Water Power

Along busy Wilshire Boulevard, a steady stream of cars is rocketing by, oblivious to another L.A. phenomenon a scant block away--22 gallons of spring water gushing per minute along a quiet corner of University High School.

“It’s just an amazing secret garden,” says Clark Stevens, of the L.A. architecture firm RoTo, which has been hired to help restore the springs. “I’ve seen other urban places like this, but never one with water. It’s incredibly powerful.”

A secret to the public, maybe, but not to the students at University High, who have used the site for decades to cut class, meditate or . . . well, school principal Elois McGehee is quite aware of just about everything that’s gone on. Even now she’s looking down at a blank square. Someone has stolen the Daughters of the American Revolution plaque that marked the spot where glassy water bubbles into a concrete cistern. She doesn’t seem fazed.

The plaque was one of several crude attempts over the years to recognize the specialness of the springs, which rises up from an aquifer deep under school grounds near the intersection of Barrington Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard. There’s the “Kuruvungna Village Upper Waterfall State Historic Site No. 522” sign out by the athletic fields, where water runs along a seen-better-days concrete waterway on its trip to Santa Monica Bay. Then there’s the DAR plaque several yards away, marking the place where the native Tongva Indians congregated years before whites set foot at Plymouth. Their descendants have since named it Kuruvungna--”a place where we are in the sun.”

Now McGehee and the members of the Sacred Springs Task Force may be steps away from realizing a restoration project begun five years ago, when then-state Sen. Tom Hayden secured a portion of what would become a $300,000 grant from the state Office of Historic Preservation to upgrade the site. That money was enough for experts to figure out how to move a tired-looking redwood classroom, which the school district was loath to raze, and get rid of the hodgepodge of concrete and nonnative plantings that had accumulated at the springs site. But it wasn’t enough to actually relocate and renovate the classroom, let alone bring back the springs to its natural state.

As a building permits deadline closed in, Stevens urged the task force to contact the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service. As a wetlands in an urban location, the site scores high on the agency’s priority list. If the Los Angeles Unified School District board votes in the weeks ahead to grant an easement, the conservation agency can then consider funding the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to break out the concrete and reshape the land to the springs’ natural flow, plant native species and move the classroom. Some $160,000 of the remaining state grant could be used to turn the classroom into an airy teaching space/museum and perhaps even construct a hut or two of tule reeds to show how the Tongvas lived before their relocation to the San Gabriel Mission.

There is also talk of using the water to irrigate the school grounds, which Stevens estimates would save the district at least $20,000 a year. “There are no claims on this water,” says the architect, shaking his head in disbelief. As someone who has worked on several other water-related restoration projects in the West, he knows its preciousness.

As does McGehee, who sees the springs and its ties to the Tongvas as emblematic of the beauty and diversity of her school, where 40 languages are spoken. “Where else have you got something like this?” she says, her eyes sweeping the site. “If you’ve got it, you’ve got to use it.”