Los Angeles and the river that ran through it

The 51-mile L.A. River was the water source for Native peoples for centuries. One hundred years ago, the city tried to kill it. Now, it may be making a comeback.

So many of the great cities of the world are next to or bestride a great river. Paris and the Seine. Cairo and the Nile. London and the Thames. New York and the Hudson.

Then, there’s Los Angeles.

Not a lot of people know it or notice it, but L.A. has a river, the eponymous Los Angeles River. It meanders from deep in the San Fernando Valley to Long Beach, 51 miles away, where it spills into the sea. For most of its length, it is encased in concrete, and roughly 10 months out of the year it is all but dried up, fed intermittently by the discharge from water treatment plants. But in the rainy season - if it rains - it can swell into a powerful torrent. A real raging river.

L.A. River at Vernon, CA. photo credit: CraigDietrich

This past winter, it rained a lot in L.A. and the river once again came to life, a reminder of what it had once been.

"It was a mere trickle most of the year," wrote Michael Connolly in The Narrows, one of his Harry Bosch crime novels. "But in a rainstorm it would awaken the snake and give it power."

Patt Morrison, the splendid Los Angeles Times columnist who chronicles the history and eccentricities of L.A., wrote in her  book Rio L.A, Tales From the Los Angeles River, "The patterns of the river's conduct, over two centuries that humans have recorded them, are like the momentous opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony: da-da-da-DUM, dry-dry-dry-FLOOD."

L.A. River in Sherman Oaks. Photo credit: Sammie

I first wrote about the L.A. River a year ago. When I was growing up in L.A. in the 1960s, like most Angelenos, I paid no attention to it except when it made the news because someone, usually a child, got too close to the water and was swept away. Only in recent years did I notice it and then become curious about it. Now it fascinates me -- its history and its potential future.

First, a very brief history of the river. For centuries, indigenous people lived off the river's bounty of fish and the animals, including grizzly bears, that roamed the forests along its banks. Yes, this is Los Angeles I am describing. Their principal village, Yangva, was located where downtown L.A. now stands, roughly near the Union Station train station.

L.A. River, circa 1900. Photo Credit: Los Angeles Public Library

In 1769, Spanish explorers arrived and displaced the native people. A century later, the Spanish and Mexicans after them were displaced by white Americans settlers. In the early 20th century, a series of devastating floods led the city to ask the Army Corps of Engineers to solve the problem. That was done by lining most of the river in cement as a flood control measure. It was a massive, impressive engineering feat. But in the process the river became, as Morrison puts it, "a toothless creature of unnatural nature."

"Once the river was encased, it didn't take long for a new river-sport to become popular: how to describe the thing. A noxious trickle. humiliating as a bedwetter's blanket ... five-one miles of glorified storm drain ... the armor, the girdle, the chastity belt," she wrote.

But, in the last two decades, the city and state have embarked on efforts to rehabilitate the river, in some parts to restore it to something approximating its natural state, and to provide bike paths and recreational facilities alongside it. There's even an outfit that leads kayak tours near Elysian Park, conditions permitting.

Hollywood loves a story of redemption. Little by little, the L.A. River is making a comeback. 

To get a better sense of the intriguing history of the Los Angeles River, I spoke to Patt Morrison. Here is a condensed version of our conversation.

Patt Morrison

RC: How did you happen to come upon the River?

PM: People I knew who lived near it called it The Ditch. I remember driving across it and I would see this vast emptiness and then this little, tiny sign -- it seemed it was no bigger than an index card although I'm sure it was -- that said The Los Angeles River and I thought, "Come on, you're pulling my leg. A river?" I learned a little bit more when I was approached to write a book.

RC: Have you traversed the entire 51 miles?

PM: I haven't gone all 51 miles because some of it, until recently, it was illegal to be in the bed of the river in most places. I've done 90 percent of it. I think it's time to do another trip along its banks. Can you imagine talking about the banks of the L.A, River? There have been so many changes, not just in the structure but also people are kayaking and taking classes, who come out to look at the wildlife.

Sepulveda Basin

RC: The area around the Sepulveda Basin [in the San Fernando Valley] is actually very pretty.

PM: It's very pretty. And you find when you come through Studio City and by Forest Lawn Cemetery), or on the side of the Burbank Studios, it's still very nice in places. In places like Elysian Park, where you've got a soft bottom and the plants have grown up, there are little ecosystems of birds and fish and all sorts of critters.

Headwaters of the L.A. River. Photo credit: The City Project

RC: Where exactly or inexactly does the river begin?

PM: It's behind the playing fields of Canoga Park High School. There's Calabasas Creek and several little tributaries up there and that's considered the source of the river. The watershed of the river is immense. It goes by the back sides of the mountains by Malibu all the way over to Pasadena and the whole watershed is the size of maybe the island of Maui. Just a tremendous gatherer of water. 

RC: How do you picture how it was when the Spanish arrived in 1769?

PM: When you read the diary of Father Crespi, they arrived in the summer of 1769 and they talk about the plentiful waters as they traverse from the east toward the west along the foothills of Los Angeles. They encountered plenty of game, but also water, plentiful waters, trickles, freshettes and streams all the way over to where we now see Beverly Hills . They called it Rodeo de las Aguas, the meeting place of waters. (Today) you think, "Really? In August in Los Angeles?" 

East Coast people think of a river which is this body of water with a nice same predictable bed all the time. This was a river that changed its path almost every rainy season. [In 1769] it trickled past where we have downtown and then it turned toward the west and the coast, across that whole plain where we now have the Santa Monica Freeway. At some point, in the second quarter of the 19th century, there was a flood that was substantial enough that the river just kept shooting down and instead of turning to go west, kept shooting down toward Long Beach which is where it now flows.

RC: Before the Spanish came, this was the land of the Native Americans, the Tongva.

PM: The Spanish called them Gabrilenos after the mission, but Tongva is good.

RC: Their village was around where Union Station and Olvera Street are now?

PM: That was their principal village, by the Council of Oak, which was a tremendous oak or sycamore tree maybe four stories high. But there were so many others.

Photo credit: Fae

RC: After the Spanish colonizers arrived and later as L.A. became a city, the episodic flooding got in the way of progress.

PM: As so happens, the new people did not pay attention to what the old people -- the Native Americans -- knew in their wisdom, that you don't build close to this because the waters can rise. But the Spanish had to have a pueblo laid out on this particular grid and this was how it was going to work. The first few years they were here, (it did) flood the footings of the church they were building.

RC: Eventually there was the catastrophic 1938 flood, after which the city said, "Enough of this."

PM: That was the last straw, but the first flood that got the city thinking about controlling the waterways was in 1914. When it flooded, it took away houses on the Arroyo Seco. It took away a (huge) pigeon farm along what we now know as the Golden State Freeway. They started a county flood control district that said: "What are we going to do about these waters?" Now we look upon water as a scarce resource. Then, they looked on it as a peril. We have to remember the 1914 flood came a year after the aqueduct [bringing water from the Owens River, hundreds of miles away] was opened. L.A. had its own water supply, so it felt it could tell the river, "You're obsolete. We don't need you anymore."

The 1938 flood destroyed 5,000 homes and killed more than 100 people. Photo credit: L.A. Public Library

There was a huge flood in '34. It rained and rained and rained. It was New Year's Eve and people were going out to parties and all the sudden, they vanished. The mudflows and the debris flows were really terrible. That accelerated the determination to do something about it.

In 1938, there was tremendous infrastructure. You had railroads, bridges, commuter roads, in and out of the Valley, around Downtown, ways to get food and products to market. So much of it was damaged in '38, it was like, we cannot afford this anymore. We can't afford to have commerce in Los Angeles disrupted by this river that we no longer need because we don't need its water and don't need its misbehavior.

RC: So, the Army Corps of Engineers came in and encased much of the river in concrete. As ugly as it is, can you understand why it was thought it was needed at that time?

PM: Absolutely. The Times called the flooding of the river a monster. It needs to be contained in its lair, The words used about the river were really anthropomorphic. It was a wicked, villainous thing. A murderous thing. People were very glad to see it being tamed. Nobody was calculating the consequences. "Oh, we have plenty of water. We don't need this river."  So it was paved into non-existence. Within a generation, people didn't even know there'd been a river. 

L.A. River in the San Fernando Valley. Photo credit: Sammie

This stretch of the river by Griffith Park could not be encased in concrete because of the high water table

Riverside bike path, Atwater Village neighborhood

RC: In your book, you call it or called it - past tense - "in a city of stars, it’s a has-been." Is that still the case?

PM: I don't think there is as much a has-been as a Norma Desmond comeback without the crazy part. In the last 20 years or so, there has been a revival of interest, chiefly, thanks to FoLAR [Friends of the L.A. River] and its founder, Lewis McAdams. People are aware there is a river. that the river was once the vital part of the shaping and growth of the city of Los Angeles and so they began to ask themselves questions, "Why is it like this now?" "'What can be done about it?" I think that with so many advancements in engineering, the prospect of a river that is still paved but allows some water back into the water table is a plausible one. People go to Paris and look at the Seine. The Seine is a paved river and yet it's very romantic. People take walks along it. There are songs written about it.  There's no reason we can't provide something like that for the Los Angeles River, have cafes along the banks of the river, have recreation along the banks of the river, where people who are visiting downtown can get a fuller sense of the scale and history of Los Angeles just by spending some time alongside the river. I want people to think of the L.A. River as they may think of the Seine. 

Photo credit: Peter Bennett, Citizens of the Planet