Greening the L. A. River : Mayor Bradley Has a Plan for Getting Back to Nature, And It’s Nothing Concrete

IT’S A NUTTY, topsy-turvy world we live in, have you noticed? So it shouldn’t have surprised anyone when Mayor Tom Bradley, having squeaked through the last election virtually unopposed, issued his platform after the polls had closed. Like a house inspection following the wrap-up of escrow, it might have induced a slight case of “Now you tell me!” But in an era when political campaigns have been officially declared off-limits to issues, it was nice to finally know what was on His Honor’s mind.

One of the proposals for the historic Fifth Term has remained in my brain despite all the whiting-out of the intervening months. Mayor Bradley proposed, as I recall--unless I dreamed it--the greening of the Los Angeles River. The mayor didn’t mean painting the concrete river channel green, as an earlier generation of Angelenos would have done (see the Astroturfed median strip of two decades ago). No, he was talking about ripping up the concrete bedding and reconstituting the river as a--oh, what do you call those things--a . . . a river.

It may come as a surprise to some of you that this region boasts a river. We actually have a few. That attractive drainage ditch beside Interstate 605--that used to be a river. Downey’s Rio Hondo, which has given its name to a school district and a movie, used to be a real rio. A concrete coffin in West L.A. holds the remains of a one-time creek.

Our rivers’ demise is due to the confluence of two of Earth’s most irresistible forces: Mother Nature and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In the early decades of this century, so the lore has it, this area suffered a series of fairly disastrous floods. Seems quaint now, when everyone is supposed to be figuring out how many bricks to put in his toilet and how to cut down on showers without offending, to think of this area as anything but drought-plagued, but that’s nature for you.

In rode not the cavalry, which at worst would have cleaned up the mess and shot a few interlopers, but the Corps, the implacable Johnny Cementseeds of the West. With sound logic and good connections in Congress, they advanced two powerful propositions: (a) Rivers couldn’t flood if they weren’t rivers anymore, and (b) building a network of rectilinear ditches sure would be good for a Depression-wracked economy.

Seen from the vantage point of our more enlightened times, when projects like downtown skyscrapers and nuclear plants and over-advanced bombers are never approved merely for their job-generating ability, it all seems rather odd. After all, a river is a geographical feature most human settlements have regarded as an asset. Paris has done quite nicely with the Seine running through it, and Londoners have yet to box up the Thames and send it packing.

Of course, it was the well-known dreamer in Mayor Bradley talking about the greened river. That must be why the subject has disappeared from local debate ever since, hibernating like a sedated grizzly. But this place thrives on crackpot ideas: Think of Venice, the Watts Towers, Jon Peters running a studio. And the river has been attracting more than its share of dreamers. Just before the mayor saw green, Assemblyman Richard Katz saw gray with yellow lines: He proposed turning the river into a freeway. Dreams like that are usually blamed on something you ate.

It would take years, perhaps decades, to coax something resembling nature back to the site of its banishment. Many habits would have to be changed--laundromats in the Valley, for example, would have to find someplace else to dump their used suds. And let’s be honest. The most energetically greened L.A. River would cast watery reflections upon its host city only some of the year. The rest of the time, we’d gaze down the banks and see, at best, sunbaked mud and a nice selection of cattails.

But, gee, just imagine the boat rides people could take during times of high water. “On your right is the Sears warehouse. On your left is the last hospital in Southern California to treat poor people.”

And we would not be alone in belatedly rediscovering the watery part of our endowment. New York City, which spent many decades conducting an experiment to see how much human waste could be poured into the Hudson without making it overflow its banks, is now relearning the pleasures (and the economic liveliness) of life along the river.

At a time when our schools and libraries and roads and health services seem to be scraping by on half-rations, it may seem frivolous to envision a massive project like giving us back our river. But that’s where American ingenuity comes in. Making this mess created a lot of jobs. Think of the jobs it will take to put things right again.