It may not be the parting of the Red Sea, but the Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan is miracle enough. Sponsored by the Los Angeles River Committee of the Los Angeles City Council, the revitalization master plan may be the corner-turning event that actually kicks off the process of making a depressing culvert into a riparian green belt, studded with neighborhood parks, including several in the city's poorest neighborhoods.
Published in draft form in February, with a final version expected in a few months, the plan covers a 32-mile stretch of the river inside the city of Los Angeles from the comfortable, single-family neighborhoods of the San Fernando Valley, through the industrial grunge of Elysian Heights, Atwater and downtown Los Angeles, to the aging, overcrowded frame houses of East Los Angeles. The only really bad thing about the plan is that it does not include all cities downstream of Los Angeles where the need for park space is even more critical.
Part of the miracle, which the master plan does not adequately acknowledge, is the origin of the idea in grass roots activism. The L.A. River is probably the most democratic planning initiative ever to occur in Los Angeles, held together by dozens of volunteer organizations, most notably the nonprofit Friends of the Los Angeles River, which has conducted tours and events on the river for years to popularize the waterway as an environmental and open-space opportunity.
If idealistic planners, architects and community activists were quick to see value in the Los Angeles River, however, government has been slow to act. One must remember that as recently as 20 years ago, Los Angeles County's flood control officials were busy pouring fresh concrete into the culvert, dismissing the idea of alternative flood control as unproven nonsense. The notion of removing vast stretches of concrete from the river seemed as lunatic as colonizing the moons of Jupiter. Since that time, nearly every other major American city — including Cleveland, Memphis, Denver and Houston — has cleaned up its dirty waterfront. Los Angeles, with its splintered city government and lack of interest in anything civic outside one's immediate neighborhood, is a latecomer to the party.
As for planning, what a difference 60 years makes! The old culvert is a monument to single-issue planning. The new revitalization master plan, if anything, may take on too many issues: The plan tries to use the rebirth of the river as the catalyst for the creation of high-density development — including multi-family, industrial, office and retail — at certain points. The plan is laudable for attempting to address the complexity and multiple agendas of urban life. Even a healthy, beautiful river, however, may not provide the leverage needed to turn around entire neighborhoods. Still, it's an exciting piece of planning that thinks big, which is what planning is supposed to do.
The plan puts forward 13 pilot, or catalytic, projects that center on parks. Each design tussles realistically with tough, unyielding existing conditions, like freeway underpasses and industrial compounds, without fantasizing that those conditions will disappear entirely. The steep walls that make the river inaccessible become concrete steps for pedestrians, and terraces that bring riparian landscaping down to the river. Inflatable dams create ponds in a number of areas, such as in Chinatown, where a secondary, "naturalized" channel widens the river and makes it a centerpiece for recreation. In Canoga Park, the river becomes the occasion of a T-shaped park that can co-exist with an existing Pratt & Whitney plant, or expand into that space if the manufacturer leaves. In downtown Los Angeles, the river becomes a linear park and the site of 1,000 new multi-family units looking onto the water.
A proposed park in the Taylor Yards just north of downtown Los Angeles would be the "biggest act of restoration," according to the draft plan, entailing the removal of one mile of concrete along one side of the river, and creating a combination park and "water-quality treatment" wetlands with plants that can scrub pollutants out of urban storm runoff. Even more extraordinarily, this entire wetlands would sit atop contaminated soil, separated by a waterproof membrane.
The river would also grow its own bureaucracy, including a joint powers authority for governance, a corporation to own the real estate and a foundation to receive contributions and grants. One sign of success is that the river has become tangible enough to be politicized. Alianza de los Pueblo del Rio, a coalition of Latino groups that consulted with river planners, publicly complained in March that only two of 87 proposed parks call for active recreation as opposed to "passive" uses (i.e. just for looks). "The plan as it stands now could be called the L.A. River gentrification master plan," executive director Robert Garcia told the Downtown News.
If the charge is true, the lack of active-rec parks in poor neighborhoods would be a major oversight. But the real disappointment of the plan is that it stops at the Los Angeles city boundaries. That means that other communities, including Maywood, the poorest city in the state, will have to shift for themselves if they want to improve the river. These cities are largely lacking in parks and open space, and maps indicate that central Los Angeles County is a collective "heat sink" of unrelieved asphalt and concrete. It is doubtful that these less affluent communities can mount a planning effort comparable to that undertaken by L.A.
It makes sense that Los Angeles would want to control the river-greening within its own borders, but the city needs to participate in some regional joint powers authority and possibly contribute heavily to the planning process in other jurisdictions so that the waterway can became a regional asset. Many of the same communities participated in the Alameda Corridor JPA to build a short-haul railway. Why not a similar effort for the river, perhaps as a means to get some more state and federal dollars?
Of course, inter-governmental cooperation would take a miracle in L.A. County, but miracles have been known to happen.
We've all seen in recent weeks the cruelty of hurricanes uprooting houses as easily as trees, tossing cars into fields and reducing farms to rubbish heaps. Tropical storms go where they want, and anything less than monolithic masonry is a goner. Even with the damage they bring, however, hurricanes are kinder than freeways.
Only two exceptions are available to alter the impact of freeways: In the case of elevated roadways, we can take them down, as San Francisco did with the Embarcadero Freeway along the waterfront. And in the case of corridors located in trenches, we can build above them.
I have published so many corrections in my journalism career that I now write the correction along with the story. To wit: The following story is all made up. There is no draft EIR for the downtown football stadium yet. Yet few readers are aware that I possess the flawless crystal sphere of Nostradamus, which gives me super powers to see accurately into the future. (Note to editor: Do I have to run corrections for inaccurate statements about myself? I mean, who would know?)
Gosh, it's really, really hard to guess what the negative impacts might occur, when building a football stadium with seating for 70,000 or so people rises in downtown Los Angeles. Let's see now.
Urban Land Institute, it's time you and me had a serious chat about your awards criteria.
As the foremost trade group of real estate developers, I find value in many of your publications and programs. And I find it understandable that you would laud large-scale development projects. Making projects is your businesses.
But when you give a national award to a very questionable project like LA Live, the entertainment-and hotel complex that covers nearly 20 acres of downtown Los Angeles, it shows that your regard for urban quality comes second place to your round-eyed puppy love for big developers and big plans.
In the ongoing quest to reclaim open space in the City of Los Angeles, no feature has been worried over more than the Los Angeles River and adjacent parcels. It is, by some accounts, one of the world's most un-natural waterways. The city's Los Angeles River Master Plan has long called for greening and the removal of concrete banks, but debate has raged over whether it even qualifies as a true river.
The Los Angeles City Council voted today to limit the number of medical marijuana dispensaries in the city (described by one councilmember as the "the capital of medical marijuana") to a total of 70 storefront locations. With an estimated 900 dispensaries currently operating within city limits, there are currently more medical marijuana outlets in L.A. than Starbucks. That is a sobering figure. How on earth did we end up with this many Starbucks?
NBC Universal has unveiled a master plan for buildout of its 391-acre property in the hills between Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley. Morris Newman offers his analysis by way of a dramatic monologue.
A working-class neighborhood north of downtown L.A. is slated for a development project unlike any other previously built in the state: A combination of housing and a public school on a shared site. Set to start construction this winter, the Glassell Park project is being built jointly by Los Angeles Unified School District and Abode Communities, the nonprofit homebuilder formerly known as Los Angeles Design Center.
Wilshire Boulevard is the Main Street of Los Angeles, and the Ambassador Hotel (1921-2006) was its biggest, swankiest, classiest address. The hotel is but a memory these days. Now, after nearly two decades of false starts and lawsuits, construction has finally started on the scheme to convert the Ambassador Hotel property into an education center. >>read more
More than 30 years ago, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley dreamed on an economically dominant downtown that would be on par with great downtowns like those in Chicago and San Francisco. Although Bradley's dream never came true, downtown L.A. has become a great residential neighborhood and a significant office market. It's easy to argue, though, that developers and market forces ultimately played a bigger role than government or public policy in downtown's evolution since the 1970s.
Just looking at the proposed football stadium on the eastern edge of Los Angeles County is enough to give me indigestion. This six-dollar hamburger is just too big to eat.
Remember the cliché about "the deal you can't refuse?" The park-for-a-billboard caper in the city of Los Angeles is just such a deal. I'll tell you about it. (Just as soon, that is, as you put that bottle back in the bag where it belongs. I have no desire to add another item to my institutional resume.)
Granted, the billboard story is hard to explain, because at bottom this deal makes so little sense.