Make Los Angeles Lake Los Angeles

Your Dec. 14 editorial, “Life Flows Into L.A. River,” depicting incremental improvements was encouraging, but why not enhance the long-term environmental, spiritual and economic worth of our city on a grander scale? I suggest that we dam the river just south of Exposition Park, creating Lago de Los Angeles. Derelict properties, including slums and old railroad yards, could be acquired and excavated to provide for expansion of the waters. Initial costs would be repaid many times over.

The lake would stimulate the conversion of scarcely inhabitable areas into a mecca of residential, recreational and tourist development -- and the ranking of Los Angeles among the great water-based cities of the world. The lake would facilitate the removal of the concrete channeling along the river’s course and would reduce the worry about a 100-year flood downstream.

Kenyon B. De Greene

Woodland Hills