Great cities tend to grow from great rivers. Paris has the Seine, London has the Thames, New York has the Hudson. Los Angeles, meanwhile, has a 51-mile long cement gutter, a linear dumping ground so bleak that it’s best known for providing a post-apocalyptic backdrop in Hollywood movies. In the land of film-lot fakery and pasteboard fantasies, it’s no surprise that the vein of blue that snakes its way across the map of LA, optimistically labelled with the word “river”, is nothing of the sort.
“Landscapes tell stories,” director Wim Wenders once said, “and the Los Angeles river tells a story of violence and danger.” The desolate concrete channel, which looks more like an abandoned freeway than a watercourse, has starred in everything from Grease and Terminator 2 to Transformers and The Italian Job, providing a relentless gulley for nail-biting chase scenes, a raw gauntlet of urban infrastructure at its most brutal. Remember a massive truck exploding in a gritty urban wasteland? That was probably filmed in the LA river. Lewis MacAdams, the 70-year-old poet and activist who founded Friends of the Los Angeles River (Folar) in 1985, once commissioned a montage of film scenes shot at the river. The result, he says, was “an unremitting catalogue of urban isolation and despair”.
But the sprawling city that’s capable of eternal reinvention on screen is now rewriting the script in real life. When you land at LAX airport, one of the first things you see is a billboard of the glowing mayor, Eric Garcetti, not sitting at his desk or posing with the Hollywood sign, but perched on a kayak surrounded by greenery – paddling down the LA river.
“Welcome to Los Angeles,” reads the poster, “where nature catches you by surprise.”
MacAdams and his river-loving chums were similarly caught by surprise this summer when it was announced that the kayaking mayor had invited the city’s premier designer of concert halls and feted international crumpler of titanium, Frank Gehry, to master-plan the entire length of the river. Not only that: he had been working on it in secret for almost a year.
The news, uncovered by the LA Times, came just two weeks after confirmation that $1.4bn of federal and city funding would be allotted to restore a central 11-mile stretch of the river, an achievement due in no small part to MacAdams and others’ decades of tireless grassroots campaigning. The Gehry announcement, hastily confirmed at a press conference at the end of August at which no actual detail about the project was disclosed, came as a bolt from the blue. It threatened to throw Folar’s carefully laid plans, developed with other local architects since 2007, entirely up in the air.
“No matter how they disguise it, Frank Gehry knows nothing about the LA river,” says MacAdams, when we meet in downtown Los Angeles, a few blocks from the gaping concrete gash that carves its way through the eastern edge of the city. “He’s never shown any interest in it. To us, this is the epitome of wrong-ended, top-down planning. Everything we’ve ever done with the river has been bottom-up, driven by the community that lives around it.”
MacAdams arrived in LA from Dallas in 1980 and was immediately transfixed by the dystopian spectre of the river, shocked by what had become a dried-out dumping ground in the middle of the city. “It was totally fucked up in every way you could imagine,” he says, in a gravelly Texan drawl. One night, armed with a pair of wire cutters, he and a couple of friends snipped a hole in the fence near the First Street Bridge, slipped beneath a sign that read “No Trespassing: $500 fine or 6 months in jail”, and ventured down the concrete slope to the flat-bottomed riverbed.
“We felt like we were exploring the moon,” he later wrote in the Whole Earth Review. “The air around us was an unholy din … The odour was industrial. The scene was a latter-day urban hell. We asked the river if we could speak for it in the human realm. We didn’t hear it say no, and that was how Friends of the Los Angeles river began.”
So started what he describes as a 40-year performance art work, aimed at raising awareness of the plight of the river. It was once the cradle of LA, the very reason that native tribes first settled here, but it was canalised by the US Army Corps of Engineers in the 1930s, in a spectacular piece of depression-era job creation, after a series of major floods had devastated the city. Since then it has operated as an efficient infrastructural machine with one central purpose: to whisk storm-water run-off out to sea as fast as possible. Most of the time, the downtown stretch stands dry, a gargantuan gutter containing a pitiful trickle.
“I thought all I had to do was convince people the river could be better,” says MacAdams. “But I realised the problem was no one even knew there was a river.”
Thirty years on, that’s still the biggest obstacle. When I tell Angelenos I have come from London to see their river, they look baffled, as if I’ve got the wrong city. “You want me to drop you off by that open sewer?” scoffs one Uber driver, as we rumble over the Sixth Street Bridge, looking down at the sunbaked concrete gulley where a dribble of water weaves its way between weeds and abandoned shopping trolleys. “Good luck.”
Under the railway tracks, below the bridge, I find my way down through a sloping tunnel, past a homeless couple camped out in the shelter of a storm drain, and out into the expansive concrete crevasse, feeling the same transgressive thrill MacAdams described. Except, three decades on since he cut his hole in the fence and declared the river open, I am by no means alone. There’s a camper-van of fashion models, here for a photoshoot, along with a gaggle of architecture students, surveying their site. A pick-up truck glides past, taking a shortcut uptown.
Further upriver at Frogtown – recently declared “LA’s hottest new neighbourhood” by LA Weekly, in no small part due to its proximity to the newly-appreciated gutter – the character of the river begins to transform. There are the same steep sloping banks, but the concrete never took hold on the soft-bottomed riverbed of the Glendale Narrows, so nature has duly taken its course. A dense canopy of trees and shrubs sprouts from the gully, as if the natural cycle has been accelerated several decades, aided by a good squirt of fertiliser. There’s even a couple of feet of water, the depth created by the increasingly choked channel, and a cycle path now stretches seven miles up to Griffith Park.
It is here in fast-gentrifying Frogtown that Folar opened the Frog Spot last summer, a community gathering space on the river’s edge, from where local artist Steve Appleton now runs kayaking tours – a legal activity since last year, when this two-mile stretch of the river was declared an official “recreation zone”.
“People might think it’s just a concrete dump, but the river is full of life,” he says, launching our kayaks out into the water, alarmingly close to some gurgling rapids. “We even spotted osprey here recently.”
As we paddle between willows, sycamores and great thickets of reeds, we glide past a group of herons sunning themselves on the concrete banks, while a school of egrets emerges from the bushes. A group of horse-riders trot along the riverbed, following the new equestrian trail to Griffith Park. It could be Vermont, if it wasn’t for the horizon of industrial sheds and electricity pylons glimpsed between the foliage. There are plenty of fish here, too: at last year’s fishing derby, someone caught a 6lb carp, and families barbecuing their catch are a regular sight here in the summer months. Perhaps they read the study which found that LA River fish are actually healthier and lower in mercury than those found in the ocean due to the clean water, which is mostly discharged from treatment plants upriver. The Narrows are crawling with watery mammals too, while the cycle lane hums with another kind of “mamil” – the middle-aged men in lycra, zooming downtown.
This bucolic scene of riverine leisure is a far cry from the days when MacAdams tried to call attention to the river by painting himself green and impersonating river animals, summoning the spirits of the hawk, rattlesnake and frog in front of bemused audiences. “I think most people thought what we were doing was just bad art,” he admits. The LA Times agreed: “With friends like Lewis MacAdams, the Los Angeles river doesn’t need any enemies,” was their damning verdict of his debut performance.
It was an uphill struggle. “When we started the annual river clean-up, I called for 10,000 people to come,” MacAdams recalls. “Only 10 turned up.” Support gradually grew, bolstered in the 90s when Folar became the rallying point for a wave of protest against plans to turn the river into a highway. These days, thousands of Angelenos regularly show up to join in the festival atmosphere of La Gran Limpieza every spring, including the mayor. “I sometimes worry that we’re getting the river too clean,” says MacAdams with a wry smile. “We’re running out of trash.”
The cleanliness of the river is the least of LA’s water worries. As a sunbaked desert of impermeable concrete and tarmac, the city is slowly being dried to death. This year, California imposed emergency state-wide water use reductions for the first time in history, after another heatwave punished the parched state in the fourth year of what is said to be the worst drought in a millennium.
“It’s a ticking time bomb,” says Ben Feldmann, principal at Mia Lehrer & Associates, the landscape architecture practice that has been working with Folar on plans for the river since 2007. “We haven’t had a Hurricane Sandy or Katrina, the kind of disaster that makes people sit up and take notice. Here it’s just a slow grind to a halt.”
The river, he says, can be mobilised as a crucial tool in the battle against the drought, used to retain water and recharge the aquifer. It might look like a just trickle, but the channel currently flushes a volume equivalent to the entire water needs of Long Beach (population 500,000) out into the ocean every day.
Lehrer’s team produced the Los Angeles River Revitalisation Masterplan for the city in 2007, a strategic framework for how the 32-mile stretch of the river within the city limits could be reborn as an “emerald necklace”, returning it to a “continuous riparian habitat corridor” by removing the concrete and naturalising the banks where possible.
Their images depict a fairytale vision of children playing by the water on swooping stepped terraces, abundant swaths of greenery draped over the concrete banks. There’s a whiff of New York’s High Line and it’s all a bit too cute, greenwashing over the gritty urban character of east LA. But the plan had teeth. The team worked with ecologists and fluvial geomorphologists, producing detailed sectional studies showing exactly how the river could be “stitched” to keep water in certain areas for longer, how inflatable dams could be deployed to pool water in particular locations, and how local schools and community facilities could be made to feel more connected to the water.
Much of Lehrer’s thinking has been adopted in the Army Corps’ current plan, known as Alternative 20, to improve the 11-mile stretch north of downtown, which was recently allotted the $1.4bn funding package, but the next steps remain uncertain. Renewed interest in the river has attracted inevitable speculative developers to flock to water’s edge, most recently in the form of the LA 2024 Olympic bidding machine, clearly seeing the benefit of adding a glowing blue ribbon to its dreamy renderings. The 125-acre riverside Piggyback Yard, the last active rail yard in LA, has been selected as the potential site for the athletes’ village. But it is a plan that shows little sensitivity to its context. Lehrer describes it as “completely disrespectful of the river”.
Her 2007 masterplan also recommended that a city-affiliated nonprofit agency be set up to manage the river, leading to the foundation of the LA River Revitalisation Corp – the very body which has now commissioned Gehry. So what does she make of the announcement?
“The idea that Frank would get involved and bring his creative energy is all fantastic,” she says. “But he’s not an urbanist. The river cuts through 15 cities, and 51 miles is hard to plan in one go. Nobody can own the character of that whole corridor.”
She is as wary as MacAdams, who concludes with a pointed reminder of the consequence of previous grand plans. “Last time anyone had a single solution for the whole river,” he sighs, “they dropped 300 million barrels of concrete into it.”
Across town in Playa Vista, home to west LA’s “Silicon Beach” of tech industries, a shimmering hangar stands next to a parking lot cluttered with mock-ups of puckered metal panels. Inside, I meet with Frank Gehry’s team to find out exactly what they’ve been up to since October last year. Will billowing glass sails and crumpled sheets of titanium soon be making an appearance on the riverbank?
“We don’t want to start making propositions for the river until we know exactly how it functions,” says Tensho Takemori – the partner leading the project with Anand Devarajan – sitting in a room wallpapered with maps and diagrams of the river’s winding 51-mile course.
They have begun, as with every Gehry project, by building a digital model, sending a truck equipped with a Lidar scanner (a laser measuring device) down as much of the river as it’s possible to drive down (around 70%), combining the point-cloud data with photography to make the beginnings of the first ever 3D model of the channel.
Much of the rest of their time, committed pro-bono until now, has been spent reading and synthesising what has already been done. “We have to educate ourselves,” says Takemori, pointing to an extensive spread of existing masterplans – produced by the Army Corp, the County of Los Angeles, the City of Los Angeles, the City of Long Beach, the LA Metro, the Department of Water and Power and the Department of Sanitation, among others. “There is a wealth of information and research out there, but none of it is co-ordinated in any holistic way to allow decisions to be made,” he adds. “That’s our job.”
They have begun to categorise the existing work using a series of evaluation criteria, from flood control and water recharge, to public health and transportation, which they have started to overlay on to a map to identify strategic overlaps.
“It’s about determining the priorities for each part of the river,” says Devarajan. “It allows you to know which resources to go after, which pots of money to go for, and it ultimately starts to give politicians a roadmap of what to do where on the river.”
They are extremely reluctant to give away any hint of what the renewed river might actually look or feel like. Will it have the cutesy soft touch of some of Lehrer’s plans, or celebrate the monolithic power of the concrete gully for what it is?
“We as an architecture practice can’t define what it should be,” says Takemori. “The river represents 100 acres running through the city, so the character will obviously vary. All of this concrete is part of our identity, but there are other stretches where it should feel more riparian. We want to open it up to all the stakeholders to have their say.”
They are developing an online platform to tell different river stories, where people can get involved and submit their own thoughts, and the River Corp seems genuine about its ambitions to open up the process – although the sentiment of transparency doesn’t quite chime with their secrecy until now. As for Folar, Gehry’s team says they have invited MacAdams to meet with them, but he has so far refused.
The 86-year-old Gehry himself was unavailable (he doesn’t much like talking to journalists), but in a recent New York Times interview, he was candid about others’ criticism of his involvement in the river.
“When you get the kind of blowback from those people that I know and who I thought were smarter than that, you begin to question their integrity,” he said. “Going forward, do I really want to work with those guys? I’m doing something that’s going to be good and trying to be inclusive, and they are trying to cut me up before I even get out of the gate. That’s not nice. I don’t want to create a fight with them, but they should grow up.”
It doesn’t sound much like the professedly collaborative, open-arms approach. With any luck, he won’t be too closely involved. Takemori and Devarajan, two of the younger partners in the firm, are clearly capable and have none of his prickliness.
But the question comes back to why the River Corp would choose a practice with no significant landscape experience and precious little interest in the river. And the answer is as simple as you might expect.
“It’s about what they can leverage,” says Maria Camacho, spokesperson for the River Corp. “Gehry Partners have the ability to bring everyone to the table and the ability to pull in amazing resources.” They have called in international guru of water management, Henk Ovink, who advised on Rebuild by Design, the $1bn post-Sandy initiative, as well as Olin landscape architects, Geosyntec engineers and the 3D technology of Trimble.
When Mayor Garcetti announced Gehry’s appointment, he declared him to be the “Olmsted of our time,” referring to godfather of landscape design, Frederick Law Olmsted, creator of New York City’s Central Park. He is nothing of the sort. As Gehry himself admitted: “I told them I’m not a landscape guy.”
What he might prove to be is the funding-friendly, catch-all solution to pulling the river’s statutory partners together to make something happen. If he can suppress his expensively eye-catching cliches and channel the spirit of his early work – when he was a rough-and-ready bricoleur of everyday LA, a magician of chain-link fencing and corrugated sheeting – he might well be the man for the job. Like the rest of this chaotic infrastructure-riven mess of a city, the LA river’s character as a seductive, abrasive edgeland must be celebrated for what it is.
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