Stephen Callis
***

***

As Water Stories Go...

***
Rio de Porciuncula
***

***
After traveling about a league and a half through a pass between low hills, we entered a very spacious valley, well grown with cottonwoods and alders, among which ran a beautiful river... Toward the north-northeast there is another river bed which forms a spacious water-course, but we found it dry. This bed unites with that of the river, giving a clear indication of great floods in the rainy season, for we saw that it had many trunks of trees on the banks. We halted not very far from the river, which we named Porciuncula.

-Fray Juan Crespi, diarist of the Portol· expedition of 1769, describing the Spanish discovery of the L.A. River.
***

***
***

***
Terminus
***

***
How can the L.A. River be read? What can be made of the concrete canyon that runs through Los Angeles? To read the river, to understand why it looks the way it does, requires more than just looking at it.

If nothing else, the history of Los Angeles is a study in economic growth. Water was brought here to ensure continued growth, first to make a semi-desert into productive farmland, then for a growing city. Whereas the importation of water has been a necessary ingredient in this growth process, the control of flood waters has seldom been looked at as a significant factor. In fact, flood control has been vital to protecting already developed property and allowing the real estate industry to flourish. Like many infrastructural improvements, flood control is too big a job to be left to private enterprise. After all, public safety is at stake. In 1914, after severe flooding and just one year after the city had secured an outside water supply (the L.A. River had been the city's primary source of water until the L.A. aqueduct was completed in 1913), the County passed its first flood control act. In the 30's the federal government, through the Army Corps of Engineers, helped ensure that the relationship between flood control and private real estate flourished, in effect amounting to an incentive and subsidy for tremendous growth.

As Water Stories Go, the story of the L.A. River is a pretty dry one. At least most of the time. However, like most rivers, the L.A. River is prone to occasional flooding. Unlike most, the L.A. River at peak flood can carry as much as a thousand times more water than normally flows during the dry season. In addition, the elevation drop of the L.A. River from headwaters to mouth is roughly equal to that of the entire length of the Mississippi. Consequently, the design of the river is a response to these demands, albeit within the narrow confines of the economics/politics of land development in Los Angeles. As any hydraulic engineer can tell you, the irony of flood control is that it allows more development. More development means worse floods because paved land doesn't absorb water as well as unpaved, vegetated land will. The L.A. River was designed in 1939 and built through the 40's when much of the watershed was still primarily agricultural. It was designed to handle a 100 year flood. Now, in some areas, it can barely handle a twenty-five year event. This relationship between flood control and land use has had, and continues to have a profound effect on how the city and river coexist.
***

***
***

***
Spring Street Bridge
***

***
Gulls in Vernon
***

***
Elysian Valley
***

***
Mouth
***

***
If the landscape can be viewed as a reflection of the economic model on which our society has based itself, then what the L.A. River looks like is as much a result of the priorities of growth and real estate over habitat as it is a result of functionalist design. It would be interesting to imagine what the city and the river might have looked like had our priorities been reversed. In fact, two well respected urban designers, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and Harlan Bartholomew had imagined just that. In their 1930 report to city and county officials, they proposed transforming flood channels into a 440 mile network of parks. This was just one of many lost opportunities, killed primarily by real estate interests afraid of an excess of public land not accessible for commercial exploitation. Ironically, Los Angeles, having sold itself on the beauty of its physical attributes, has done little to preserve them. In the 225 years between the Portol· expedition and the present lies a history of the river, not exactly a road paved with gold, but a river paved with concrete.

"It's an ugly system, but it works". -Jon Sweeten -Army Corps of Engineers, 1990.
***

***
RECREATION ALONG THE RIVER

POLITICS OF AUSTERITY

DEBRIS BASINS

STORM DRAIN #59

DONALD C. TILLMAN WATER RECLAMATION PLANT
***

***

***