A writing interlude from Tilly Hinton, PhD
Not-quite-so mainstream is the idea of swimming in the Los Angeles River, the hardest-to-get element of FoLAR’s vision of a “swimmable, fishable, boatable, bikeable Los Angeles River for our community.”[1] Carol Armstrong told me, during a quick interview at the City’s river headquarters high up in City Hall in early 2016, how “people joke that it’s the Eastside ocean.”[2] It seems to me less a joke and more an astute observation. Kayaking advocate Anthea Raymond, herself born and raised in Los Angeles’ Westside beaches, had said much the same to me a few weeks earlier. She enthused about the need for “this second waterfront” to account for traffic gridlock and to return the mega-city’s focal point from the beaches back to Downtown.[3] Former councilman Ed Reyes took me to his childhood stretch of that inland ocean. As he recalled skidding down the steep concrete banks as a child in the late 1960s, the joy was still palpable. It had most definitely been his beach. In the 1987 documentary film by Gerard Dawson, Something Resembling a River, we meet a man who swims in the river because it reminds him of home in Mexico and we watch another man slowly immerse his body into the river, ever so gradually, face and ears and all.[4] While some are squeamish about water quality, others are more relaxed. Lila Higgins routinely paddles in the river up to knee height. “I’ve been all up in that water. It’s tertiary treated,” she told me.[5]
Shelly Backlar described swimming as “the last bastion.” As a warm smile spread across her face, she said, “and those of us who have fallen in the river kayaking have done it so I know it’s possible!” Shelly has fallen into the river not once, but three times. She describes it as a lesson in surrender:
“I thought I was going to be very proactive and conquer the water. I flipped out not once but twice, the water it was deep and it was moving. It taught me a lot, that a lot of this was: just don’t fight it, don’t conquer it. If I would have just relaxed and put my feet in! It’s just another kind of metaphor for we’re going to tackle this; we’re going to do this. It’s just: jump in and do it. It’s a process. Yes, swimmable, swimmable is next …”[6]
Sometimes ideas surrender, too. Anthea Raymond told me how she had been part of a feasibility study into the idea of building a white-water park in the Los Angeles River. An expert had come in and assessed the river’s potential and, while the initial assessment had shown inconsistent flows to be a major impediment to such a development, Anthea and others could still imagine this Eastside ocean being a massive tourist attraction. I asked if this kind of expansion brought any tensions for her. She told me of her love for walking her dogs nearby, “in the secret places,” and how walking, particularly at dusk, makes her feel:
“like you’re in this big open space in the middle of … it’s not chaos but it’s just, there’s all this energy just kind of throbbing around you and you’re at the center of something that’s very peaceful.”[7]
Later in our interview, I ask Anthea what she feels optimistic about in relation to the river. Her answer is people, the involvement of people who are passionate about and have an emotional connection with the river. Then, she returns to our earlier discussion about white water:
I actually think I want to tamper down my urge to like commercialize, because, I mean, if you had people surfing surfboards or surfing kayaks in the middle of Los Angeles, it would bring a lot of attention to the LA River, probably too much attention to the LA River because it would be like: “Right, Gidget goes east” [laughs]. I’m not sure, I mean, I’ve been talking about this for a long time, and writing and thinking about it for a long time but I’m not sure I want that to happen. I mean, I like the idea of a beach.[8]
This is the push and pull of river change, where every gain poses a potential loss. An act of apparent salvation may be one of destruction in the same swoop.
The river has many temperaments. Before being channelized, it was an ephemeral watercourse, typical in Southern California. Flood control mechanisms pushed the river towards aridity until water reclamation plants came online, discharging treated water into the river and, inadvertently, creating an altered ecology much more receptive to fish, birds, and humans. FoLAR members Linda and Thomas Brayton, in their submission to a draft Environmental Impact Study in late 1991, described the river as “an unintentioned but, nevertheless, valuable and essential habitat for wildlife.”[9] Indeed, it was and is. Contemporary river flow rates are thought to be higher than at any previous point in time.[10] As journalist Neil Cohen put it, things had not been this way at any point since the Stone Age.[11] Natural patterns and human alterations make for a highly variable river that changes along its course, throughout the changing seasons, and across time. The river’s many temperaments make for many emotional reactions.
It was the summer of 2012 when Kat Superfisky—at that time a graduate student in landscape architecture and ecology back east in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and now one of the river’s many passionate advocates—first saw the river. She was standing on the Los Feliz bridge, looking north to Griffith Park. She recalled to me her incredulity at this concrete river: “I remember thinking to myself, you’ve got to be kidding, Los Angeles, you call this a river?”[12] It is certainly a river that challenges expectations. When Joshua Link guides people on river kayaking trips, he teaches them that:
you’re literally paddling down three or four rivers at the same time because, obviously, we get water from a lot of remote locations. So there’s the Owens River kind of north-east from here. There’s the Sacramento River, the Colorado River.[13]
All of that water has been somewhere else before flowing down the Los Angeles River, through stormwater drains or as outflow from a water reclamation plant. Anthea’s daily river observations include watching how stream flows change at different times of the day. She told me how it “parallels people’s usage patterns but twenty-four hours behind.”[14] The presence of water changes people’s emotional engagement with the river. The city’s king of water, William Mulholland, remembered the river as he had seen it in the final years of the nineteenth century. He described the river in 1877 as “a beautiful, limpid little stream with willows on its banks.” It was an instant affinity for him, “something about which my whole scheme of life was woven, I loved it so much.”[15]
Many proposals have come and gone to make the river a more water-filled place. In 2004 the City of Los Angeles proposed constructing El Pueblo Lake, a recreational space that “would extend from the confluence of the Los Angeles River and the Arroyo Seco, south to Main Street. This would be a seasonal lake, using inflatable rubber dams that would be deflated during the rainy season.”[16] Later that same year, Lewis MacAdams wrote about the proposal in a draft article about development options for the river, which remains in the FoLAR archive. It reads this way:
In April, the city engineer’s office presented a computer-generated study of how a seasonal waterway in the channel, operated by inflatable dams, could create “El Pueblo Lake,” where DESCRIBE POTENTIALLY IDYLLIC SCENES[17]
That note, to add in descriptions of the “potentially idyllic scenes” that could be generated by this mile-long artificial lake, gets to the core of one of the river’s many tensions. It is the tension of authenticity. The rivers of our storybooks have ample water, but never so ample as to be wracked by dangerous floods. These imagined rivers have beautiful tree-lined banks, ready to shade picnickers but repellent to vagrants or criminals who might be tempted to hide there. There is clean water to splash about in, creatures in abundance, and boating, swimming, and loveliness. And, of course, river water is blue and river edges are green, right? Not quite so, in a climate and landscape like Los Angeles. Joshua Link, a landscape architect born and raised in Los Angeles, explained it this way:
The real landscape of Los Angeles is about subtlety, whereas if you see the more manicured landscapes of LA it’s all about lush and tropical and flashy. That just doesn’t feel authentic to me.[18]
In his architectural drawings, as he came to know the watershed more and more intimately, he started representing the river differently, stripping back the intensity of colors to show a more authentic vision for the city and river:
I would start doing these Photoshop renderings. I would start trying to show a little bit less water, start playing down the really verdant aspects of it. There was one command I would do at the end of every single drawing. It was the saturation command. I always would bring it down like twenty points in saturation. It was just like this magic thing. I was like before, “No, no, no, that’s Columbus, Ohio, or that’s back in New York” and I would adjust the saturation and like, “Okay, that’s LA.” It’s just a little less, a little less verdant. You can change the perception of a project, just with a few clicks.[19]
The river’s changeability—across time, across seasons, and across different places along its course—is one of its defining features. A feature it maintains against many odds, most notably the extensive engineering works to contain and control it, to make it “a water freeway.”[20] The river remains changeable for a raft of reasons—among them, weather, changes in the built environment, human interventions and interactions, and love.
[1] Friends of the Los Angeles River, “What We Do.“
[2] Carol Armstrong, February 2, 2016, digital recording at City Hall, Downtown Los Angeles.
[3] Anthea Raymond, January 11, 2016, digital recording at Anthea‘s Home, Cypress Park.
[4] Gerard Dawson, VHS tape of “Something Resembling a River,” 1987, Box 156, Friends of the Los Angeles River records, 1987–2013.
[5] Lila Higgins, January 19, 2016, digital recording at HMS Bounty, Los Angeles.
[6] Shelly Backlar, January 26, 2016, digital recording at Friends of the Los Angeles River Offices, Los Angeles River Center and Gardens.
[7] Anthea Raymond, January 11, 2016, digital recording at Anthea‘s Home, Cypress Park.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Records of the Los Angeles Division of the Army Corps of Engineers (Public Affairs Office, Administrative Records, and Records Relating to Flood Control and Civil Works Projects 1898–2000).
[10] Gumprecht, The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth, 127.
[11] Neil Cohen, final version of “Mark Twain!” article for Los Angeles Magazine, 1990, Box 60, Folder 1, Friends of the Los Angeles River records, 1987–2013.
[12] Kat Superfisky, January 18, 2016, digital recording at Mia Lehrer + Associates Studio, Downtown Los Angeles.
[13] Joshua Link, January 19, 2016, digital recording at Millennium Biltmore Hotel, Downtown Los Angeles.
[14] Anthea Raymond, January 11, 2016, digital recording at Anthea‘s Home, Cypress Park.
[15] Gumprecht, The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth, 95.
[16] City of Los Angeles, “El Pueblo Lake Initial Concept Study,” (2004), Box 93, Folder 1, Friends of the Los Angeles River records, 1987–2013.
[17] Lewis MacAdams, draft article about development options for the river, n.d., Box 31, Folder 1, ibid.
[18] Joshua Link, January 19, 2016, digital recording at Millennium Biltmore Hotel, Downtown Los Angeles.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Friends of the Los Angeles River records, 1987–2013.