Blake Gumprecht, The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth (Johns Hopkins University Press; $40)
Patt Morrison, Rio L.A.: Tales from the Los Angeles River (Angel City Press; $30)
David Manning, Riverbed (Ridgefield Press; $19.95)
Blake Gumprecht’s The Los Angeles River and Patt Morrison’s Rio L.A. are part of a long tradition in the literary history of Los Angeles, depicting the city as a sort of Paradise Lost, where greed and selfishness win out over charity and compassion, and where all has gone to hell in a handbasket. This tradition extends as far back as the city’s founding but acquired real definition in the latter half of the twentieth century with the work of Carey McWilliams, Kevin Starr, and, more pointedly, Mike Davis. Gumprecht and Morrison follow their illustrious predecessors, paying homage to them and expanding upon their work in new and interesting ways.
The basic version of the Los Angeles River/Paradise Lost myth common to both books goes something like this:
In the beginning, there was the river, and it flowed down from all the mountains, spreading out in swamps across the basin, giving water and life to all. Native Americans came to this place and gathered in villages near the river — but not too near, for they soon learned of the awesome power of the typically docile river during wet winters. The rain would begin falling and not stop; it would wash down the mountains in torrents and flood much of the plains. It could be relentless and unforgiving, but the native Gabrielino quickly learned its rhythms.
When the Spaniards arrived in the late eighteenth century, it took them a few seasons to understand and respect the river. Once they did, they corralled the Gabrielino into a corner of one of their former villages, and forced them to dig a series of zanjas or ditches to divert water to the Spaniards’ orchards and fields. Even after the Americans took over, Los Angeles relied on the abundance of the river to sustain itself. The fate of the young city became inextricably linked to its flow and was subject to its whim, shifting from drought to flood and back to drought without rhyme or reason. The Powers-That-Were demanded a more reliable water supply, and they got it through a man named William Mulholland.
Mulholland is said to have remarked that when he saw the river for the first time, his “whole scheme of life was woven.” Ironic, then, that Mulholland would commit, if not the original, then certainly the most fatal sin against the river: by initiating a program to transport water hundreds of miles, first from the Owens Valley and later from the Colorado River and the San Joaquin Valley, Mulholland rendered the Los Angeles River useless as the life source of the budding metropolis. In doing so, he robbed it of any symbolic value it may have had to the inhabitants of Los Angeles and paved the way for further humiliation in the coming decades.
Even before Mulholland, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a succession of real estate booms had pushed development across the Los Angeles basin; the river had retaliated with a succession of devastating floods that rallied public sentiment against it. It was the arrival of the automobile, however, that would cause the fundamental shift in the Angeleno perception of space. No longer a city made up of villages nestled between tributaries of a temperamental waterway, its future would be formed by a paved, plaid overlay of streets, boulevards, and highways designed specifically for car travel.
When it became clear that a massive restructuring of the city was required, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce vowed to do it right. They hired Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., the son of the mind behind New York’s Central Park, and urban designer Harlan Bartholomew to make a survey of and proposals for parks, playgrounds, and beaches, with special consideration for the automobile. The resulting Olmsted Bartholomew Plan, finished in 1930, outlined a system of linear parks wide enough to control the river in the worst flooding, yet lushly landscaped for recreation. Integral to this system were parkways — roads with wide, planted medians that moved traffic rapidly in an idyllic setting.
The vision was as compelling as it was complete, but it was ambitious — the estimated cost to implement the plan was said to have been over two hundred million dollars. The report seemed to vanish overnight. “How Eden Lost It’s Garden,” in Mike Davis’s recent book, The Ecology of Fear, summarizes the issue, suggesting that real estate developers were upset with the plan because it forfeited too much privately-held, developable land to the city; that the onset of the depression made any sizable allocation of public money suspect at best; and that Los Angeles Times-prompted dissension within the Chamber itself prevented agreement. Without a single strong, persuasive leader to promote the plan, it was doomed to obscurity.
Referring to the Olmsted Bartholomew Plan as a “window into a lost future,” Davis brings the plan back into public consciousness. It was republished recently in Eden by Design (Greg Hise and William Deverell, eds., Berkeley: UC Press, 2000) and achieved the status of a kind of talisman, a magical document that promised redemption for sins against the river but that, in its rejection, condemned Los Angeles to a darker fate. Within a decade of its publication, federally funded flood control channels were being built by the Army Corps of Engineers, pouring a concrete lid over the 51-mile long Los Angeles River from Canoga Park to Long Beach.
Gumprecht and Morrison both pick up the story at this point and attempt to divine a final chapter. Morrison uses clever graphics, an abundance of photographs, and florid prose to persuade the reader that deliverance is upon us. Describing several grassroots efforts aimed at making the river more natural, she ends with a plea to “parole” the river from its concrete prison, to return it to a natural state, presumably along its entire length. I appreciate her enthusiasm for the project and her inventiveness in articulating a plausible scenario. She stops short, however, of a vision of true redemption, for, if the fall occurred when the city decided that the river could no longer quench the thirst of unbridled growth, wouldn’t salvation require a complete repudiation of the aqueduct system of Mulholland and his followers? The concrete straightjacket restraining the Los Angeles River would have to be removed, certainly. But, in a Paradise Regained, wouldn’t all development within the broad, ancient floodplain have to be sacrificed as well?
Blake Gumprecht is more measured. He piles fact upon dry, academic fact in a sober, yet nonetheless fascinating, way. Where Morrison appeals to one’s emotions, Gumprecht makes a pragmatic argument. In offering no easy answers, he suggests that the river is acceptable just as it is, with no resolution, no redemption — and no happy ending. Unlike Mike Davis, who sees conspiracy in his morning cup of coffee, Gumprecht confronts the cold, hard fact that it was not the clandestine machinations of an evil power structure that ruined the Los Angeles River incrementally over decades; rather, it was the utter indifference of an entire populous that let its paradise slide, bit by bit, into the inferno that now defines it.
David Manning’s new book, Riverbed, is a revealing counterpoint to these two books. In his latest noir tale set in a parallel-universe Los Angeles, the former LAPD detective follows the case of missing anthropologist Evangeline Rice, whose body is discovered after an El Niño storm deposits it in a remote stand of sycamores in a fictitious Riverside Park.
The story is mundane cops-and-robbers fare, but it comes to life in its descriptions of the settings, all of which magically occur along the length of the Los Angeles River and its tributaries. Manning invents a credible version of what the city would be like if it had been designed with today’s awareness of watersheds and ecosystems, with an effective master plan firmly in place. He imagines his victim as an important force in a progressive Arroyo Seco/Occidental University culture thriving along the banks of that ill-fated river. He summons from extinction a society of dire wolves — whose curious carcasses so densely populate the La Brea Tar Pits — living within the marshy woodlands of the Las Cienegas Park (in our universe, Beverly Hills). He envisions schools of trout making their way up the river from the Ballona Slough to spawn in Tujunga. And he suggests that in such a world one could take a raft and float down the entire length of the river, never once encountering even a hint of civilization, save the occasional bridge.
So striking are his descriptions that they totally overwhelm the story, the plot of which now escapes me. In fact, this particular novel was instrumental in curing a bout of insomnia that had afflicted me since I began researching the Los Angeles River. I found it somehow fitting that such a depiction of paradise left this reader uninterested, indifferent, and ultimately bored. Because, in the end, how engaging would such a Los Angeles River be without the pathos that its tragic history arouses?
We tell stories to naturalize the horrible. We use them to reconcile our bad behavior with the image of goodness we have of ourselves in our minds. For the native Angeleno, it is customary — no, essential — to engage in a little therapeutic myth-making from time to time; how else could we live with what we’ve done to our river, to each other, and ultimately to ourselves? Thanks to Blake Gumprecht and Patt Morrison, perhaps now we can acknowledge our sins, forgive one another, and move toward a more realistic redemption.
Author Tom Marble, AIA, is a partner with WhiteMarble, a multidisciplinary design firm in Los Angeles.
Originally published 4th quarter 2001, in arcCA 01.4, “H2O CA.” Photo illustration by Marc Phu.
