The Second Coming of the L.A. River

In Los Angeles, government is opaque. Just try, for example, to find the person responsible for street maintenance in your neighborhood. Or call City Hall and ask who is enforcing the ban on leaf blowers. Your questions will be met with puzzlement.

Usually, this opaque quality hides the endless, dreary failures of our city fathers and their minions. Occasionally, though, it also hides their triumphs. And today we have such a case.

Very soon, perhaps this week, a design team buried in the viscera of City Hall will make a bit of history. They will roll out a map of the Los Angeles River and, for the first time, commence an official plan to bring a stretch of the river back to life.

The section selected for the guinea pig treatment runs through Studio City. If all goes as planned, this stretch will slowly be restored over the next decade with trees, bike paths and walking trails. It may even gurgle with high flows in summer.

A long time coming, no? Most of the great cities of the world have long celebrated their rivers, even if they also dumped hideous amounts of filth into them. London has the Thames, Paris the Seine, New York the Hudson, and so on. Even the degrading pollution has been reversed in some cities and they now have reasonably clean rivers snaking through their neighborhoods, giving people the chance to stroll and breathe the vapors of a living body of water.

In Los Angeles, we don’t exactly celebrate our river. No, we’ve taken the other path. The Los Angeles River has been treated like a sewer, made to look like a sewer, reviled like a sewer. For decades we have surrounded our river with chain-link fence to keep people out, as if the river was an object of shame. We lined it with concrete, made it the subject of talk show jokes.

For so long have we pursued the sewer strategy that most people cannot imagine anything else. Mention that the Los Angeles River once supported a healthy population of steelhead trout and you will get a blank look. Mention that it once flowed year-round, that it supplied the entire city with drinking water until the early 20th century, and you will get ditto.

And that’s why the Studio City project may change history. For the first time, people will see what happens when a river is treated with respect. They won’t have to imagine the delicate joys of walking, biking and hanging out next to running water. Those joys will present themselves in living color.

Or, to put it another way, our beat-up river will have a chance to attract some fans of its own, and who knows what may follow? If we can convert one stretch, we can convert another. And another.

“It’s a big deal because it will serve as the model,” said City Councilman Mike Feuer, who has sponsored the project. “Without a model, the idea of a real river is too abstract. People don’t believe it can happen.”

Which raises the question: Exactly how will this happen in Studio City? Thanks to bond money from Proposition K, passed in 1996, some $10 million will be spent on the project, and the above-mentioned bike paths, hiking trails and woodsy landscaping will be included in some fashion.

Beyond that, no one is certain. The conversion of a sewer-fied river has never been tried before. The planners know, for example, that their $10 million will not allow them to rebuild the concrete walls of the river. And they know they will be working with a limited amount of space along each bank.

In fact, a number of warehouse-like commercial buildings now hover close to the riverbanks. And even as the restoration planning begins, the city is contemplating construction of yet another such building--a multistory parking garage this time--that would rise 10 feet from the river’s edge.

So there will be limits. Still, says Melanie Winter, the executive director of Friends of Los Angeles River, success is within grasp. “You can change the character of the concrete walls [of the river] so they don’t really look like concrete walls. New technologies are available that maintains their stability but leaves them looking close to natural.”

And though space is limited, Winter predicts that the stretch of river, about two miles, will be enough to provide the essential experience. “It’s doable,” she says. “And when people see what has been accomplished here, they will want the same thing in Los Feliz or Glendale.”

As for how they will manage the trick of keeping the river filled in the summer, technology again comes to the rescue. Designers would make use of inflatable dams that would capture the slow flows of summer and create a meandering waterway. In the winter, they would simply deflate.

You might think that Feuer would have chosen a more remote location for this experiment. In fact, the Studio City stretch was selected precisely because it runs immediately behind the busy restaurants and shops along Ventura Boulevard. Not only does the heavy foot traffic mean the greenway will get more use, it also raises the possibility that some businesses will eventually open “second fronts” onto the river rather than turning their back on it.

In Chicago, Cleveland and San Antonio, this strategy has produced profits as well as pleasure and made the river an anchor of the community. San Antonio, for one, owes much of its current reputation as a tourist attraction to exactly that phenomenon.

In Los Angeles, of course, no plan ever goes unsullied, and some homeowners next to the river already have expressed resistance to the idea of living next to a public park. Bistros along the river may be fine and dandy in Chicago, they say, but not in Studio City. They don’t want to hear the sound of clinking glasses on their own patios.

If the river parkway is designed correctly, Winter argues, they won’t. No one is contemplating planting a restaurant directly across from a residential neighborhood, she says.

Other sections of the parkway, which face onto a golf course, would be the proper setting for a bistro.

“If we build the park right, people will love it. They will wonder how they lived without it,” she says. “But, in the end, the people of Studio City must have a hand in designing the park because they are the ones who will use it every day.”

So that’s the story from the bowels of City Hall. Fifty years ago politicians here laid plans to kill the river and bury it under concrete. Now they are planning, in a small way, to reverse that decision and let the river live again.

Invisible, as they say, no more.