Aerial view of Los Angeles
From left to right: Los Angeles River, the Rio
Hondo, and the San Gabriel River, with the 105 Freeway on the bottom
Photograph from Small Blue Planet Atlas Company
INTRODUCTION
A common perception is that the most shared urban experience of Los Angeles is its freeways. This truism seems confirmed by an aerial view of greater Los Angeles, as the basin and valleys are criss-crossed by a series of linear, concrete paths. Surprisingly, these are not the freeways but the rivers, arroyos, and washes of the region's flood control system. Although visually dominant from the air, the rivers are largely invisible and unseen to the everyday life of the city at the ground level, contained in concrete storm drains located in back alleys and behind industrial sites.
In the past fifteen years, a growing constituency of people have imagined a new future for the river. They have argued that the present condition of the Los Angeles River and its tributaries can be reversed, transforming from banal concrete ditches into a network of linear waterfront parks and public urban spaces. The riparian landscape of the existing river as it passes through the Sepulveda Dam Basin or the Glendale Narrows is the precedent cited for the first vision; the San Antonio Riverwalk is the model for the second.
Los Angeles River in the Glendale Narrows
Photograph by the Friends of the LA River
The San Antonio Riverwalk
Photograph from the Virtual San Antonio Paseo del Rio
However, achieving this imagined future will require a radical reconception of the river's status, as its present condition along much of its 52-mile long course seems to render the vision suggested by these precedents a utopian fantasy. Yet although the Los Angeles River does not currently have a significant presence in the city whose name it shares, an analysis of the river's historic and present hydrology will highlight ecological, geographic, and environmental issues of the entire region. These regional concerns have the potential to transcend the limitations of other urban design methodologies that emphasize architectural, social or political space. Although these methodologies are appropriate and necessary at their own scale, the sprawling suburbs, multiple political jurisdictions, and chaotic built landscape of the contemporary metropolis requires another scale of understanding. Issues raised by the "valley view" of the watershed can guide the design of specific, local architectural interventions in the city. Analyzing the Los Angeles River within these traditions might illuminate the significance of the river to a city that has forgotten it, stress the importance of reconsidering the river's function within the region, and lead to new design possibilities not yet imagined by those either responsible or interested in the river's future.
The hydrology of the Los Angeles River basin today, however, is drastically different from the riparian landscape of arroyos settled by the Spaniards in 1781. To understand both the problems and the future possibilities of the Los Angeles River, it is of course necessary to review the watershed's PAST.