By the time the sun is directly overhead a stream of sweaty volunteers has begun the trek back to their cars after a long morning of hauling trash out of the LA River. Three-foot-tall piles of trash bags flank the walkway alongside the riverbed, standing as a testament to their efforts. The stretch of the LA River that slices through Rancho Dominguez looks like any other, a cement trench with wide, sloping sides, running as far as the eye can see in both directions. But the vivid green of the grass covering the bottom and reaching halfway up the rough walls of the riverbank is a stark contrast to otherwise industrial surroundings. From the nearby platform of the Metro Del Amo Station it almost looks like a park.
The group of volunteers leaving the clean-up are just a few of the 6,000 Angelenos that joined Friends of the LA River’s (FoLAR’s) 29th annual Great LA River Cleanup, the largest urban river cleanup in America. In April of 2018 FoLAR planned cleanups at nine different sites and extended over the course of three weekends. One of the organizers, Rey Bravo, stood by, chatting with volunteers under the shade of a pop-up. He and his supervisor spent about three months putting the events together, and he relished seeing all their planning in action. “Most of it is permits and paperwork and bureaucracy, but at the end of it you get to see people kind of involved in the river in a real way, and you can build something.”
One thing Bravo is interested in building is awareness; FoLAR’s stated goal is to change the public conversation about the river. Bravo explains how assessing the impact of the cleanup isn’t as easy as measuring the amount of trash collected (120,000 lbs in 2018). “Obviously a river clean-up can only do so much to really impact the river’s ecology, but what it does is it connects people to the river as a tangible thing that they’re touching, and that keeps it in mind when there’s money on ballots for public spaces.” Another volunteer, Armando Reyes, echoed Bravo’s sentiment about the unaccounted-for benefits of the clean-up. “It’s a lot of fun to see people come out and build community.”
Bravo’s involvement in FoLAR is a testament to the impact this kind of tangible contact can have. In the summer of 2017 he had started working in their outreach center in Elysian Park, known as The Frog Spot. “I worked the weekend mornings there, and it’s kind of hard not to fall in love with the river as you see the sun come up and fall on it every weekend for a summer.” When the job ended, he found another job within the organization.
Bravo admits that his feelings about the 51-mile-long concrete ravine that runs through the heart of LA are not widely shared: “People kind of associate it with a flood channel, more than what it actually is.” But FoLAR, along with a multitude of engineers, artists, activists and city employees, are trying to change that. In the 29 years that FoLAR has been advocating for the river, they’ve seen some striking transformations, both in the river’s infrastructure itself, and in the public’s awareness of it.
FoLAR co-founder and long-time Board Chair, Lewis MacAdams, began the project of re-imagining what the cemented-in river could be in 1985. He stepped down from his leadership position in the organization in 2016 but his legacy can be seen in recent improvements like the installation of bike paths, parks and public art along some sections of the river. For many, a bike path may not seem like a revolutionary concept, but the magnitude of the paradigm shift it represents can be obscured by a lack of context. “Initially the idea was crazy to people,” Bravo recalls. “There was chain fence along the river because it was only seen as a flood channel. So, to call it [moderate] now, just speaks to the progress that’s been made.”
Plans to revive the river have been meandering through city, county and state bureaucracy since 1996, when the first LA County River Master Plan was approved by the County Board of Supervisors. In the ensuing years numerous governmental and community stakeholders in the 17 cities through which the river winds produced an estimated 144 overlapping plans. This April saw the first of a dozen meetings of the LA County River Master Plan Steering Committee, assembled by the Board of Commissioners, who will synthesize developments in technology, policy, and social awareness of the river to update the 22-year-old master plan. The Committee is hoping to produce a comprehensive guide that can incorporate existing research about ecology and infrastructure, and connect to surrounding neighborhoods to identify project opportunities and possible routes for implementation.
Though there’s no official number yet, the count on potential projects in the newest plan could run into the hundreds. As a comparison, the 2007 LA River Revitalization Master Plan, the city’s equivalent to the Master Plan, proposes 240 projects along the 32-mile portion of the river that runs through LA city proper. Those proposals will require an estimated $980 million contribution from the city, and range from currently underway to 20 years out. Key projects in development right now include several large-scale parks in Downtown LA, Downey, and Northeast LA and 12.5 miles of riverside bike paths and greenway in the San Fernando Valley. In addition, several stretches of the river throughout the city have been restored to a natural state and are now accessible to the public for recreational activities like fishing and kayaking.
Spaces like the Rancho Dominguez stretch of the river represent the earliest stages of the revitalization that is well on its way further north. Though efforts to restore some of the river to its original, life-sustaining habitat have been successful, much of that development hasn’t yet extended to the surrounding neighborhoods. Still, Bravo sees the potential for the changes in the river to bring together a city that can feel divided. “It’s a unique connective tissue between Los Angeles, in a place that doesn’t have a lot of that, doesn’t have a lot of centrality to it. It’s urban sprawl, but this river, it goes all the way to Long Beach, it goes all the way to Van Nuys, [and] that’s a pretty rare thing.”
Evelyn C. McLean 