When They Look at the L.A. River, They See Green

The eyes of the river people work differently. You often have to strain to see what they see when they’re envisioning the future of the repressed, denatured, humiliated Los Angeles River.

On a late Sunday morning, with the sun squatting like a fat man on the San Fernando Valley, Melanie Winter stands atop one of the concrete slopes that pass for the river’s banks and spreads her arms. She sees “a bike path on this side of the river--a Class 1 bikeway all the way to Long Beach. Rows of native sycamores, willows and cottonwoods on both sides, and a pedestrian path on the other side. You can’t imagine how much you can change when you have this much acreage, just with some planting. This can be a whole greenway.”

What I see at this site a few hundred feet downstream from where the river begins in Canoga Park is a wide half-hexagon of barren concrete channel, a man-made no-man’s-land that throws back the sun’s heat with something like vengeance. A narrow low-flow channel cut into the concrete floor runs with perhaps a foot of sluggish water. Sticking out of the concrete on the northern bank are iron rings for attaching rescue gear when the wider channel races with storm water, an eventuality as hard to imagine on a dry summer day as Melanie Winter’s greenscape.

Unbeknownst to a surprising number of Angelenos, the Los Angeles River is a naturally occurring phenomenon--not the world’s largest storm sewer. Its year-round flow gave Native Americans, and then Spanish colonizers, reason to settle here. But the river was wild and steep, losing about the same amount of elevation over its 51-plus miles as the Mississippi does over its 2,350. It regularly flooded the coastal plain and carved out new courses for itself. As settlement of the region proliferated, the floods took greater and greater tolls. After devastating inundations early this century, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers determined to take the river in hand.

From the late 1930s until 1960, the Corps entombed the river alive. Its aim was to channel storm water as swiftly and safely as possible to the sea (no matter the semiarid region’s recurring water shortages and dependence on imported supplies).

Winter, the 42-year-old board president of Friends of the L.A. River (FoLAR), is full of ardor for the river. Six feet tall, a former dancer and actress, she is among the tribe of river people--members of such organizations as FoLAR, North East Trees, the Los Angeles & San Gabriel Rivers Watershed Council and the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition, and residents of riverside neighborhoods--who can claim much of the credit for turning certain stretches of the forlorn river into recreation areas in recent years.

They’ve accomplished this despite public ignorance and official flood-control doctrine that often proved as unyielding as the river’s concrete walls. Their long-term agenda is a vast one. It envisions not only accessible parks along the river and a bikeway running the stream’s entire length, but a new emphasis on controlling floods and recharging ground water via inflatable upstream dams and spreading grounds, which also will create new wet wildlife habitats and water-centered recreation areas.

The vision likely will be a long time in the realizing. Meanwhile, the concrete walls are here to stay. They are what give flood-prone cities downriver of Los Angeles the confidence to exist.

Momentum, however, has shifted toward the river people. Los Angeles County, the city of Los Angeles and even the Corps of Engineers lately have undertaken efforts to re-naturalize the river and fit it for human use. The state of California will spend more than $88 million on projects along the Los Angeles River and the confluent Rio Hondo in the coming year. Of that amount, $45 million will finance the start-up of a new 61-acre state park at the Union Pacific Railroad’s largely abandoned Taylor Yard on the river’s east bank, south of the Glendale Freeway. It will be the first state park built in Southern California in almost two decades, and it is coming to the river.

i recently traveled the length of the river on foot and via bike and canoe, from its beginning just west of Owensmouth in Canoga Park to its mouth at Long Beach. The journey was challenging because of fences and locked gates along many portions of the stream, paved bikeways that abruptly end, the industrial/commercial tangle of downtown Los Angeles and ongoing construction to heighten the channel walls in the downstream cities.

It was easy to see what the river people have in mind at those places where the river still seems more river than storm sewer.

East of the railroad trestle that crosses the river between White Oak Avenue and Balboa Boulevard in the Valley, the concrete desert gives way and the river regains its natural bottom in the Sepulveda Dam Recreation Area. It flows into four lush ponds that are home to great blue herons, egrets and ducks. Here trees and brush obscure the concrete walls, and all is quiet, cool and breezy. The ponds are so hidden they’re practically secret, though a few fishermen have found their way to the shore. It’s illegal to be on the water, however, without a county permit.

The river people say that with inflatable dams to control the flow, ponds like these could exist in many places along the stream. “The flood control people tell you anything that obstructs the flood flow is bad,” says Denis Schure, a FoLAR activist who is paddling our canoe. “But we’ve been living with these four ponds for 50 years.”

In the Elysian Valley, at the Glendale Narrows, the river again is freed from its concrete bottom and greenery instantly reappears. From the ornate wrought-iron “Guardians of the River” gate, erected less than a year ago by North East Trees, which also has planted the spot with such native vegetation as matilija poppies, the view upriver is that of a pastoral “V”--especially if your eyes can screen out the river’s concrete walls and the heavy electrical lines above.

At no place is the river more inviting than from the Sunnynook pedestrian bridge at Atwater Village. Here you can look down at the water as it passes over a natural bottom, parting into three currents, marooning islands of vegetation and tumbling to a white froth on the rocks. Atwater Village seems particularly enamored of the river. A number of its streets end in accessible pocket parks that overlook the stream.

Far to the south, at Willow Street in Long Beach, the river recaptures its vegetation-making soft bottom after a long and tedious journey over concrete. At this point seawater from San Pedro Bay flows into the river, swelling and salting it. Brown pelicans swoop over the water, which, finally liberated from human device, merges with the welcoming sea.

Such glad places, however, occupy only a small percentage of the river’s length. They exist between vast, dour vistas in which upended supermarket carts collect algae in the low-flow channel, and bottles and plastic cups spill from the street drains that carry water from lawn sprinklers and car washings to the patient river.

Below Sepulveda Dam, the river is confined in a “box channel,” a flat concrete floor stretching to two concrete walls that rise straight up 15 feet and are topped by a 4-foot fence. Beneath its surface, long strands of algae, like the hair of drowned witches, fluctuate in the current, break off and form elaborate knots that float by. At this time of year, this stretch would be unnavigable by canoe if not for the extra volume of treated sewage water that flows into the river from the Los Angeles Sanitation Department’s Tillman Water Treatment Plant.

In downtown Los Angeles, the river is all but inaccessible in a maze of freeways and along vast industrialized tracts that continue for miles south of the city limits. A bikeway that begins at Atlantic Boulevard in Maywood peters out at sites of construction to raise the walls higher against future flood waters. The perfectly maintained Lario Trail bikeway begins at Imperial Highway. Running atop the eastern concrete bank, it provides a clear view of how the river, which is at its widest here, is cut off from neighborhoods and existing parks, equestrian centers, golf courses and other green spaces.

It’s heartening, however, that one of the ugliest, noisiest riverside sites, Taylor Yard, will be replaced by the new state park. Over the ensuing years its rumbling diesel engines, squat fuel tanks and confusion of electrical towers will be exchanged for grass and green.

To ponder that impending transformation is to gain respect for the river people’s vision.

The river people see, over time, the river as a scenic, unifying element in local civic life--a green thread through L.A. County’s patchwork of cheek-by-jowl, asphalted, uncommunicative communities.

“I really believe that when the re-naturalization of the river is done, it will alter the face of the city and the way we relate to each other,” says Melanie Winter. “Right now, there is no way for people in, say, Glendale, to get to Long Beach traveling in a human-scale way. The re-naturalization of the river is sort of a way to re-civilize ourselves. They thought they were thinking long-term when they built this flood channel. Why can’t we think long-term when it comes to restoration?”

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James Ricci’s e-mail address is james.ricci@latimes.com