As We Gather at the River

‘Shall these dry bones live?” asked Ezekiel, hope contending with his skepticism, and the dead floor of the valley stirred, if only in his prophetic dream. If you had stood on the levee overlooking the Los Angeles River on any summer day in the last 30 years, anywhere below the sharp loop the river makes at Vernon, when the only thing stirring on the flat expanse of concrete is the waste water running in the “low flow” slot in the middle of the channel, skepticism would surely have triumphed over any hope for what might live there. We’d made this river in our own image, over 100 years and for more than $1 billion, for the purpose of flood protection but also to make San Fernando Valley real estate more profitable, harbor industrialization possible and immigrant families east of the river just a little more remote from the rest of L.A. What else we might have made of the river eluded us.

Until today. Upstream and down, the once vacant and trespass-forbidden riverside is crowded with planners from public agencies and environmental organizations, volunteers, county workers, schoolchildren, and politicians tying small parks to a thread of city and county bike paths to build a 51-mile-long Los Angeles River Parkway--a name that deliberately recalls a monumental park plan proposed in 1930 by the famed landscape firms of Olmsted Brothers and Bartholomew Associates. That vision of the river, before the disastrous floods of 1934 and 1938, still haunts the erased history of Los Angeles.

The Olmsted-Bartholomew plan would have remade the river channel as a wide band of parks and wetlands from the San Fernando Valley to the ocean and without the control of concrete. That river isn’t possible today and even then, it would have been a mirror of Anglo anxieties about race and class in a rapidly diversifying Los Angeles.

But now we have different opportunities. As we begin to encounter the river as a place, not an abstraction, we encounter each other. The riverbank is not the perfect place for this meeting, but it’s the only place we have that extends the length of metropolitan Los Angeles and along nearly all the borders of our social divides. Think of the river we’re making as the anti-freeway--not dispersing L.A. but pulling it together.

The budget that Gov. Gray Davis signed on June 29 makes more of the connections by authorizing five riverside projects (among them a new state park) that significantly extend the band of green that cities, the county and environmental organizations have already begun to draw along the course of the river. The funding was made possible by passage in March of Proposition 12 and Proposition 13 park and clean-water bonds. It includes:

* $5 million for a bikeway and hiking trails along the Tujunga Wash in Van Nuys and habitat restoration along a half-mile of the flood-control channel.

* $5 million for an Elysian Valley Riverfront Park at Marsh Street, just south of the Glendale Freeway, that will consolidate a belt of smaller parks (some hardly bigger than a house lot) on both sides of the channel from Atwater Village to the Arroyo Seco. These will be linked by the $2.6-million Elysian Valley Bikeway, already being built by the City of Los Angeles along seven miles of DWP right-of-way from the north side of Griffith Park to Elysian Park.

* $45 million for the start of a 61-acre Los Angeles River state park on the east side of the Elysian Valley on part of the Union Pacific Railroad’s abandoned Taylor Yard. The new park will fit a permanent wetland among the meanders engineered into the channel in the 1940s, test a model storm-water retention system and provide (on higher ground) visitor facilities to anchor the valley bikeway.

* $5 million to build a Confluence Park not far from the Los Angeles River Center and Gardens, where Los Angeles entered history in 1769 at the meeting of the river and the Arroyo Seco. The new park would be a hub where bikeways up the arroyo to Pasadena and south through downtown will connect with the Blue Line extension.

* $2.4 million to expand Riverfront Park in tiny, crowded Maywood. Its official population is 30,000, but Maywood may have more than 40,000 residents, half of them under age 24. They have access to just five acres of parks, one of the lowest percentages per capita in the nation. Maywood’s Riverfront Park, when finally assembled from former industrial sites, will more than double the city’s recreational open space and be a gateway to the river bikeway at its Slauson Avenue crossing.

The new state budget allocates a total of $88.5 million for these and other projects in the watershed of the Los Angeles River and the Rio Hondo, trimmed by Davis from the $117 million the Legislature approved. Among the cuts was $3.8 million to buy six acres of the disputed Cornfield property in Chinatown, where developer Ed Roski intends to build a 47-acre block of faceless warehouses. Considering that a park connecting Chinatown to the river greenway had won the support of Rep. Xavier Becerra, state Sen. Richard Polanco, former Assembly Speaker Antonio R. Villaraigosa, County Supervisor Gloria Molina, and leaders of the Chinatown community, the governor’s veto showed that one of the limits to re-imagining the river is a powerful Los Angeles developer.

There are other limits. Making a place for a pick-up game of soccer in Maywood, for example, has taken more than five years and challenged every assumption about restoring the river to a natural state. The six remnant properties in Riverfront Park, an L-shaped lot wedged between warehouses and the channel’s chain-link fence, are “brownfields” left by the vanished manufacturing economy that once made the river’s southern reach the most industrialized corridor in California. One of the riverfront parcels was a federal Superfund site that required supervised remediation by the Environmental Protection Agency.

A hard realism is needed to build parks on tainted ground in industrial neighborhoods overlooking the vacant flood-control channel, an unsentimental skill that the nonprofit Trust for Public Land and the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority have jointly acquired. Over the past five years, they have pooled funding from the state, the county and corporate and conservation donors, made partners of the county Department of Public Works and even the Army Corps of Engineers, created the first small parks in the Elysian Valley stretch of the river and added Riverfront Park in Maywood and an expanded Dills Park in blue-collar Paramount to the greening riverside.

These projects are as modest as the neighborhoods through which most of the river passes, but they are essential to bridging the gaps the river makes in the fabric of L.A. In Bell Gardens, a city with only two parks and a population of 100,000, city officials and the Trust for Public Land broke ground in March on another brownfield site for a pocket park and gateway to the county-maintained lower river bikeway. The trust plans a similar gateway park in Bell. In Studio City, despite NIMBYist fears of the kind of public who will use a public park, the gated riverbank will be made accessible, landscaped with native plants and opened to the bikeway next year. Along Compton Creek, one of only six locations in the flood-control system without a concrete floor, the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority is using $3 million in county recreation bonds to build another chain of small parks. In Long Beach, the newly created San Gabriel and Lower Los Angeles Rivers and Mountains Conservancy plans to build a bikeway with part of the $15 million the conservancy has been allocated in state park-bond funding. Residents of the Wrigley neighborhood in north Long Beach, anticipating the new conservancy, are already building their own pocket park and gateway to the bike path.

The river that we’re remaking is a mirror of new possibilities and with a band of heroes that includes all of us. By large majorities, we voted for county park bonds in the recession years of the 1990s and for state park bonds in this year of continuing economic boom. That funding is flowing to projects along the San Gabriel River and the Rio Hondo, as well as the parkway along the Los Angeles River.

In the prophetic words of the old hymn, we shall gather at the river, because we have almost nowhere else to go in a built-out L.A. We shall gather at the river with all its flaws as a place and all our flaws as a people. We shall gather on the river’s problematic banks to restore it, not to nature, but to ourselves. *