In Praise of Artifacts--and Those Who Love Them

One day in February 2000, Craig Howell was strolling in the rain down Spring Street below Chinatown. As he reached the old Southern Pacific train yard, the cloudy sky fissured, and a shaft of sunlight fell on the embankment at the yard’s western edge and began scudding along it.

Although 100 or so yards away, Howell noticed something curious. As the finger of light traveled, it traced a small, curved shape that seemed stuck in the hillside. Howell, a dedicated amateur archeologist, decided to investigate. He poked with a stick around the periphery of the curvature and exposed more of what looked like a brick-encased channel about 3 feet in diameter.

Howell looked uphill to his right, in the direction of Elysian Park, where he’d once explored an old water tunnel leading to the L.A. River. Then he looked downhill and backward to his left, toward the old Capitol Milling building, which at one time had been powered by a water wheel, and beyond it toward the Plaza at Olvera Street, which is thought to mark where the pueblo of Los Angeles was founded in 1781.

The bit of channel he’d exposed lay in a line connecting those points. There could be but one explanation. This was a segment of the zanja madre, the “mother ditch” of the original settlement’s aqueduct, its lifeline to the river.

Chinatown Yards, also known as “the Cornfield” because of its pre-railroad agricultural history, was the last sizable undeveloped space anywhere near downtown. At the time, Majestic Realty Corp. planned to build a warehouse complex on it, and an aggregation of environmentalists and community groups called the Chinatown Yards Alliance was battling to preserve the site for a future park to serve the overpopulated Eastside.

Howell didn’t really “discover” this segment of the zanja madre. Old maps clearly showed the aqueduct running through the site. Nonetheless, what he came upon brought a specific emotional gravity to the alliance’s arguments. Lewis MacAdam, founder of Friends of the L.A. River, calls Howell’s find “the turning point” in the alliance’s eventual long-odds triumph. Joel Reynolds, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Counsel, says the alliance’s lawsuit against Majestic, its pressuring of federal officials, and the fact that Chinatown Yards became an issue in the recent mayoral race ultimately decided the issue, but that Howell’s find provided “very clear evidence of the historic value of the property” that made it even more apparent that “you shouldn’t be thinking about putting warehouses on top of it.”

Craig Howell is a retired construction millwright, a thickset, bearded, ponytailed man who just turned 55. In cowboy hat and overalls, he puts one in mind of country singer Charlie Daniels. His style of speech might be characterized as corn-pone discursive.

He is what Mark Raab, director of Cal State Northridge’s Center for Public Archaeology, calls one of “the inspired few,” amateur delvers intoxicated by the past, a trait little short of contrarian in L.A., where “so much of the civic culture finds history a subtle burden.”

Howell’s latest project is removing graffiti from the 193-year-old San Fernando Mission dam, a 60-foot-long, 4-foot-high agglomeration of masonry, river rocks and broken roof tiles. “I’m gonna do it with a toothbrush to try to not damage it any more,” Howell says. “If I was 200 years old, I’d want somebody to wash me down with a two-hair camel brush.” Howell’s approach to history is the opposite of abstract. His passion is for artifacts of infrastructure that “allow people to see what it really meant to build a city.”

His house in Granada Hills is a landfill of various such collectibles. In his front yard are deposited, among other things, a stack of century-old wooden Western Union telegraph conduits; a pile of 1920-vintage gas pipes with lead-and-oakum joints from the old Los Angeles Gas and Electric Co.; a cast-iron L.A. Water Works & Supply gate valve cover dating from 1913 (the year William Mulholland’s aqueduct from Owens Lake opened); a 250-pound Depression-era Department of Water and Power irrigation water meter he was able to identify from a 1938 DWP employees’ manual he found in a dumpster. “And I’ve got two water hydrants coming,” he says, “pre-1926.”

What Howell collects is the stuff of ingenuity and toil that allowed modern civilized life to take root and prosper here.

When flogged to remember, L.A. has always turned primarily to dramatic narrative, to tales of out-sized personalities, outrageous wheeling-dealings and outlandish political struggles. That probably has to do with the existence here of the entertainment industry and an abundance of irritable writers (guilty, I plead guilty). But all this time, the toilets have been flushing and the lights have been coming on when switched. For that we can thank generations of nameless people who installed and maintained and spent their lives thinking about such things as gate valve covers and irrigation water meters. Their history, knowable mostly through the glamourless, often seemingly odd devices they labored over and left behind, deserves occasional remembering, too.