A River Without a Chuckle

Who owns the Los Angeles River?

Don’t know? Don’t care?

I understand.

That’s the way it goes with the L.A. River. It’s possible, in fact, to live in Los Angeles and never see or be aware of the river that runs through it. Say you live in West Hollywood and work in Culver City. The L.A. River would never show up on your personal map.

I remember the first time I saw it. This was the early 1970s and I had just come to Los Angeles. A friend was taking me to lunch in East L.A. We passed over the Macy St. bridge and I looked down at the biggest concrete sewer I had ever seen.

The thing stretched toward the horizon and had a purity about it, a geometric cleanness that was almost lovely. Mostly it was empty of water. A tiny channel had been cut along the bottom and through this channel ran a tiny stream.

“That’s the L.A. River,” my friend said. And then he chuckled.

Ever since, I have listened for that chuckle whenever the subject of the L.A. River comes up. It’s always there. People will say the words “L.A. River” and then comes the chuckle.

I understand.

Los Angeles is that kind of place. We don’t really have a river , right? We just have a thing called a “river,” and we only use the word to produce the necessary irony.

You might recall the suggestion made a year or so ago by Assemblyman Richard Katz. He proposed that the river be converted to a freeway. There was a fitting, L.A.-kind of logic to it. Since our river wasn’t really a river, it might as well become a freeway.

Except there’s a problem here. The Los Angeles River happens to be very real. We haven’t noticed because, for 50 years, the real river has been covered over and camouflaged by concrete.

The L.A. River drains the watershed of the entire San Fernando Valley. It exits the valley at Elysian Park, curls past downtown and then heads south towards Long Beach.

This river flows year-round and once, around the turn of the century, supplied the city with virtually all of its water. In fact, the first attempt at a water grab in Los Angeles involved the efforts by Messrs. Van Nuys and Lankershim to corral the river’s water rights and squeeze the city dry. Only narrowly were they defeated.

So our river is real, with a real history. Wouldn’t it be nice to get it back, at least in part? To clear out the concrete, to let the trees grow back along the river’s edge, to watch the ducks paddle around, to be able to say the word “river” without the irony?

And we could get it back. Other cities, notably San Antonio, have reclaimed their rivers with great success.

But we have a problem. You may recall the original question: who owns the river? Sadly, it’s not us. Not really. The real owners are the feds, and the feds don’t like the idea of our river coming back.

It was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who enclosed the river in concrete during the 1940s after a series of floods, and thereby gained their equity in the river. The floods were bad, true enough, and the Corps has never forgotten that. They like the river just the way it is.

Last week, the Corps revealed that they had refused to spend most of a million-dollar congressional appropriation to study restoration of the river. Why? Because the Corps didn’t want to.

It’s not that flood control would be sacrificed by the reclamation. Most agree that the river could be restored while retaining its capacity to absorb great storms.

No, the problem is otherwise. Restoration would be expensive and would require imagination. Apparently the Corps is short of both.

In San Antonio the reclaimed river waterfront has become the city’s major visitor attraction. It’s economic benefits are measured in the billions. And that’s little San Antonio.

What could happen in L.A.? Consider that Disney Studios, Warner Brothers and Universal all are gathered along the river. So are Griffith Park, the L.A. Zoo and, as they say, many more.

And we could start small, reclaiming a chunk here, a chunk there. The river could be won back slowly, over decades if necessary.

I know that, somehow, the idea of winning this war sounds unlikely. It’s not the sort of thing that L.A. does well, right? It sounds too good.

I understand. But maybe, this time, I understand wrong.