and flowers - all that was missing was water to make it happen. Every bungalow would have a green lawn, the city a dreamscape; a faux-tropical paradise with an equable, clement desert climate.

To the city’s elites, the only impediment to this desired future among the world’s great cities was a lack of vision and the will to make it happen. In the avaricious social climate that was the national norm as the twentieth century opened, and which was a near civic religion among Angelenos, everything was possible. Riches flowed from the very faucets, doubt being the cardinal sin. Among the city’s men of commerce, the natural limits of a sparse water supply were no reason to hesitate. The fact that there was no water nearby, with the exception of a few intermittent streams and a limited supply of groundwater laid down over the millennia, was simply a problem requiring ambitious, even grandiose plans. 

By 1904, the city knew it needed more water. It went big, as a headline in the right-wing, union-busting LA Times shouted, “Titanic Project to Give the City a River.” The thought of more water always set off a Pavlovian response in the slowly rising desert metropolis. So the city looked north and east, to the Owens Valley. The Owens River rises to the southeast of the Yosemite Valley, open to storms barreling in from the west by a gun site crack in the granitic cordillera, twisting through a long valley, up to twenty miles wide, with the Sierra Nevada on one flank and the White Mountains towering 10,000 feet from the valley floor on the other. Owens Lake is where the river ends, at an elevation of 4,000 feet. LA is at sea level.

After being discovered by whites in 1834, Owens Valley citizens murdered the few remaining Paiutes in the Valley in no short order, driving the last one hundred into Owens Lake to drown, 30 years later. The Owens Valley, minus its native inhabitants, became prosperous on pasture and orchards. Bishop, Lone Pine, Big Pine, and Independence thrived, a beautiful, irrigated strip of white man’s civilization beneath the towering spire of Mount Whitney, all made possible by the river running through it.

Led by the brilliant engineer William Mulholland, who overcame a seeming Himalaya of obstacles with the relentless support of the Times, the City went about obtaining the rights to the river’s flows from the guileless ranchers. Through hook and crook LA bought what it could legally and took the rest, as immortalized in the movie Chinatown. 

To bring the waters to the city, the Owens River would be jacked up 3,000 feet in giant siphons, then pumped across the crest of the Tehachapi Mountains in a futile attempt at slaking the thirst of LA, lying in the desert at the end of the aqueduct like a bejeweled junkie on a one-hundred-year bender, requiring a bigger and bigger fix.

Too late, the locals understood the stakes and declared war on the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, blowing up sections of the aqueduct several times before peace was finally imposed and the Owens Valley began its rapid decline, riven by silica laden dust devils rising sporadically from the lake’s shrunken corpse. 

A few in LA obtained fabulous wealth from the water grab, some of it even obtained legally. However, the good citizens of the City of Angels were accustomed to scandal - almost expected it from the city’s ruling elites - and were temperamentally quite comfortable with the graft that ensued. 

Today, Owens Lake still appears on maps. Only rather than a lake, when convection winds blast the Valley floor, huge alkaline dust clouds boil into the stark blue sky and carry their deadly silica towards the LA basin; a just God’s rewards, the few remaining valley residents believe!

The water did open LA to untold riches, at least for the few perspicacious enough (or recipients of insider information, the muckrakers might argue) to make the “right “investments. By the 1920s the LA basin was, acre for acre, the richest farming region on the planet. LA County led the US in farm income. This would soon change, because as the twentieth century rolled forward the little remaining public land was privatized, and the once arcadian landscape became a sewer for the city’s expanding industries east of downtown. 

In the twentieth century, the once thriving orchards of the San Fernando Valley, incorporated into the city in 1915 and enriched by Owens Valley water, were rapidly transformed into LA’s current primary crop: tract housing! As all of this transpired, public parkland in Los Angeles was ignored. In a 1907 report to the Los Angeles Municipal Art Commission, Charles Mulford Robinson, a renowned champion of the City Beautiful, argued that Los Angeles required a comprehensive plan for parks, boulevards, and the beautification of the LA River corridor. 

In a report commissioned by the city’s leaders in 1930, Harlan Bartholomew and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr, the nation’s preeminent landscape architect, found the city’s park deficiency “positively reprehensible,” pointing out that the southern California region fell far short of the minimum recreation facilities of the average American city, and that this had been clearly recognized for many years. Olmsted and Bartholomew’s report issued a full-throated critique of the helter skelter building boom in the ‘20s. They described how developers had ignored admonitions and pleas to dedicate parks for their multiplying subdivisions and how powerful homeowners associations had opposed all efforts to pass specific park or recreation assessments, thus shrinking the percentage of public space as the population exploded. By 1928, only 0.6% of LA was made up of public parkland! A selfish, profit-driven individualism was the guiding ethos of the city and region. 

The report made the case for radically enlarged public ownership of beaches and envisioned a redeemed LA River connected to beach communities by a regional system of beaches, parks, playgrounds, and mountain reserves centered on the Santa Monica Mountains. The authors argued that principal natural drainage channels should be acquired by the city for the highest public use. They included greenbelts along the river that would provide a holistic blend of flood control, recreation, and transportation. 

Applying a concept they called “hazard zoning,” Olmsted and Bartholomew’s plan would create among the major flood channels and adjacent wetlands a 440-mile connected network of multipurpose parkways, similar to Olmsted Senior’s 1887 “emerald necklace design” for the Back Bay Fens in Boston. Just as critically, Olmsted and Bartholomew’s plan would redirect park and open space resources to the increasingly impoverished working-class districts south and east of downtown. 

The speculators and anti-communist business elites of Los Angeles killed the Olmsted plan in the womb. In their mind, the urban planning model advocated by the report, with its heavy emphasis on public ownership, evoked at its best a French-style dirigisme, heralding state control of economic and social matters. In its worst construct, the ruling oligarchs comically conflated public parkland with the brutalist Stalinist central planning of the Soviet Union - not park-rich Minneapolis, as the authors intended. If their plan had been implemented, the history of Los Angeles would likely have been very different. But alas, as I discovered, these were prophets singing in the wilderness. 

The Great Depression visited on Los Angeles a series of tragedies, bookended by massive unemployment and the loss of eighty-seven lives in the great flood of 1938. The greenbelt alternative was completely ignored. No one paid any attention to the idea that keeping property owners out of the flood plain by means of hazard zoning was far cheaper than building expensive public works projects. All of this was a precursor to the fatal decisions leading to the modern environmental monstrosity that is the Los Angeles River, a vestigial, lifeless, human-constructed embodiment of everything that went wrong in the LA Basin. 

The need for jobs combined with heavy lobbying by the Southern Pacific RR, together convinced Congress to approve the Flood Control Act of 1941, under which the US Army Corps of Engineers was authorized to turn the river and its tributaries into a monolithic system of concrete storm sewers, sacrificing what remained of the natural river on the altar of emergency work relief, preservation of industrial land, and a promised abatement of the flood problem. Subsequent floods would prove this last piece to be largely wishful thinking.

To most, myself included, as I undertook this seemingly futile effort, the very idea of an LA River seemed more akin to a New Yorker’s putdown of LA than an actual river. This was where the problem lay as I undertook my review and began exploring possibilities, as well as probabilities of success. The modern city, true to its history, was a huge, sprawling, auto-dependent, one-story conurbation of insoluble excesses, completely cut off from the natural world. 

Park land, particularly for inner city residents, who lived far from the beaches and mountains, was in short supply. SoCal, minimally centered on the City of Los Angeles, was not really a functioning metropolitan region, so much as a huge, chaotic communal apartment with a slightly criminal flair. Rescued from desert tyranny, Angelenos readily and joyfully became slaves to the auto, with the Mojave desert and even Charlie Manson’s decrepit Hollywood ranch, hours by auto from sustainable employment, now no more than far-flung rapidly suburbanizing hastily constructed desiccated exurbs, prone to terrifying wildfires each summer and fall when blasted by fierce Santa Ana winds.

I now understood Villa’s real focus on the river and the benefits it might provide Los Angeles, particularly the working-class immigrant barrios of East and South Los Angeles, though the political obstacles would be no less daunting than those Olmsted faced so many years before. A motivating factor for the Senator, which I now came to recognize, was that the ethnic divisions, that had been muted since the Watts riots of 1965 until the1992 acquittal of four Los Angeles cops by an all-white jury for the savage beating of black motorist Rodney King, required the city take a deep look at its fractured civic culture. 

Angelenos lived in tribal silos, Latinos to the east and southeast, African Americans to the south, and wealthier whites on the west side and in the beach communities. Successful Asian immigrants moved to Orange County where they were changing the demographics of that once monotone suburb. The San Fernando Valley, north of downtown across the Hollywood Hills was a mishmash of Latinos in the flatlands and Anglos on the heights. The Santa Clarita Valley, where the King trial took place, was the very definition of white flight. During the King riots, Korean businesses were selectively burned as the demonstrators moved north along Vermont Ave. across the 10 Freeway into Koreatown. 

To Villa, the river was a last chance to connect disparate ethnic tribes that were barely coexisting in greater Los Angeles. The river wound its way out of the Sepulveda basin in the San Fernando Valley, past upscale suburban paradise in Glendale and Pasadena, picking up the Arroyo Seco and Rio Honda as it turned south along the Golden State Freeway through heavily Latino Boyle Heights, before flowing through the African American community of Compton and the white working-class communities leading to Long Beach and the Pacific. 

Villa believed that a string of urban parks adjacent to a newly reinvigorated riparian corridor could serve the many communities along its banks and unite Los Angeles, as great public spaces do in (actual) cities like New York, London, and Paris. 

Convincing the various competing interests in a city as fractured as Los Angeles after the “insurrection,” as some called the riots, to try a new blueprint seemed as likely to be successful in 1993 as was Olmsted sixty years earlier. 

The Corps still viewed the river as a storm sewer, and the downstream communities had no interest in lowering flood walls for some - in their mind unproven - environmental dream of a real river to provide park land to upstream communities with which they felt no connection. In addition, there was a plan - I am not kidding here - by the powerful chair of the Assembly Transportation Committee, representing the traffic-clogged bergs of the San Fernando Valley, to pave over the river and turn it into yet another freeway. 

Assemblyman Dicky Lyons, well connected to the Assembly leadership - loquacious, ambitious, and a true Valley Boy by birth and disposition, had been making national news with his plans to paint the concrete blue and convert it to a toll lane for his car obsessed constituents, and he was determined to kill Zapata’s efforts in their infancy, as I quickly learned. 

Cal was encouraging. “Keep at it. This Lyons cat is tenacious, but you can beat him. Like that article you gave the Senator claims, if we can turn this nightmare back into a living breathing river again, anything is possible. If you humans learn to live with nature instead of imposing your will ON nature, the planet will be a better place. I can’t think of a more degraded ecosystem where proof of concept might have some sway upstairs than in the LA basin.” 

First off, I needed to get on the ground, to put aside my lingering prejudice and visit the river to understand what might be possible. Driving to LA with Brotsky and Cal we drove to the river near Dodger Stadium north of downtown. The Los Angeles River, in its concrete casket, presents a stark contrast to the natural waterway it once was, or any actual river to be truthful. Encased within a cold, gray expanse of concrete, it now resembles more of a man-made canal than a meandering river. This transformation, while an attempt to control and manage floodwaters that have historically plagued the city, also resulted in the loss of any  ecological and aesthetic charm.

Brotsky found an opening in the chain link fence that separated the river from the freeway, while Cal and I took it all in from the top of the embankment. Cal looked sad. “I can’t help but feel a sense of melancholy and loss,” she said softly. Everything has been destroyed. The lush vegetation, the diverse wildlife, and the tranquil ambiance that once characterized this place. Instead, I'm surrounded by a utilitarian environment, with straight, rigid lines and unyielding surfaces. An environmental disaster,” she whispered plaintively.

I needed to imagine something different. The concrete walls rise high on either side, casting deep shadows on the water below. The river's flow is confined and restrained, reducing its ability to naturally adjust and adapt to the changing landscape. Instead of the gentle sounds of flowing water and the soothing calls of birds, the air is filled with the echo of car engines and the distant noise of city life.

The high walls and limited access has also disconnected the river from the communities it runs through. Once a gathering place and a source of life for the local population, it has now become an overlooked and underappreciated feature of the urban landscape. Forgotten by many, it is seen as more of an obstacle than a valuable natural resource.

While it's important to acknowledge the practical reasons for concreting the river, I couldn't help but dream of a future where it might be revitalized and restored to its former glory. I tried to imagine transforming this concrete casket back into a living, dynamic river, complete with native vegetation and habitats that would support a rich diversity of wildlife. Such a transformation would not only benefit the environment but also bring communities together, reconnecting them to the natural world that lies within their city's heart. This was Villa’s vision and the one we were tasked with bringing to fruition.

As I stood there, I was reminded of the delicate balance between human needs and the preservation of our natural heritage. The Los Angeles River, in its concrete casket, serves as a poignant symbol of the impact of human intervention on the environment and the importance of finding ways to coexist harmoniously with nature.