The Invisible River : Hearts of the City / Exploring attitudes and issues behind the news

In any great city, the most despised parts of the urban landscape get rendered invisible. That theory was advanced many years ago by the author Jane Jacobs, who noticed how certain poor neighborhoods, abandoned wharves and other like places seemed to disappear from the collective urban consciousness. The invisibility, she concluded, allowed the despised parts to be safely ignored and left to rot.

Jacobs wrote her famous book, “The Death & Life of Great American Cities,” more than 30 years ago, and some good news has come along since. Places like Baltimore’s wharf, the abandoned warehouses in San Francisco’s south-of-Market and many, many old neighborhoods have emerged from their invisibility, alive and well.

But here in Los Angeles we hang stubbornly onto our invisible parts, and that includes the biggest one of all. Why, do you think, have we come to loathe the Los Angeles River so much that we made it invisible? What crime demanded our river be entombed in concrete, barred from human contact by razor wire?

Flooding, perhaps. Yes, it did flood back in the old days, before the concrete. But flooding can be controlled in many ways, no? We could have given the river a flood plain to play around in. We could have built catch basins for the overflow and let it percolate into the ground. We did none of those things. We chose instead the concrete straitjacket and the wire.

If you want to know just how invisible we’ve made our river, here’s a little test.

Q: Why is Downtown Los Angeles located where it is?

A: Because a river runs through it, the Los Angeles River. Only now you can’t find it.

Q: Who proposed a freeway in the bed of the Los Angeles River?

A: Assemblyman Richard Katz, who forgot that the river was there.

In recent years, other cities have decided to pardon their rivers and restore their visibility. In fact, you could call the river restorations a small movement across the land. Chicago did it, and the city now sports a river that curls gloriously through the downtown. Restaurants have sprung up on the riverside. People stroll along its banks, sniffing the river air. Same thing in San Antonio, Memphis, Cleveland.

You might think that these other cities faced a smaller problem than does Los Angeles. Not so. In Cleveland, the Cuyahoga was once declared a fire hazard. And here’s how Laurene Von Klan, executive director of Friends of the Chicago River, describes their river in the old days: “It stunk, it looked bad, it had fences that shut people out. The Chicago River was one of the most notoriously foul rivers in the country. In downtown, office buildings turned their backs on it. The riverside was the place where people put parking lots.”

So how come Cleveland and Chicago overcame those problems and Los Angeles has not? A mystery. If anything, the Los Angeles River presents as great an opportunity for rebirth as do the rivers in either of those cities. In its natural state the river has water year-round. It runs the entire length of the San Fernando Valley, then curls around Downtown and heads for Long Beach. In total, more than 50 miles of waterfront. Wasted.

In the Valley, the river runs past several big studios, including MCA, Disney, CBS and Warner Bros. You might think the river would offer a splendid opportunity for restaurants, shops, etc. But no. The only activity comes at CBS, which is paving over its riverside. For a new parking lot.

Actually, the studios are only reflecting reality. They don’t face a river, they face a concrete sewer. Who wants to pay for an al fresco lunch next to a sewer?

So as long as the concrete remains, the river will stay despised and invisible. A year or so ago, a group known as Friends of the Los Angeles River produced a plan for doing away with a big stretch of the concrete. The Army Corps of Engineers had begun a study of flood control along the river, and it had a lot of money to spend. Several hundred million. So the Friends group thought, well, let’s spend the money to get part of the river back and provide for flood control at the same time.

Nothing doing. After lobbying hard for many months, Friends of the L.A. River was swatted down this spring by the Board of Supervisors. The board decided to go with the Army’s plan to build yet higher walls of concrete near the river’s mouth.

At that meeting, which I happened to attend, one of the Friends’ speakers was describing to the supervisors how the river could be transformed into a thing of beauty. Then he paused, as if a bothersome thought crossed his mind. Reaching into a bag, he produced five copies of a videotape and passed them over. If the supervisors were not acquainted with the item under discussion, he said, perhaps the tapes would help. The supervisors accepted politely.

An invisible river, as I say. Invisible for so long that many cannot imagine our city with a real river. The very idea of L.A. with a river seems incongruous, faintly ludicrous.

So here’s a modest proposal. Let’s take one small stretch of the river--maybe a half-mile or so somewhere in the Valley--and make it a model project. Rip out the concrete, tear down the fences, restore the riverside to something resembling a natural state. Let the bulrushes and the sycamores grow. Then--and here’s the crucial part--allow appropriate commercial enterprise along the banks.

In other words, turn the river into a profitable enterprise. Give it a constituency not only of strollers and bicyclists but of business people. And if it works, convert another half-mile somewhere else. And then another.

Creep up on it. Get it back piece by piece, the same way other cities brought back old neighborhoods like Brooklyn or DuPont Circle in Washington. Give people a chance to see the possibilities. If I’m right, the river will do the rest.