Reinventing Los Angeles by Gottlieb Robert;

Author:Gottlieb, Robert;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press

THE STREAM THAT BECAME A CONCRETE FLOOD CHANNEL

When it was being constructed in the late 1930s, the Arroyo Seco Parkway was considered a “wondrous feat” that could enable drivers to be “launched like a speedboat in a calm, spacious, divided channel.” But the stream that resided below the parkway was also in the process of becoming an unobstructed channel. Before this transformation, the Arroyo Seco stream, a 46.6-square-mile watershed tributary to the Los Angeles River, had long been considered one of Southern California’s greatest natural resources. From high in the San Gabriel Mountains north of Pasadena, even today the Arroyo Seco’s stream flows freely until it leaves the mountains and the Angeles National Forest and enters the urbanized segment of the Arroyo corridor near NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. In this urban stretch where the stream is now channelized, it meets the freeway for the last six miles of its journey before emptying onto the broad concrete plain of the Los Angeles River, next to the one-time rail yards and overpasses just north of downtown Los Angeles.

Before its urban stretch was channelized, the Arroyo stream flowed freely and was filled with trout. Willow and sycamore trees grew along its banks, providing habitats for aquatic life and birds. Generations of Tongva Indians and European settlers were inspired by its beauty and lived partly off its bounty. Arroyo Seco, however, means “dry gulch,” and the stream developed a reputation as both a “spacious water course” (as Father Crespi noted in his journals) and also a channel that would sometimes turn dry after it reached the area below the mountains on its path towards the T.A. River. As development increased during the early years of the twentieth century, the river bed was without water for most of the year, except when periodic storms filled the stream’s banks and flooded adjacent lands. A number of proposals emerged during this period to address the problem of flooding, including the development of park lands along the Arroyo to absorb those occasional flood waters and to enhance the Arroyo’s visual attractions. In 1917, Pasadena’s Arroyo Park Committee, chaired by one of L.A.’s most celebrated architects, Myron Hunt, put forth a plan (in conjunction with landscape architect Emil T. Mische) for the lower segment of the Arroyo, the area within Pasadena that was most vulnerable to problems of flooding. The plan recommended that the Lower Arroyo be restricted to walking and bridal paths and trails that would be planted only with native plants. In 1924, Pasadena’s city manager, A. G. Koiner, introduced the idea of establishing the Arroyo as a wildflower preserve.17

But developments also began to take their toll. After the major floods in 1914 cut through the banks of the Arroyo in several sections, walls were built to contain future flood waters in one area of the Arroyo, with costs reduced in part by the use of prison labor. In 1922, Pasadena’s best-known institution, the Rose Bowl, was built within the Arroyo Seco watershed, a decision that was also controversial.

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