After the huge success of New York's High Line, the derelict elevated railway on the Lower West Side that is being transformed into a mile-and-a-half-long "park in the sky", Los Angeles is hoping to do the same with what could come to be known as its "low line" – greening and revitalising the long-neglected Los Angeles River.
Leading the effort is Friends of the Los Angeles River (FoLAR), founded by local artist Lewis Hamilton. In 1986, with a few friends, he took a pair of wire-cutters, cut through the "No Trespassing" fence and "reclaimed" the river for its rightful owners, the people of the city. Nowadays, you won't need your own wire-cutters. Though the work is far from finished, the river has been opened up with bike paths, new pocket parks, and FoLAR tours like the one I went on.
We met at The Cornfield, once a patch of wasteland north of LA's downtown, between Chinatown and Lincoln Heights. It was designated a state park, the Los Angeles State Historic Park, in 2006 after a long-running community campaign that included LA artist Lauren Bon's environmentally-motivated living sculpture Not A Cornfield, when she grew corn in the abandoned freight yard for one agricultural cycle, and Cornhenge, a collection of corn bales.
This being LA, we immediately jumped back into our cars, passing Chinatown's Metro station in the style of a pagoda and circling the new $74m jail, a tall skyscraper with arrow-slit windows that sits empty because the city cannot afford to hire wardens. Suddenly the first car disappeared into a dark maintenance tunnel under the 6th Street Bridge just wide enough to take a car. Like Alice, we followed this rabbit on to the concrete bed of the LA River with its trickle of water flowing down the middle.
"Everyone thinks this is a desert climate but it's actually a land of lost rivers and streams," explained tour leader Jenny Price. Like Paris on the Seine or London on the Thames, LA was founded on a riverbank. As the city grew, it squeezed the river in a double bind, draining it to the dregs in the dry season and building on its flood plain. In the rainy season, the natural flooding caused increasing devastation and deaths.
After especially bad floods in 1934, the US Army Corps of Engineers encased the river's 52 miles in a concrete coffin from its headwaters in the suburban San Fernando Valley, through downtown LA to where the river meets the sea at Long Beach. For the next half century most Angelenos (let alone visitors) either didn't know the river existed or treated it as a local joke. Jenny told us that revitalising it is "not even primarily about the river itself but about addressing the problems of LA. It's a key to the more sustainable and liveable city we're trying to create".
For the visitor tired of Disneyland and freeways, a FoLAR "carpool" tour will take you to parts of LA you'd never normally see, or you can walk or hire a bike to ride beside the river where it's been "greened", such as the stretch adjacent to Griffith Park. The north end is "soft bottomed" and looks like a traditional river with trees, birds and fish. So do the last few miles near Long Beach. Here bike paths are shared with horse riders and joggers.
No one could call the LA River scenic as yet, although FoLAR's efforts received a recent boost when the US Environmental Protection Agency declared the river "a traditional navigable waterway". That's opened up the prospect of kayaking tours as well as further funding. Ironically, the Europeans in Jenny's group liked our first stop in the concrete culvert criss-crossed with power lines and bridges the best. Why? Because it's familiar as the gritty location for a dozen movies including Point Blank, Grease and To Live and Die In LA.
Further information
Folar.org runs car pool trips ($25) and guided walks (free). Reservations required. Only a few tours in summer months due to the heat.
A mile-by-mile cycle tour of the river in pictures
Los Angeles River Center and Gardens (570 West Avenue Twenty Six) on the most developed section of the river near Elysian Park. FoLAR has its headquarters here.
Bike hire: Spokes N Stuff, 4730 Crystal Springs Ave, Griffith Park CA 90027, spokes-n-stuff.com, +1 323 662 6573; Bicycle John's, 1038 Hollywood Way, Burbank CA 91505, bicyclejohns.com, +1 818 848 8330
The Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition runs an annual mass bike ride/fundraiser for about 2,000 riders. la-bike.org.
LA River Expeditions hopes to start canoe/kayak excursions soon. lariverexpeditions.com.
