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Finding home: the Los Angeles River

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Finding home: the Los Angeles River

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Content Finding Home: The Los Angeles River Katie Antonsson A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the USC Graduate School University of Southern California In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts Specialized Journalism: The Arts May 2016 Copyright 2016 Katie Antonsson Antonsson | ii Abstract This story began as a personal exploration, an attempt to reconcile myself with a home I returned to after four years away and found utterly foreign. I was merely curious about the Los Angeles River and wanted to know more—where it came from, what it does, who cares about it, and what it feels like to stand next to it. Or inside it. As the weeks and conversations unfolded, endless stories presented themselves to me, some highly publicized, some unknown. I was drawn to the unknown, but curious about how the highly publicized was affecting the unknown. I am interested in the way an abandoned feature of the city is being reclaimed. I am interested in the way that something that is fundamental to our city’s history was so summarily dismissed seventy-five years ago and has only been re-acknowledged in the past thirty years. I am interested in what people are doing around the river and why. I am interested in the story that is not getting told. Nobody is talking about the people who live next to the river and just go for a walk now and then. Nobody is talking about what it is like to stand in the river. Nobody is talking about why we should care. I have taken the train over the river every day since moving back to Los Angeles. Sometimes it excites me, and sometimes I dread the mere thought of having to see it. It’s like a temperamental friend, but like one of my interviewees said, in many ways the river is a canvas for those who don’t have a voice (Hanson 2015). You can project your own psyche onto the river and make it your own. Nobody experiences the river the same way and nobody comes to have the river in their life in the same way. I know my story is unusual, how the river came to have such importance in my life. This is that story. Antonsson | iii Table of Contents Abstract Introduction Chapter One: The Past in Plain Sight Chapter Two: The Future within Reach Chapter Three: Finding Home Conclusion References Appendix A: The Website Appendix B: Transcripts ii 1 4 9 14 19 21 23 27 Antonsson | 1 Introduction It seems strange that fifty-one miles can disappear. They didn’t disappear overnight, though. Fifty-one miles disappeared over seventy-five years, slathered with concrete, bisected by freeways, roped off by barbed wire, and plastered with Do Not Enter signs. These fifty-one miles belong to the Los Angeles River, and though the river has slowly re-entered the consciousness and conversation of Los Angeles in the past thirty years, its disappearance under concrete, freeways, wires, and signs has much to do with the way in which it is re-entering the conversation. Because of its general unsightliness and inaccessibility, the river has not been taken seriously as an integral feature of Los Angeles life. It’s a feature that is passed over every day on the freeway, and rarely explored. Sean Woods, superintendent for California State Parks in Los Angeles, shared the sentiment: “When [the river] stopped being the primary water source for the city in 1913, it lost its significance in terms of its importance to the city, so as the city began to turn its back on the river, it was used as a dumping ground. It was channelized in the ‘30s, that even further cemented its fate as this storm drain channel, and people forgot of it as a river altogether” (Woods 2015). However, in recent years, nonprofits and city organizations have taken an interest in the river, dedicating themselves to a revitalization, of sorts, that would re-introduce the city to the river and show how fifty-one miles can be transformed into a public platform for daily life and experience. Friends of the Los Angeles River (FoLAR) has been involved in shifting public perception of the river since the 1980s and the city developed a vested interest in the river in 2007 with the introduction of the Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan. Within the past Antonsson | 2 year, Frank Gehry’s name has entered the conversation and the Sixth Street Bridge has been demolished for safety reasons. With all of these factors combined, the conversation surrounding the river has reached higher stakes: there are more players, more ideas, and more aspirations than ever before. Even Angelenos who have no interest in the river listen up at the sound of Frank Gehry’s name. They take notice as the historic Sixth Street Bridge comes down. They stop and stare as El Niño brings the river back to turbulent life. Though conversation surrounding the river took almost forty-five years to truly begin, its whisper-like initiation has blossomed into a citywide conversation. How did we let something so massive slip away from us? Something so fundamental to the founding of our city? Why did it take so long for us to peek over the freeway overpass and take an interest? And what has hooked the interest of so many over the past thirty years? The river is almost unknowable, largely because of its inaccessibility—that, in many ways, only augments its allure—but even when we break past the fences and train tracks, there’s a greater sense of mystery shifting along the concrete banks, an intangible sense of history and of future tied up in fifty-one miles. The attraction to the Los Angeles River, for some, is about figuring it out. At the least, that’s my attraction. The river has been an object of fascination in my life for as long as I can remember. Driving to baseball games as a kid, I would always try to look over the freeway railing to see the river. I would get glimpses, like a film projector before the frames start moving at the proper speed, and it never seemed enough. Driving over it on Fletcher Drive, I’d get something akin to goose bumps and not know why. Driving to the zoo, my eyes would go wide and the full three seconds of exposure the river got from the 5 freeway. But it was always in driving, always in car that I could catch glimpses and senses of it. It was never enough. Antonsson | 3 I sought understanding, and all I found was more questions, more voices, more stories, more glimpses of a mile or two that never added up to a full fifty-one–mile vision. But perhaps that’s the point: the river isn’t composed of one story—it’s composed of thousands. Antonsson | 4 Chapter One: The Past in Plain Sight The mystique of Los Angeles, practically since its founding, has much to do with its status as the final frontier of America. Once you’ve traveled all the way from New England to Los Angeles, you’ve run out of country. A place so heralded, so idealized, could hardly have a foundation for history with so many visions reaching to define it. The city is still this way today, filling with countless newcomers every year who don’t understand the region’s history. Los Angeles, therefore, is re-imagined and re-born every few decades under the weight of so many new ideas and new voices. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it does leave historical consciousness somewhat lacking—what some would call historical amnesia—which in turn makes Los Angeles an ephemeral city, of sorts, existing in the moment and not a moment sooner. The Los Angeles River has a complicated history, one that is difficult to understand in times of drought and only slightly more plausible during storms. In its most cursory sense, the history of the river is one of the survival and welfare of Los Angeles. The river would overflow and flood, destroying housing along the banks and wiping out entire communities. It was paved over in the 1930s as a stopgap, to create the “flood control channel” that is the river we know today. That’s the cursory story. I was seeking something a little deeper, something that would really link the river’s past to the city’s misunderstanding of its present. I contacted the Los Angeles City Historical Society in October, asking for voices to hear and brains to pick. Within minutes, they directed me to Professor Abe Hoffman, a professor of California history at Los Angeles Valley College. It seems almost too convenient that the start of my search for understanding would begin at the river’s headwaters: the San Fernando Valley. But there I was in Hoffman’s cramped office, squeezed in among the books and loose papers. Antonsson | 5 Hoffman regaled me with stories of his neighborhood, car dealerships that used to be bursting with life but are now vacant, natural spreads that were paved over for a burgeoning suburbia, and a particular diversion of the Los Angeles River known as the Zanja Madre—now lost, apart from one plaque on Olvera Street and one untouched but crumbling segment in the Cornfields, a state park north of Chinatown. “This city’s notorious for [erasing its own history],” Hoffman sighed, “and the one reason why is that there are so many new people coming and they don’t know what was there before— they don’t know the city. They have a very superficial understanding of it. The disrespect for the river comes from [that] lack of historical consciousness. And it has to be worked out. Maybe over generations” (Hoffman 2015). Los Angeles was founded because of the river. When the Spanish entered what is now California territory in order to build sites from their mission work, Father Juan Crespi first recorded encounters with Los Angeles and the river in 1769—then called the Rio de Porciúncula—before the original Los Angeles pueblo was established. By 1781 El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora de Los Angeles was established on the river’s bank (City of Los Angeles 2016). Nearly a hundred years later, when the Southern Pacific railroad reached Los Angeles, its tracks were laid alongside the river, where they remain today. The city’s population leapt from 11,000 in 1880 to over 50,000 in 1890, largely due to cheap train fare west (and to the aforementioned mystique of the final frontier of America) (Given Place Media 2016). Settlements encroached on the river’s banks, only to fall victim to the wild, unpredictable flows and floods (Hoffman 2015). “To show how dangerous the Los Angeles River can be,” Hoffman said, “there was a deputy sheriff at that particular time named Martin Aguirre. In this flood, that was caused by the Los Angeles River overflowing its banks and going down toward the ocean very quickly and Antonsson | 6 destroying bridges along the way, people were caught out in the river and he waded out on his horse and he rescued about twenty people, pulling them out. And he was a hero” (Hoffman 2015). Given the river’s rather unassuming trickle today, leaving much of the concrete exposed and bleaching in the sun, its history of flooding is difficult to envision. To grasp a better sense of the river’s torrid past, I spoke with members of FoLAR, the oldest and most established Los Angeles River nonprofit. Willy Arroyo is one of the nature guides at the Frog Spot, FoLAR’s summer community center in Frogtown, a neighborhood in Elysian Valley that you’d never find unless you were looking for it. Arroyo led me to a patch of dry land in the middle of the water in a section of the river known as the Glendale Narrows, a stretch of greenway that runs from Griffith Park to Elysian Park. The natural islands in the river are a strange mash-up of non-native and invasive bamboo, sticky mud and caked-over trash, and the occasional bird or frog. It’s not exactly an inviting space, but it’s astonishing that it exists at all. “The reason why it caused so much flooding is because this was a seasonal river,” Arroyo said while we watched the water swiftly run past, “which means it would only flow when it was the rainy season. So a lot of people weren’t prepared for it. Half of the year there would be no water, so a lot of people would put their houses where the river passes. And because it was a seasonal river, it had a direction, it just didn’t have a path. So it would go everywhere and [towns] would get flooded and people would die” (Arroyo 2015). We rarely see the river flowing at this strength anymore, but that’s for two reasons: frequent drought conditions in the southland and the river’s successful channelization in the 1930s (however you want to define “success,” because the river’s main purpose is in moving water from point A to point B, and it does so quite well). All the same, it still has an echo of its Antonsson | 7 former strength during rainstorms; Arroyo pointed toward several plastic bags ten feet up in the greenery. He told me that because of a recent storm, the river ran high enough for trash to get caught in treetops. “The Army Corps of Engineers tried to figure out the fastest and cheapest way to fix it,” he said, gesturing toward the concrete bank on the other side, “because it was right in the middle of the Great Depression. There wasn’t a lot of money to go around. So they figured just channelize the river, add cement and that will solve all problems. But they didn’t realize that in the future that was going to cause the natural resources that were in the river to die off” (Arroyo 2015). According to Hoffman, it took around twenty years for the Army Corps to set the concrete along the fifty-one miles. The river, erratic and fickle, was tamed: a flood control project rather than a beast of nature. The river that was fabricated in the 1930s has remained largely unchanged, apart from the Glendale Narrows. The stretch of the river visible from the 5 Freeway near Griffith Park and Atwater Village is dense and green, unlike the miles of concrete that make up the river’s downtown stretches. In fact, when the river was paved over, the water itself was buried under the concrete, where it still runs unseen today. In the Glendale Narrows, however, the water broke through before the concrete could set and, over decades, the natural resources grew back and the wildlife returned to this seven-mile portion. Apart from the unexpected beauty of finding something so lush in the middle of an urban environment, the Glendale Narrows allows us to see what the river was like before it was paved. It’s seven miles of living history. Because inviting portions like the Glendale Narrows and nearly bone dry segments in downtown don’t seem dangerous, Angelenos fail to understand why miles and miles of fence so heavily guard the river. And because the river is so infrequently dangerous, it only makes sense Antonsson | 8 that the city would want to reclaim it as a public resource. It’s still dangerous in times of storm, but there’s so much unused space and time when the river is safe for public access that could be fruitfully utilized for public good. After all, the river is the not-so-proverbial cradle of Los Angeles civilization; it’s only natural that the city would want to remember its roots and perform some amount of reinvention and reimagination to bring the river back to a critical part of public consciousness. And a critical part of Los Angeles identity. Antonsson | 9 Chapter Two: The Future within Reach The Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan is an impressive document. An exhaustive 284-page collection of proposals, possible funders, problems, maps and mock-ups from the City of Los Angeles, its adoption in 2007 generated the significant forces behind the plan for the river’s future today. The Los Angeles River Revitalization Corporation emerged as one of its most impressive institutional tributaries, engineered specifically to ensure that the river, and any future citywide projects involving the river, would tangibly benefit the city. That any plan, no matter the size, would have a positive impact in both how the public perceives the river and how the river fits into Los Angeles. As to why now: Los Angeles is a city of limited public space, one that famously has no center. There is no Central Park equivalent, and the well-known maxim that Los Angeles is seventy-two suburbs in search of a city holds true. Citywide efforts have attempted to ameliorate this decentralization in recent years, from downtown’s revival to fabricated urban centers like The Grove to the expansion of public transportation rail lines. None of these efforts have fully stuck, and centralization of a city that spans over 500 square miles requires something drastic. Something big. The Los Angeles River is fifty-one miles long, intersecting fifteen different cities in its route from Canoga Park to Long Beach Harbor, running straight through Los Angeles’ dense urban core. If that doesn’t sound like an opportunity for major centralization and reconnection, it’s hard to say what does. Given the seventy-five years since the river was first paved over, revitalization of the fifty-one miles is hardly a new idea, but any plan has been nearly impossible to execute because Antonsson | 10 of the river’s principal purpose as a flood control channel. It would seem that things are coalescing at the moment, however, to make revitalization not just a possibility but an imperative: growing public interest in the river and a subsequent desire to make it an asset to the city rather than an eyesore, as well as the technology and engineering know-how to do it safely. For over a year, the Los Angeles River Revitalization Corporation has been in conversation with celebrated architect Frank Gehry and his firm Gehry Partners to conduct the necessary research to enact the Master Plan, but also to exchange ideas and questions. Mostly to build a true vision for the future of the Los Angeles River, one that considers all angles, including how the river itself coexists with the city. Gehry, a noted Los Angeles resident, had already expressed an interest in the river, primarily its hydrology aspects, imagining how the river could alleviate California’s recent drought. The Los Angeles River Revitalization brought Gehry Partners into the conversation to problem-solve and propose what the river needs moving forward, holistically. Their findings are part of the beginning stages of a major shift in how the Los Angeles River could fit into city life. “Those conversations with Frank [Gehry] were informal,” said Eli Kaufman, communications director for the Los Angeles River Revitalization Corporation. I met Kaufman at the Los Angeles River Center and Gardens in late October. The River Center is home to a handful of river-oriented organizations, FoLAR and the Los Angeles River Revitalization Corporation among them, in Cypress Park. The Los Angeles River Revitalization Corporation has since moved to the Arts District downtown, three blocks away from the river. “There was no scope of work, there was no contract. We thought, here’s a great thinker, a great designer, a great architect who gets huge projects done. He is capable of looking at the same material that Antonsson | 11 everybody else is with the same opportunity or challenge that everybody else is and reimagining what’s possible” (Kaufman 2015). The Los Angeles River Revitalization Corporation seized upon Gehry’s interest in the river as an opportunity. “Because of who he is,” Kaufman said, “he’s able to bring in these top- notch folks that become part of our thinking team. He helped us map the river with a 3D point cloud map that was produced by Trimble [Navigation, Ltd.] All the hard-bottomed sections have been mapped—and that’s never been done before. “[Gehry is] approaching it like a student would,” continued Kaufman. “Asking what is it? What can it do? What do we care about? How do we measure that?” (Kaufman 2015). Kaufman further explained Gehry’s approach, “He asked things like, a river like Los Angeles’, especially in a region where we’re so arid, does it have to have water to be a river? Does it still function as a river-ly entity without water? And that’s a great question because…if you go to any natural river in this region, they’re bone dry” (Kaufman 2015). The Los Angeles River is bone dry the majority of the year, or is at least at non- threatening levels for 99% of the time, according to Gehry Partners. But that fractional 1%, that tiny impediment that grows too large to be overlooked come rainy season, is the reason why the city and the river have never had a peaceful and prosperous coexistence. Gehry Partners terms this 1% as “design flow,” or the singular purpose of the river as a flood control channel. Gehry Partners noted in their initial report for the Los Angeles River Revitalization Corporation: “Design flow is the maximum capacity of water for which the river was designed. This condition occurs less than 1% of the time and had predominantly defined what can and cannot be done with the channel itself. While design flow cannot be reduced, perhaps there is a middle ground that can be explored” (Gehry Partners 2015). Antonsson | 12 How do we define this middle ground? If the river is not a major public threat 99% of the time, but the 1% is too vital to be ignored, what then defines true middle ground? “The Army Corps of Engineers thinks about life safety in the river channel,” said Anand Devarajan of Gehry Partners in a separate conversation by phone in November 2015. “There are no levels of grey in the threat assessment. Now, they’re starting to look at it through this hybrid lens of understanding that the river may have to have a different role than just being safe or not based upon it raining or not” (Devarajan 2015). There is potential, in other words, for the river to serve a multiplicity of purposes, far beyond being a flood control channel. Exploring these options could open the gate to a more accessible river, but not without difficulty. Tensho Takemori of Gehry Partners chimed in on the same phone conversation, “You have to be willing to understand that the public’s relationship with the river is going to take time to change, and there’s going to be incremental steps between no access and all access” (Takemori 2015). With any luck, the effects of El Niño could help with that leap from no access to all access. Devarajan added, “You’re going to start to see something interesting happen with people in Los Angeles in how they think about the river, and that’s because it’s actually going to be full for the first time in their lifetime” (Devarajan 2015). Opening up the Los Angeles River as a public resource requires an effort from two sides: the larger scientific side of the river (from ecology to hydrology) and the more disparate grassroots side. It requires an openness and willingness to learn on the part of the public, a desire to get involved, to get your feet wet. The two sides, the two voices, however, need to be heard in conjunction with each other, and need to speak together. “Our goal is not to impose a vision on anybody else,” Devarajan said. “It can’t be designers or architects or landscape architects or planners deciding, hey, this is what’s good for Antonsson | 13 this community. You need to reach out to those community members and ask them what they need. “The river is part of an LA psyche,” Devarajan concluded. “Now, I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to change that, but I think we should be cognizant of—when we change it, do we want to change it? Are we trying to beautify the city just to beautify it? Or do we want to keep some semblance of our history and who we are in it? That’s a difficult, nuanced thing to figure out. As a designer, I think it’s possible to resolve those two contradictions” (Devarajan 2015). Just as Devarajan says, concern for the Los Angeles River is a citywide effort. It goes beyond policymakers and beyond river organizations. It requires the interest and effort of a larger community, one that is invested in understanding the river. Understanding, with any luck, leads to appreciation, and appreciation leads to a will to have a say in what happens next. Antonsson | 14 Chapter Three: Finding Home Scaling down the steep concrete bank, the dank, funky smell of the decaying plants, the verdant mud, and the saturated trash overwhelms even from a distance. It’s like moss and fungus at once, ripe and overbearing, but surprisingly inoffensive. It makes sense. It’s part of the experience, part of this environment, that such an engulfing smell could seem so normal. The water rises to lick the bank, leaving behind strange rings of mustard yellow, olive green, pale brown. Your shoes get wet when you try to leap to the mud bank across the two feet of water. You undershoot and scramble up to be among the strange, warped trees and bushes webbed with refuse. It is, first and foremost, quiet. At least, the banter and chatter of the city seem remote. The water gurgles and sloshes past, slipping between smoothed rocks and patches of dense mud, held together by tree roots. The freeway—whether the 5, the 2, the 134—fills the background with a hollow white noise. A crane pokes his beak up out of the water and looks at you, flying away to the highest branch with just the slightest whoosh of his wings. Sandpipers skitter along the shallow water on the other concrete bank. Your feet sink deeper into the porous mud, but you find you don’t mind. It is, secondly, one of the few times in a city of four million that you will ever find yourself completely alone. Even with the freeway at your back and a bike trail at your front, nobody will see you, nobody will hear you, nobody will know you are there. It is miles of the starkest privacy. It is something akin to urban peace in the middle of a metropolitan center. In sections farther south from the Glendale Narrows, concrete-covered sections closer to downtown, the sheer scale of the surrounding concrete elicits an unexpected reverence for the scope. The basin is massive, and you are not. The basin is quiet and calm, just a trickle of water Antonsson | 15 alongside you. The basin extends south, far beyond what you are willing or able to walk. You climb the steep bank back to the fence, turning around at the top to examine the enormity of it all. The sun is low in the sky when I pull up to the gate at the Bowtie Project in late October. The Bowtie is something of an innocuous space, one you’d almost never find without directions, which seems to be the prevailing theme of the Los Angeles River. It would explain that sensation of ultimate isolation in the basin of the river; every access point feels like a secret. These aren’t places you stumble upon, they’re places you find. The Bowtie is California State Park land, co-managed by the arts nonprofit Clockshop, so the space is a heavy mix of faded California history and contemporary artistic ambition. The train tracks from the former Taylor Yard are overrun with weeds and the concrete expanse along the river is decorated by a mural and a Michael Parker sculpture—“The Unfinished.” It is the evening of the fourth highly anticipated Los Angeles River Campout, organized by California State Parks and Clockshop. One hundred and seventy campers roll up in various city cars and walk in on foot, tents and camp chairs and coolers of beer in tow. They set up in the later afternoon sun and laze about, greeting their nighttime neighbors and looking out at the foliage in the river. The air is still, the mood content, and the campers wave at the passengers on the Metrolink as the trains go rolling by. National Park Service rangers walk through the campground, speaking brightly with the campers, sharing their knowledge. FoLAR’s River Rover pulls up and idles next to where the taco stand will be. The knot-tying station begins to take form behind an impromptu fire pit, ringed with bales of hay. A group of teenagers follows a park ranger out deeper into the Bowtie for a nature walk, their fingers grazing the fronds of weeds as they walk. Antonsson | 16 Park ranger Luis Rincon steps down the river’s concrete shore with a group hoping to catch and release fish as the sun goes down. Sean Woods, the superintendent for California State Parks in Los Angeles, watches over the proceedings, a big grin on his face, as a flag with a picture of Earth from space is raised above the tents, flapping gaily. Even in broad daylight, there’s something ethereal about the Bowtie. The space, just like the river, is ripe with history. The abandoned features of a decommissioned Southern Pacific rail yard pepper the eighteen acres, and the thirty years since its closure have lent the space a calm, post-industrial air with significant hope for a fresh future. California State Parks purchased the land in 2003 and has been working to make it a viable public resource ever since. The campout gives the Los Angeles River community a home, if only for a night. I speak to campers and park rangers alike during the campout, asking for their stories, yearning to know about their connection to the river. Stosh Machek, a poet and artist living at the Brewery Artist Colony, just east of the Los Angeles River, nods thoughtfully as I ask what one story about the river, in his mind, is not getting told. “That it is something other than a repository for water runoff,” he says simply. “That there is actually life there. People aren’t aware how many layers of life there are everywhere. And when you look at the river and you see, oh look, there’s a place where some mud stopped. Trees grew there. Oh, and now there’s birds. And now there’s possums. And now there’s coons. There’s something other than an urban thing going on there, and it’s a nice break” (Machek 2015). Another local artist, Melissa Manfull, mentions that she once created a whole artwork about the river. She lights up when I ask her to explain her project. “I did a map of the whole east side, including the LA River—the LA River being the main part of it—for people to explore different parts of the LA River as well as the east side. Just mapping it and understanding how to Antonsson | 17 get over the river and around the river and how it bifurcates the city was a fun project. To see how you maneuver people around the city through a map, and how you get them over the river and through the river and getting them to interact with places on it” (Manfull 2015). Even the park rangers, who are now well versed in the river, came to it the same way most Angelenos do: slowly and half-skeptically. Kya Marina-Le, a ranger for the National Park Service, admits, “I didn’t know about this whole side. I didn’t know about the Bowtie. Didn’t know about the Sepulveda Basin and that there were places that have soft bottoms, like this place here. My mentality has changed. I grew up seeing that concrete-lined grossness with this eensy bit of water going through it and now— This section of the Los Angeles River is special to me because this is where I grew to learn and love what the LA River can provide” (Marina-Le 2015). Down the banks, where Luis is helping teenagers bait their hooks for the catch and release, the air is calm. Families stretch out on the concrete, still warm from the sun, and friends crack open cans of Modelo. Children cautiously dip the ends of their lines into the water and wait anxiously. When nothing happens, they drop their poles and start chasing each other up and down the incline. When the sun finally sets, Kya urges me to get in line for tacos. Campers queue up with ticket stubs in hand and pile their plates high with fresh asada from the grill, topped with lime and radish and salsa. Before long, the Bowtie is covered in the warm, California smell of crackling beef and warm tortillas. We all meander over to the fire pits, eating, laughing, drinking, meeting one another. It’s a sense of peace, of security, that on this concrete slab so many Angelenos can come together and enjoy the space, understand the space. The Los Angeles Astronomical Society sets up their homemade telescopes and invites the campers to take a look. The skies are clear. The planets beautiful. Antonsson | 18 I have no tent, I have no patch of land to stretch out on, so I reluctantly shuffle back to the car as the park rangers rouse the children into wild campfire song choruses. From the top of the Bowtie, you can hear the shouts and cries of the campers, you can hear the freeway whizzing by, and above all, you can hear the river. Antonsson | 19 Conclusion They say Los Angeles is a city without a center. It’s a large city, one that is nearly impossible to make small. But that seems a strange truism when I keep running into river folk on the streets of the Arts District, on the Gold Line, in university cafes. They say hello, we swap stories, and we run into each other again at the river. I run into classmates on the Frogtown bike path, I take old friends to the Bowtie after sunset. So why now? Well, we talk about the river now because the voices are already there, growing louder by the day. We talk about the river now because there’s an undeniable and inexplicable pull toward our city’s history. We talk about the river now because I’m not the only Angeleno who passes over it on the 110 and wishes I could see more than just glimpses. We can’t seem to put this gravitation toward the river into words; it’s something unknowable. But it’s tangible. It’s there. Almost every community member, every city official, every passerby who I talked to about the river spoke to its power. Kaufman summed it up best, perhaps, at the end of our conversation at the Los Angeles River Center. He smiled and said, “There’s something so basic about our relationship to water. And the fact that we have very few water features in our city that we can engage with, your connection to water is pretty limited” (Kaufman 2015). So we’re left with the river. The unknowable, undeniably beautiful Los Angeles River. If there’s a vision for making the river the city’s convergence point, perhaps it’s because it already is. Perhaps its enormity is what makes it so powerful. Perhaps its inaccessibility is what makes it so appealing. Perhaps it really is as simple as the human pull toward water, the pull that built Los Angeles nearly 250 years ago, calling to us again. The pull toward the Antonsson | 20 unknowable, toward the mystery, toward something so large that still feels so secret and personal. The pull toward a tangible history in a city of ephemerality. Antonsson | 21 References Arroyo, Willy, personal interview, September 19, 2015. Backlar, Joey, personal interview, September 19, 2015. Backlar, Shelly, personal interview, October 10, 2015. Briggs, Katie, personal interview, October 10, 2015. Campbell, Stephanie, personal interview, September 27, 2015. Chilewicz, David, personal interview, October 10, 2015. City of Los Angeles, History: Los Angeles River Revitalization, 2016, (City of Los Angeles), < http://www.lariver.org/About/History/index.htm> City of Los Angeles, Master Plan, 2016, (City of Los Angeles), <http://www.lariver.org/Projects/MasterPlan/index.htm> Devarajan, Anand, telephone interview, November 18, 2015. Gehry Partners, L.A. River Revitalization Corp, August 28, 2015 <http://www.scribd.com/doc/276690627/L-A-River-Revitalization-Corp> Given Place Media, Historical Resident Population, City & County of Los Angeles 1850 to 2010: Los Angeles Almanac, 2016, < http://www.laalmanac.com/population/po02.htm> Groves, Martha, Peter Jamison, and Dan Weikel, “Architect Frank Gehry is helping L.A. with its Los Angeles River master plan, but secrecy troubles some,” The Los Angeles Times, August 7, 2015. Nagourney, Adam, “Frank Gehry Draws Ire for Joining Los Angeles River Restoration Project,” The New York Times, September 23, 2015. Hanson, Patricia, personal interview, October 10, 2015. Antonsson | 22 Hawthorne, Christopher, “How Frank Gehry’s L.A. River make-over will change the city and why he took the job,” The Los Angeles Times, August 9, 2015 Hoffman, Abraham, personal interview, October 15, 2015. Hoffman, Abraham and Teena Stern, “The Zanjas and the Pioneer Water Systems for Los Angeles,” Southern California Quarterly 89, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 1–22 Hoffman, Kate, personal interview, October 17, 2015. Hoffman, Mackenzie, personal interview, September 27, 2015. Jamison, Peter, “A ‘linear Central Park:’ Frank Gehry’s plan for the L.A. River takes shape,” The Los Angeles Times, August 28, 2015. Jamison, Peter, “Frank Gehry faces monumental challenge in L.A. River project,” The Los Angeles Times, August 28, 2015. Kaufman, Eli, personal interview, October 16, 2015. Machek, Stosh, personal interview, October 17, 2015. Manfull, Melissa, personal interview, October 17, 2015. Marina-Le, Kya, personal interview, October 17, 2015. Takemori, Takemori, telephone interview, November 18, 2015. Walker, Alissa, “Frank Gehry Is the Wrong Architect to Revitalize the Los Angeles River,” Gizmodo, August 7, 2015. Weintraub, Deborah, personal interview, October 10, 2015. Woods, Sean, personal interview, October 17, 2015. Antonsson | 23 Appendix A: The Webpage In addition to the reporting provided above, I wanted to hand-code a webpage that would display my photography and videography in a way that tells the story from another angle. The angle is intended to share the senses that accompany the river: the sights, the sounds, the motion. The page itself is created with ScrollMagic, a jQuery plugin that allows for functions related to scroll activity. This method of flow, with limited audience input and maximum effect output, is intended to digitally mimic the movement and flow of the river: fluid motions from one image to the next, brief pauses for breath and appreciation, and moments of contemplation in the text portions. I have also included audio rollovers, which require no external plugin, to illustrate the voices of the community. These are intentionally left without the images of the speakers to further describe the fluid nature of experiencing the Los Angeles River. Yes, these are real people sharing real stories, but their stories are the collective voice of the river. They are the stories that comprise the river. Below, I have provided the documentation for the webpage. The webpage is hosted at <http://katieantonsson.com/losangelesriver/index.html> The first image introduces the piece simply, with a plain image of the river and a prompt to scroll down. The arrowhead with the words “SCROLL” beneath bounces up and down by 10 pixels. Antonsson | 24 The title appears as a panel beneath the initial image, with the initial image scrolling up out of the window and the title image remaining static. As the user scrolls, a series of the title image cycle through, animating the background image. The title itself – “FINDING HOME: THE LOS ANGELES RIVER” fades in. The first text of the piece introduces the story as a whole, and includes the title once again and my byline, with a “sticky” image that remains in fixed position beside the text as the user scrolls, until the user has finished reading. The first two text pieces are broken up with a banner image in between. The second text section likewise has a sticky image beside it. Antonsson | 25 In a swipe motion, an image of the Los Angeles River full during El Niño is replaced by an image from the same location during a dry day. The image swipes from left to right, the dry image replacing the storm image. Beneath the image swipe, a background video of the river in the Glendale Narrows plays on loop, without sound. Between text sections, a backgrounded, sticky quote appears from one of my interview subjects, a quote which sums up the story I am trying to tell. Antonsson | 26 Beneath the text, a series of eight audio rollovers. Each image plays less than one minute of an interview from various subjects throughout my research. The name and title of the subject appears when the cursor hovers over the image, as well as the date and location of the interview. Each image also increases its opacity to help make clear which interview is playing. Full transcripts included in Appendix B. As with the image swipes earlier on the page, the page finishes with four image swipes: first right, then down, then up. Antonsson | 27 Appendix B: Transcripts Below, find the transcripts of the interviews included in the audio rollover portion of the webpage (Appendix A). ELI KAUFMAN: The thing that I really loved the most in terms of my own personal experience with the river where I felt something different is I have a seven-year-old son and we participated this year in the second annual kayak. It’s funny because it’s his first experience with kayaking, his first experience with kayaking of any form was watching his old man bob down the river. and we ended up spending an extra hour just sort of playing by the banks of the river. There’s something so basic about our relationship to water. JOEY BACKLAR: My mother has worked with FoLAR for the past thirteen years, so I grew up on the river as little kid being dragged down to river walks, going to the cleanups and everything. When I was so much younger, I didn’t really appreciate it. It was just helping my mom with something, you know. And then as I got older and had more of a sense of awareness and more of a sense of the impact that I have on the world just as one person, I felt like I needed to do something, and this was my opportunity. I care about my city. I love nature, so this was the way I could help. KATE HOFFMAN: I’ve been living next to it for so long that i have a relationship with it. I don’t get down there and walk around on it near as much as I want to, but I do love to put my hands in it and to get my body down there next to it whenever I can. Even as little as I get down there and walk around in it and put my hands in it, I still feel its power and its presence because I Antonsson | 28 live near it. But I’m also kind of a river person. I grew up on a river and I prefer them to oceans. I have no interest in the Pacific. But this river, if we can reclaim it and bring it back and let it have its proper place in the city, it would be amazing. KATIE BRIGGS: I drive in, purposefully, from El Sereno crossing the First Street bridge, and it’s almost like getting my mind right, and almost as if I’m having all of these elders who did the same like trudge across this river to do service. So it really almost regroups me, orientates me to the idea that yeah I’m a worker, I come from a history of workers, and I am providing a service. I’m a teacher, so, that’s what I mean. MELISSA MANFULL: So I had a show at Fellows of Contemporary Art in Chinatown, and for my performance, I went along a did a map of the whole East side including the LA River, the LA River being the main part of it, and did a map for people to explore different parts of the LA River as well as the East side, so it was nice to kind of go along and search out all these places and find new spots that were really amazing. Like there’s a park up the street on the other side of Fletcher that’s really amazing. Just mapping it and kind of understanding how to get over the river and around the river and how it basically bifurcates the city between east and, not even west, but east and less east, was kind of a fun project. To see how do you maneuver people around the city through a map, and how do you get them over the river and through the river and getting them to interact with places on it. PATRICIA HANSON: I really love to work happening now to bring them back, one, so it’s accessible to the community besides kids sneaking in. I used to love running around in the canals Antonsson | 29 and like skateboarding and hanging out with your friends because it was like an area that no one was in. But I want people there now. I want kids to be able to skateboard and bike ride and also then see trees, see beautiful birds, I want us to bring it back to what it can be to also make LA sustainable, bring back some of our native wildlife. Um, I see nothing but positive possibilities if we really do work on bringing it back in a positive way. SEAN WOODS: You know, I was living here in the 80s and I used to drive across it all the time and never thought that it was a river. I was like most Angelenos, you know. To me it was where all the storm drains emptied into and it wasn’t until I met Lewis MacAdams from Friends of the Los Angeles River and we went down into the soft-bedded bottom of the river right here in the Glendale Narrows that I saw the abundance of bird life and artesian springs popping out of the concrete cracks and I really saw a river that was alive, and that people needed to know about it. STOSH MACHEK: Well, the first time I saw the river was probably when I moved into the Brewery. Probably four or five years ago. And over where we are, it’s just a piddly little crick. It ain’t much at all. But I’ve driven in it. I mean, the first time I saw the river was like when I watched Repo Man. And they were driving through the river. And I’ve actually done that, gone to Sixth street in a car and drove around in it, you know. People back east, when they— if they think of the Los Angeles River, they think of it as like where Arnold Schwarzenegger drove his Harley. In Terminator. I just want to see it be a river again. I want to see the cement removed. And I want to see it be an actual river again. And I want to turn this into something green instead of grey.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract This story began as a personal exploration, an attempt to reconcile myself with a home I returned to after four years away and found utterly foreign. I was merely curious about the Los Angeles River and wanted to know more—where it came from, what it does, who cares about it, and what it feels like to stand next to it. Or inside it. ❧ As the weeks and conversations unfolded, endless stories presented themselves to me, some highly publicized, some unknown. I was drawn to the unknown, but curious about how the highly publicized was affecting the unknown. ❧ I am interested in the way an abandoned feature of the city is being reclaimed. I am interested in the way that something that is fundamental to our city’s history was so summarily dismissed seventy-five years ago and has only been re-acknowledged in the past thirty years. I am interested in what people are doing around the river and why. I am interested in the story that is not getting told. Nobody is talking about the people who live next to the river and just go for a walk now and then. Nobody is talking about what it is like to stand in the river. Nobody is talking about why we should care. ❧ I have taken the train over the river every day since moving back to Los Angeles. Sometimes it excites me, and sometimes I dread the mere thought of having to see it. It’s like a temperamental friend, but like one of my interviewees said, in many ways the river is a canvas for those who don’t have a voice (Hanson 2015). You can project your own psyche onto the river and make it your own. Nobody experiences the river the same way and nobody comes to have the river in their life in the same way. I know my story is unusual, how the river came to have such importance in my life. ❧ This is that story.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Antonsson, Katie (author)

Core Title Finding home: the Los Angeles River

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Specialized Journalism (The Arts)

Publication Date 04/18/2016

Defense Date 04/16/2016

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Army Corps,Army Corps of Engineers,California State Parks,Clockshop,Community,Ecology,El Niño,FoLAR,Frank Gehry,Friends of the LA River,Friends of the Los Angeles River,Frogtown,Glendale Narrows,Home,Hydrology,LA River,LA River Center and Gardens,Los Angeles,Los Angeles River,Los Angeles River Revitalization Corporation,Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan,National Park Service,nonprofit organizations,nonprofits,OAI-PMH Harvest,revitalization

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Anawalt, Sasha (committee member), Bustamante, Peggy (committee member), Tellalian, Daniel (committee member)

Creator Email antonsso@usc.edu,kateantons@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-229463

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