Life Flows Into L.A. River

Before most people realized Los Angeles had a river, it was City Councilman Ed Reyes’ secret playground. Even now he is as eager as Huck Finn to show off his old waterhole -- a rare stretch of unpaved riverbed where palm trees wave between concrete banks.

Technically, the channelized river was and still is off limits, by city law and mothers’ orders. But to a kid growing up in Cypress Park in the early 1970s, this spot near the confluence of the Golden State and Pasadena freeways was both an oasis and a refuge from the gangs that ruled the neighborhood parks.

Today Reyes chairs a newly formed City Council committee on the Los Angeles River. He looks at the 51-mile concrete drainage ditch and imagines a greenbelt of nature trails, soccer fields and sidewalk cafes.

He’s not the first. Seventeen years ago, a poet in a pork-pie hat named Lewis MacAdams launched the crusade to reclaim the river. His nonprofit Friends of the Los Angeles River drew laughter first -- and then other artists, environmentalists, neighborhood activists and politicians. Professors from Eagle Rock’s Occidental College to Harvard University made the river a laboratory for urban planning classes.

The river today still looks like a concrete ditch, and it’s easy to think that nothing has come of all these plans but little blue signs proclaiming that it really is a river. But a closer look finds seeds of progress.

The nonprofit North East Trees has landscaped a string of riverside pocket parks from Griffith Park to downtown, with artist-designed gates that beckon visitors in rather than fencing them out. A two-mile river parkway with trees, benches, bike paths and walking trails is taking shape in Studio City, thanks to bond money from the 1996 Proposition K. Federal transportation dollars earmarked for alternatives to cars have paid for paved bikeways. The state recently bought two old industrial sites near downtown to transform into riverfront parks.

Twenty-plus local, county, state and federal agencies oversee some piece of the river. The problem with working with so many jurisdictions was underscored when members of the council committee met recently with Atwater Village residents who wanted to know whom to call to remove graffiti and repair broken sprinklers along their river walkway. The city? The county? The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers? No one could answer.

The challenge for the new committee, then, is to not only keep the momentum going but to build bridges between the various projects, public and private, and the people they serve.

MacAdams took the long view when he started what he then called “a 40-year artwork to bring the Los Angeles River back to life through a combination of art, politics and magic.”

This City Council, under term limits, won’t be able to complete the transformation in the four or eight years its members can serve. But Reyes’ committee helps dispel the fear that term-limited councils won’t take on epochal tasks. It also shows that politicians, like children and artists, know magic when they see it.