Take a stroll, bring a picnic, down by the L.A. River

Down by the Los Angeles River, by Joe Linton, Wilderness Press, 2005, $17.95

Illustration by Joe Linton An illustration from Down by the Los Angeles River shows a willow tree in a soft-bottom portion.

The Los Angeles River's long-held position as punch line may be changing.

Flashy and prone to jump its banks after big rains, the river was entombed in concrete in the '40s by the Army Corps of Engineers. It was an unimaginative but economic and generally effective solution to the floods which destroyed property and lives.

Since then the river has been viewed as blight-a magnet for gangs and graffiti. Many Angelenos were not even aware that this 'storm drain' was actually a river. But in the mid-1980s activists began to advocate on its behalf, and their success could not be better measured than by the fact that the river now has its very own guidebook.

Down by the L.A. River, by Friends of the L.A. River's Joe Linton, is a lovingly illustrated and meticulously written guide to walks and bike rides along the river's banks. There are short essays on conservation efforts, history, and flora and fauna of the river, but primarily it is a practical guide, explaining to would-be adventurers important details such as where to park and where the bathrooms are.

Linton, both author and illustrator, subscribes to the strategy of FOLAR co-founder Lewis MacAdams who said that if you can get someone down to the river, they'll fall in love with it.

What is FOLAR's vision for the river?

A greenway from mountains to sea along the L.A. River. State Parks is doing two new large parks along the river, at the Cornfields and Taylor Yard. The county's doing some small parks, the city's doing some parks in the [San Fernando Valley]. There're new bike paths on the way right now. There're things here and there, and they don't all connect yet. It's a 51-mile greenway along the river, and even more along the tributaries.

Does that vision include removing the concrete?

Hopefully, yes. In '34 and '38 there were huge floods. There were [scores of] people killed and millions of dollars in damage, so the concrete serves a purpose of protecting us from floods. What we can see, though, is that there are areas where there's no concrete on the bottom, and then you get these willow trees and egrets and herons. There's still some reinforcement, but the river bottom is natural.

Historically the river wandered around. In the earliest written accounts the river emptied in Long Beach. In the 1810s it took a right turn downtown and emptied via Ballona Creek into the Santa Monica Bay. In the 1820s it went back to Long Beach. It got reinforced and hasn't wandered since. It's not possible to do full-on restoration, because we've got so many people here and so much development.

But looking at examples from other rivers like the Platte River in Denver, the Guadalupe River in San Jose, there are ways to do terracing of concrete. There are ways of maintaining the foliage that grows within the channel so we can have both really good flood protection, better than we have today, and we can have more natural functions and habitat, and a more welcoming place that people will enjoy coming to.

In the L.A. area, something like enough water for a million people runs off into ocean in a year. Would filtering water back into the ground be part of the restoration?

Yes. That's exactly the problem with water in L.A.-we get most of what we need, then we flush it all out, then we import it from faraway watersheds. Historically we had a lot more permeable space. We had farms throughout the San Fernando Valley up until the '50s, places where water used to soak into the ground. Now it hits concrete and runs off.

Today the city uses something around 10 to 15 percent of local water, which is sad. If we capture and soak more of that water, we're not having a tremendous energy cost to bring water to here, and we're not taking that water out of other ecosystems where it's needed.

If we just took out the concrete bottoms would that help refill the water table?

The trick is that groundwater is really a watershed thing, so if we're only looking at a river corridor we're not going to fix the whole problem. We need a lot of interventions throughout the watershed.

FOLAR has pushed for multipurpose projects. If we can pull up pavement and run surface flow through a natural area, we slow it down, we settle out some of those pollutants. Those go into the root systems and get digested biologically, breaking down contaminants. So not only do we get water quality benefit for that, but we get habitat and green space, and places for kids to play. We get a multi-benefit project out of it.

Is this going to happen? Is it a pipe dream?

Ten years ago it was like, we have a river? And today it's like, it's worth investing in, we do have a river.

FOLAR leads walks along the river on the third Sunday of each month. See https://folar.org.