A Fresh Start : Environment: A stream in Fryman Canyon bubbles to life as cleanup crews start evicting old cars and other debris.

Los Angeles Conservation Corps members and area residents witnessed the birth--or rather the rebirth--of a stream this week in Studio City.

Work crews were digging the deeply buried remains of an old car out of the heart of Fryman Canyon on Monday. When they finally pried the rusted metal hulk out of the dry ground, water suddenly bubbled to the surface and began trickling down the dry stream bed.

“It’s alive,” said Tim Ballinger, the supervisor of the corps team.

At that moment, in the remains of another old car less than a hundred feet downstream, other corps workers discovered a tiny, newborn kangaroo rat.

The life cycle was beginning anew.

“Places like this are so rare,” corps member Shawntise Rose said. “I feel good about what I am doing.”

The Conservation Corps is helping to clean up Fryman Canyon this week at the request of Studio City residents who, for nearly a year, fought a developer’s plan to build 63 luxury homes in the pie-shaped slice of urban wilderness. The land was finally acquired by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and it opened as a public park in March.

This week, area residents worked side by side with corps members to try to get the stream flowing again by removing the remains of more than a dozen old cars.

“We’re claiming this as our place,” said Debra Denker, a nearby resident, who was using a pickax to dig the metal out of the soil. “I’ve been coming here for 25 years and have always wanted to clean this. It’s the culmination of a dream.”

The stream was a point of bitter contention during the long battle over the land. Area residents argued that the presence of the rare, year-round stream merited the canyon’s preservation as a wilderness area.

Developer Fred Sahadi countered that there was no stream--simply runoff from houses atop Mulholland Drive.

Ballinger, who is supervising the four-day cleanup, and other conservation corps workers said they had no doubts that their sweat and energy were being expended to restore a real stream.

Ballinger said the water flow has been stopped by the rusting cars, a concrete-reinforced safe, a washing machine and dryer, tires, car batteries and old mattresses and box springs that had been tossed into the ravine over the years.

But when the debris is removed, they said, the water will percolate up from the ground.

“With the weight of the metal, it was detouring the water from running,” Ballinger said. “I pictured it yesterday running without the cars. It was good. The stream is here.”

Nearby resident Judy Marx, who led the crusade to save the canyon from development and participated in the cleanup, vowed: “When people cross here, they will see a beautiful, bubbling stream.”

It is no easy task to drag old cars--some of which date back to the 1940s--from the bottom of a steep ravine, where they were buried in silt and gravel.

Shovel-wielding corps members first dug the metal out of the ground, then they lifted the wreckage out of the ravine from above, using a winch.

Corps worker Betty Aguyo, 22, of El Sereno, has cleaned up canyons before, many of which were badly littered with cans, bottles and other trash. But “this is a lot more work. Here you don’t have to just take it out, you have to dig it out,” she said.