Yearning for a Pristine Channel: A Fairy Tale Runs Through It

As the Army Corps of Engineers, with the blessing of the L.A. County supervisors, began clearing channel brush last week, environmentalists repeated the fairy tale of a once-idyllic Los Angeles River fallen on hard times. Instead of a “drainage ditch given backdoor status” or an “invisible river,” the friends of the river promised they would return it to the rustic stream of yore.

That’s the trouble with nostalgia, especially when it infuses a cause: It obscures the truth. The Los Angeles River was not pristine 100 years ago; it didn’t flow gently from the Valley to the sea before the corps paved portions of it with concrete. Indeed, its unspoiled days ended long before the corps turned a shovelful of dirt. Consider how Times readers of the ‘80s--the 1880s, that is--described their river as it was in the era that environmentalists apparently pine for.

The corps didn’t create the levees. That was done by homeowners of the 1880s, who filled this newspaper’s letters column with calls for ever-higher embankments. Especially outraged was “West Side” when the River Improvement Fund was squandered on an east-bank levee to protect a strip of land owned by William Workman and John Hollenbeck--”rich men all”--leaving westside working-class folks at the mercy of the next flood.

But today’s anti-levee crowd had their counterparts, too. Developer Alfred Moore dismissed as “terror-stricken” a warning, published in this newspaper, that a flood could sweep away homes in the central part of the city. He boasted of having just sold six lots in the Aliso tract to a lady who built a “fine residence” within a few feet of the riverbed; he also claimed to be selling bottom-land lots rapidly. Having lived in the tract for eight years without ever seeing a flood, Moore asked when croakers thought the next one would occur. It came, in 1884, and 40 houses in Moore’s tract were swept away.

Environmentalist Lewis MacAdams suggests that channel clearance and concrete levees would be unnecessary, and the fears of downstream residents would be alleviated, if the county tore up asphalt parking lots so rain could soak into the earth. He forgets that, before 1900, the entire Valley was a settling basin, yet that didn’t stop the disastrous floods of the 1820s, ‘30s, ‘60s and ‘80s.

MacAdams would let the bulrushes and willows grow. Tell that to the flood victims of 1884. One of them, “J,” urged that the channel be plowed annually to keep the willows from impeding the river’s path. “R.M.M.” advocated hiring the unemployed to clear out the willows and other obstructions. Trees belonged on the bank, not in the riverbed.

As for the recreational possibilities spawned by those addicted to a Huck Finn image of the river as a great playground, was the river, as it really was back then, the kind of place where parents would want their kids to play? Some ‘80s parents didn’t think so. “Observer” complained about fathers “very remiss in their paternal obligations” because they allowed their children to “play hoodlum in the willows along the river” with other foul-mouthed boys and girls.

In any case, just how pristine was the Los Angeles River in the late 19th century? “Pro Bono Publico” reported that the remains of 80 animals, killed in a stable fire, were dumped into the river at Seventh Street: “Forty tons more or less of dead horse to putrefy and breed typhoid fever in that vicinity and on the adjacent Boyle Heights.”

The foot of First Street, at the river, became such a dumping ground that “H” urged the city’s health officer to make a pilgrimage there so that “his nostrils might be regaled with odors most suffocating, where carcasses are permitted to fester in the hot sun, and garbage exhales its deadly vapors, rendering the neighborhood utterly unbearable.”

Obviously, some residents of the ‘80s didn’t object to using the river for waste disposal. One such plan was widely discussed as the decade neared its end. The rise in population in the middle of the decade had severely strained the city’s inadequate sewer system. Among solutions seriously considered was one offered by “Cosmopolitan” and several other correspondents: Dump the city’s waste into the river and send it off to Long Beach. That was thought to be less damaging to the environment than building a sewage pipeline to Santa Monica Bay and polluting the beaches. Since more Angelenos frequented Santa Monica than Long Beach for recreation, turning the river into a sewer had support. But the intermittent nature of the river’s flow foreclosed the sewer option.

A century-plus later, the river remains a problem. Angelenos continue to argue over flood control, levees and recreational use of the channel. Input from environmentalists will be an important element in any solution, but they, like others, have an obligation to present a more accurate history of what they wish to preserve.*