Gathering at the River: Maybe the Time Is Right

Re “New Idea Floated for L.A. River,” Jan. 24: Good ideas never die. They just have to find their time (or people have to grow and reach for them).

Back in 1967, a student at the UCLA School of Architecture and Urban Planning proposed, in his master of architecture thesis, inflatable dams across the L.A. River to create a series of lakes for boating and recreation, thus changing the character of the river from an ugly back-alley ditch carrying urban debris and pollutants to a series of attractive water bodies with parks around it.

In 1968 further studies were done by the city planning department to analyze its feasibility. The concept was also embraced by the Environmental Goals Committee as part of the Los Angeles Region Goals Program.

Detractors of the concept, however, prevailed by arguing that the debris and urban storm water runoff pollutants would make the lakes unsafe for human contact.

Perhaps now, with government programs such as the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board and the Standard Urban Storm Water Mitigation Plan in place, and the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy’s studies for L.A. River parks and an open-spaces greenbelt, the time has come to dust off the city planning and UCLA files and bring the studies to fruition.

Radoslav L. Sutnar

Former Executive Director

of Environmental Goals

Committee, Los Angeles

Goals Program

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Lane Barden’s idea of using inflatable rubber dams to create a lake in the L.A. River is not new. I ran across the concept in the late 1970s while working on the Los Angeles bid for the 1984 Olympic Games. A lake in the L.A. River was considered a potential venue for Olympic rowing. We found the rubber dam technology was well established and affordable, and the dam could be deflated quickly (for flood control purposes).

But the construction cost would have been too high because bridges and other obstructions had to be modified to meet international rowing federation requirements.

Richard A. Dickinson

Glendale

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The concept of a Los Angeles River lake was first proposed in the Letters From the People column of The Times, April 7, 1888.

Reader G.W. Briggs, concerned with the growing problem of sewage disposal for the fast-growing city, suggested that one solution was to turn the river into both an open sewage channel and a ship canal, thereby moving the sewage problem to San Pedro harbor and creating a lake downtown where oceangoing vessels could dock.

A Times cartoonist, for the Jan. 1, 1913, midwinter edition, resurrected Briggs’ idea and depicted the Los Angeles of 1938, envisioning a city of skyscrapers at the edge of a harbor, with freighters moored nearby. To Briggs, and to the modern advocates of a downtown lake, this body of water would “also add the great jewel of attraction to this very highly favored land by providing the City of Angels with a lake.”

Ralph E. Shaffer

Prof. Emeritus of History

Cal Poly Pomona