VIVIAN LE: This is 99% Invisible. I’m Vivian Le sitting in for Roman Mars. I’ve lived in Los Angeles for give or take eight years now, and I wanted to take you to a place here in the city that’s a little weird but also pretty special.
VIVIAN LE (FIELD TAPE): Maybe it’s a different spot that we get in. I feel like this is going to be a lot of guess and check.
VIVIAN LE: It’s also kind of hard to get into. Luckily, I had backup with me.
GILLIAN JACOBS (FIELD TAPE): This street that we’re on is about as close as you can get to the river.
VIVIAN LE (FIELD TAPE): Okay. I know that there is some way to get down there, like an access tunnel point, which I don’t know what your appetite is for getting it into a tunnel–
GILLIAN JACOBS (FIELD TAPE): I’m not doing that!
VIVIAN LE: Reporting this story with me this week is Gillian Jacobs. Gillian is an actor, a director, and of course a fellow LA resident.
GILLIAN JACOBS: Yes. And that elusive spot we were trying to get to was the LA River.
VIVIAN LE (FIELD TAPE): There it is.
GILLIAN JACOBS (FIELD TAPE): There’s the river.
VIVIAN LE (FIELD TAPE): There’s our guy.
GILLIAN JACOBS (FIELD TAPE): What is the predominant emotion you’re feeling right now?
VIVIAN LE (FIELD TAPE): Awe.
GILLIAN JACOBS (FIELD TAPE): That’s a lie.
GILLIAN JACOBS: When you hear the word river, you probably picture a majestic body of water flowing through a natural habitat. Well, the LA River looks nothing like that. Most people who see it probably mistake it for a giant storm drain. It’s a deep, trapezoidal channel with steep, concrete walls and a flat, concrete bottom.
VIVIAN LE: In the spot we were at, the riverbanks were lined with railroad tracks, industrial warehouses, and commuter traffic. The water part of it–as in the thing that rivers are most known for having–exists as just a tiny stream at the bottom of the concrete for most of the year.
VIVIAN LE (FIELD TAPE): I mean, it is quite ugly.
GILLIAN JACOBS (FIELD TAPE): It’s very ugly right here.
VIVIAN LE (FIELD TAPE): But it is kind of pretty in a weird way.
GILLIAN JACOBS (FIELD TAPE): And there’s water flowing, but it’s, like, algae.
GILLIAN JACOBS: The LA River is a surreal place to be, which has made it a great location to have edgy photoshoots or film movies. You’ve actually probably seen it in the iconic scene from Greece where the T-Birds drag race the Scorpions down the dry river bed or the scene from Terminator 2 where the T-1000 chases John Connor in a semi-truck.
VIVIAN LE: Yes, Los Angeles is a modern city filled with concrete. But other major cities with rivers–like Chicago, London, and Paris–have managed to retain more of the natural river-ness. Those rivers feel untouched in comparison to the hyper engineered Los Angeles River.
GILLIAN JACOBS: Los Angeles was founded around this river. But decades ago, it was confined in concrete so that–for better or worse–the city could become the sprawling metropolis that it is today. And all these years later, we are still grappling with the consequences of those actions.
VIVIAN LE: Before the river was encased in a narrow, concrete passageway, it wandered freely throughout the Los Angeles basin.
PATT MORRISON: Think of water everywhere. There were rivulets. There were freshets–little stream beds that you had to leap across. All over Southern California, all the way out to Beverly Hills, they found these little water courses. And it’s almost impossible to imagine that Los Angeles.
VIVIAN LE: This is Patt Morrison, LA Times columnist and author of the book Rio LA. She says that, even before human intervention, the LA River behaved in peculiar ways.
GILLIAN JACOBS: After heavy rains, the LA River would swell from a trickle into a full-blown river, but with no fixed course. Sometimes when the river flooded, it would cut new pathways, turning different parts of the LA Basin into a tapestry of wetlands and inland seas.
PATT MORRISON: It may rain for two or three months out of the year, and what that rain does constitutes pretty much where the river decides to go. If it’s not a very rainy season, the river will behave itself in its pretty small, flat, little bed. But if there’s a lot of rain, it’s going to say, “Well, this looks like a good place to flood, and this looks like a good place to overflow.”
VIVIAN LE: The river’s watershed was larger than the island of Maui, and all of this untethered water had a huge impact on the entire ecosystem of Los Angeles.
GILLIAN JACOBS: People today look at LA and think it’s a desert because it’s so dry, but the climate is actually closer to the kind of Mediterranean weather you’d see in, say, Spain or Portugal. The river supported dense forests, marshlands, and enormous biodiversity.
MATTHEW TEUTIMEZ: So, the river did not just affect the corridor that it runs in. It affected the whole landscape.
VIVIAN LE: This is Matthew Teutimez, tribal biologist for the Gabrieleño Band of Mission Indians, Kizh Nation. Teutimez says that the Kizh built their lives around the water provided by the LA River.
MATTHEW TEUTIMEZ: Now the LA River–the ancient name for it is Wenot, which means “the life giver.” And that pretty much explains it all in terms of the capacity of what this river provided.
GILLIAN JACOBS: Even in its original natural state, the LA River was very boom or bust. During the rainy season, the river would flood wide swaths of the LA Basin. But during the dry season, which in LA is most of the year, most of the rushing surface water would shrink to a shallow stream.
MATTHEW TEUTIMEZ: Many of our zones and many of our waterways are ephemeral, meaning they’re seasonal; they only occur during high water volume times.
VIVIAN LE: Despite these patterns of flooding and drought, the river was more than enough to support the indigenous communities of the LA Basin.
GILLIAN JACOBS: That is until, of course, the arrival of European colonizers. Los Angeles fell under the control of Spain, then Mexico, and then finally the United States. And to settlers from the East Coast, the LA River, which seemed both too wet and too dry, was baffling.
PATT MORRISON: Yankee rivers earned their keep. Yankee rivers are rivers where you can float barges and move goods and commerce and people. And what kind of lazy ass river just sits around and doesn’t do anything for nine months out of the year? So, it was a very frustrating river for people who came with these industrial sensibilities to look at and to depend on.
GILLIAN JACOBS: When California gained statehood in 1850, the population of Los Angeles absolutely exploded. The city grew from just under 2,000 to 100,000 people in only 50 years. This growing population began depleting the river and its groundwater to the point that, by the turn of the 20th century, the LA River was completely dry.
VIVIAN LE: But Los Angeles city leaders had no intention of slowing the population growth because they wanted to become the dominant city in California. So, instead, they found themselves a different water source.
GILLIAN JACOBS: In 1913, a civil engineer named William Mulholland unveiled an aqueduct that diverted water from the Owens Valley–about 233 miles north–and siphoned it down to LA. The aqueduct basically destroyed the livelihood of farmers up north and set off a series of violent conflicts called the California Water Wars.
VIVIAN LE: Sorry, that last beat of LA history was a bit of a spoiler if you’ve never seen the movie Chinatown.
GILLIAN JACOBS: Once the dust had settled and Los Angeles had itself a shiny, new, imported water source, Angelenos pivoted from draining the river to outright trashing it. They dumped waste from factories, dead animals from slaughterhouses, and untreated sewage into the mostly dry riverbed.
PATT MORRISON: It was inconsequential as far as Angelenos were concerned by then.
GILLIAN JACOBS: So, to make room for the people in industries of a booming new city, developers built closer and closer to the dried up banks of the river.
VIVIAN LE: But of course, the LA River isn’t just any kind of river. And all of this shortsighted development backfired in a big way.
MATTHEW TEUTIMEZ: When these settlers came out here–their small time frame of knowing how our land works–they said, “Eh, let’s get close to the rivers. We don’t get much water anyway.” And then we have our floods.
VIVIAN LE: Remember, the LA River could be dry for long stretches of time. And this was especially true after settlers depleted the watershed. But it was only a matter of time before Los Angeles had another big, rainy season.
GILLIAN JACOBS: To make matters worse, the topography of Los Angeles County was practically designed to flood.
PATT MORRISON: The principal city of Los Angeles sits in the bowl that’s surrounded by the ocean and then by mountains and hills. And all of the rains that come to those areas over the course of a winter have nowhere to go except down–and we are down. That’s where we are.
VIVIAN LE: What makes the La River’s flood path especially dangerous is just how quickly the water can move once it gets going. The watershed begins high up in the Santa Susana Mountains, the San Gabriel Mountains, and the San Fernando Valley, and drops to a very low altitude in the blink of an eye.
GILLIAN JACOBS: And because of the steep decline, that water picks up incredible speed.
PATT MORRISON: Now, the Mississippi River and the LA River both drop about the same distance from source to mouth. The difference is the Mississippi River takes 2,000 miles to get from way up there to way down there. We do it in 50 miles. 50 miles. So, it’s like the difference between a wheelchair ramp and a water slide. And it all comes down. And it brings it into this funnel–all of the tributaries of the Los Angeles River. And so, when it rains a lot, the water comes shooting down off of those hills like something crazy.
GILLIAN JACOBS: In 1914, the year after the Owens Valley aqueduct opened, LA was hit with a major flood. It caused so much damage that there was a public outcry for the city to address its flooding problems.
VIVIAN LE: But did the people of Los Angeles learn their lesson about building right up to the banks of the flood prone river?
GILLIAN JACOBS: No!
VIVIAN LE: That’s right, Gillian. And 20 years later, in 1934, it happened again–only worse. In the last week of December, in 1933, Los Angeles was slammed with a heavy winter storm. And on New Year’s Day, the banks of the LA River swelled beyond their capacity.
PATT MORRISON: And Woody Guthrie wrote a song about the great Los Angeles flood.
WOODY GUTHRIE: A cloud burst hit our city And it swept away our homes; And a hundred souls was taken In that fatal New Year’s flood.
GILLIAN JACOBS: This second flood gained national attention and prompted the federal government to step in. In 1936, Congress passed a law that gave the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers authority over the LA River to build flood control measures.
VIVIAN LE: But it was a third flood just a couple of years later that would lead to the river’s downfall.
PATT MORRISON: 1938 was the flood that essentially doomed the Los Angeles river to no longer be a natural river.
GILLIAN JACOBS: March 2nd, 1938, is to this day the wettest day on record for Los Angeles and led to the most devastating flood in the city’s history. In current day value, the flood caused about $1.7 billion worth of damage. and an estimated 115 people were killed.
NEWS REPORT: Disaster, destruction, and death descend on five Southern California counties. Tons of water submerged 30,000 square miles of populous beach…
PATT MORRISON: And in the 1938 flood, the prop department of Warner Brothers was very badly damaged by the rising river waters. One of the things that got carried away was a big plywood whale that had been used in a movie. And so for that one minute, there was a whale in the Los Angeles River, even though it was a plywood movie whale, which sums up Los Angeles so beautifully.
GILLIAN JACOBS: This third flood also brought the city’s biggest event of the year to a standstill.
PATT MORRISON: This was in March of 1938. What happens in March–or usually did? The Oscars. They could not get to the Oscars. Now, we’re talking crisis. Three days they had to postpone the Oscars because the movie stars were stranded.
GILLIAN JACOBS: That was the final straw. Los Angeles had had enough.
PATT MORRISON: We have to tame this killer river–this nightmare river. Those were the words you saw in the newspaper headlines at the time.
GILLIAN JACOBS: Los Angeles residents were tired of living under the constant threat of flood. City leaders also hated the fact that the expanse of the river’s floodplain took precious real estate off the market.
VIVIAN LE: So, the city decided to take its most drastic step yet. It would carve out a 51-mile set pathway and seal the river into place with concrete. The river’s sole purpose would be to funnel stormwater out to sea as quickly and efficiently as possible.
GILLIAN JACOBS: Taking this enormous watershed and packing it into a narrow, concrete channel was an incredibly ambitious plan. But the United States at the time was in the depths of the Great Depression. And when the Army Corps of Engineers was tasked with this channelization project, it put 17,000 people to work.
PATT MORRISON: And so, you had a massive government works project that was put underway, where lawyers and dentists were out there working on paving the Los Angeles River.
GILLIAN JACOBS: Over the next 21 years, the Army Corps of Engineers moved 20 million cubic yards of earth, poured 2 million cubic yards of concrete, and placed nearly 150,000 pounds of reinforced steel.
JENNY PRICE: It remains the largest public works project west of the Mississippi.
VIVIAN LE: This is Jenny Price, a writer and public artist. The rivers’ trees were scraped away, its green spaces ripped out, its shorelines removed, its curves straightened. By 1960, the river had been completely transformed and then barricaded behind chain link fencing.
JENNY PRICE: They not only channelized the river and cemented the river and paved the river, but they buried it, right? They dug the channel and put the river into it. So, it’s deep. You’re in this kind of cavernous space.
GILLIAN JACOBS: Trapping the river into a secure path meant that real estate developers could build properties like never before.
JENNY PRICE: A lot of the La River Basin was kind of wetlands that would flood seasonally. South LA was wet. West LA was wet. The Valley was very, very wet.
VIVIAN LE: But thanks to the concrete channel, all of those different corners of the city were now dry.
JENNY PRICE: If you look at when those suburbs in West LA and the Valley and South LA really mushroomed, it’s right after they concreted the LA River.
GILLIAN JACOBS: The channelization of the river was an extreme–even violent–approach to flood control. But in a way, the concrete did what city leaders at the time wanted it to do. The county so far has not experienced a flood as devastating as the one in 1938.
VIVIAN LE: And with the river fastened into place, Los Angeles was also able to urbanize at a breakneck speed. Now, nearly 1 million people live within a mile of the river.
GILLIAN JACOBS: But when Los Angeles traded its natural river for real estate, it got a lot more than it bargained for because, in the process, we’ve created a slew of other environmental and social problems.
JENNY PRICE: You’ve taken a river, and you’ve shut it off from its river basin. So, water can flow into, but not out of the river. So, the river no longer replenishes the soil with nutrients, the aquifers with water, and the beaches with sand. At the same time, you have designed the infrastructure to get as much water as possible into the river as you can to drain all of the storm water into the storm sewers, into the tributaries, into the river, and now to the Pacific Ocean. So, how does LA manage its water? It takes all the water that it gets for free from the sky, which we call rain, and designed its infrastructure to move all of that water as fast as possible out into the Pacific Ocean. And then it spends, like, a billion dollars a year to import from watersheds all across the west. It’s a significant ecological cost to all those watersheds. It’s insane. It makes absolutely no sense.
GILLIAN JACOBS: By the time the project was completed in 1960, most people thought of the LA River as a flood control channel. Generations of Angelenos grew up without ever realizing that once had a powerful river and that it made this city possible.
CHRISTINA MARTINEZ: My kids are teenagers now, and you’re driving around downtown LA and you see the sign “Los Angeles River.”
GILLIAN JACOBS: This is Christina Martinez, secretary for the Gabrieleño Band of Mission Indians, Kizh Nation.
CHRISTINA MARTINEZ: And last time we were downtown, they were like, “Mom, there’s a river?” I said, “Well, when we get to it, look over the edge, and tell me what you see.” And they’re like, “There’s nothing there. It’s just concrete.” I said, “Yep.” I said, “Look at how wide that concrete ditch is. Imagine all that concrete gone. And that was full of water at one point.” So, my kids will never know what the LA River looked like. You can only imagine.
GILLIAN JACOBS: What was your relationship to the river growing up? Did you have one?
CHRISTINA MARTINEZ: None. None. That’s all I know as well–just the concrete jungle of it all. Yep.
VIVIAN LE: After the LA River was paved, it remained mostly ignored for decades. Even though it ran straight through the heart of Los Angeles County, people forgot it was there. For all intents and purposes, the river was just another piece of infrastructure.
JENNY PRICE: There was a proposal by a state assemblyman to use the river as a freeway. During the dry season, there was a proposal to paint the channel blue.
VIVIAN LE: It was difficult to see the river as anything other than a punchline. The word “river” seemed like a weird euphemism for this concrete ditch that people actively avoided.
GILLIAN JACOBS: But in the 1980s, 20+ years after the LA River was paved, something slowly began to change. Some people in Los Angeles started looking at the river a little differently. They began to question whether the river had to be like this.
VIVIAN LE: The first and loudest of these people was an artist named Lewis MacAdams.
PATT MORRISON: He was a poet and a performance artist in a pork pie hat. And his first realizations about the LA River came when he and his friends had been smoking a little something-something and went down to the river, which was fenced off, and got some wire cutters and went on in.
VIVIAN LE: From that moment on, MacAdams was determined to be an advocate for the LA River. In 1986, he founded an organization called Friends of the Los Angeles River, which was made up of other artists and architects. They made it their mission to get Angelenos and policymakers to start thinking and caring about their river again.
JENNY PRICE: The way that we move water through the Los Angeles region is enormously insane and enormously screwed up. But as screwed up as it is, the LA River is still the central artery of the major watershed and has never ceased to be that.
GILLIAN JACOBS: Eventually, the LA River went from being a niche artistic project to a mainstream one. Other groups and individuals started asking questions like, “What if we restored some of the natural habitat along its concrete banks? What if the river could be part of a solution to our constant drought? What if the river became a place that people wanted to visit rather than avoid? What if we built some damn parks?”
VIVIAN LE: MacAdams and other river advocates believed that, before anything physical could happen, Angelenos had to change the way they were thinking and speaking about the LA River. If we wanted people to stop treating the river like a flood control channel, we had to stop calling it a “flood control channel.”
JENNY PRICE: There’s a famous story where Lewis was at some meeting. And whenever someone from the county or the course said “flood control channel,” he said “river.” It was like, “Flood control channel.” “River!”‘ “flood control channel.” “River!”
CANDICE DICKENS-RUSSELL: Yeah. It’s the power of words, right? The power of owning words and owning the river as a river.
GILLIAN JACOBS: This is Candice Dickens-Russell, president and CEO of Friends of the Los Angeles River.
CANDICE DICKENS-RUSSELL: It’s the nature versus built, And I think that’s the thing that changes in people’s minds. When they talk about it as a “river,” it’s something that deserves to be here as opposed to “flood control channel.” “Oh, they just built that so that we could solve some problems.”
VIVIAN LE: After years and years of grassroots activism, by the early 2000s, the river–to be honest–still looked like a concrete monstrosity. But things were actually getting better.
GILLIAN JACOBS: A few pocket parks had sprung up along the river. And it helped that years earlier, a water reclamation plant opened upstream, which meant that the river actually always had at least some water in it. It was by no means the Danube–you still probably couldn’t pay people to get into the water–but it was an improvement.
VIVIAN LE: But in 2006, right in the middle of the Los Angeles Rivers comeback, a Supreme Court decision pulled the emergency brake on all of that positive momentum.
JENNY PRICE: It imperiled the wetlands in the La River Basin.
GILLIAN JACOBS: It was a case called Rapanos v. the United States, and it challenged protections granted by the Clean Water Act.
VIVIAN LE: The Clean Water Act states that it’s illegal to discharge any pollutant into “navigable waters.” What this case in particular argued was that wetlands and ephemeral rivers, like the LA River, didn’t count as “navigable waters” because they dried out for a lot of the year.
GILLIAN JACOBS: It basically came down to can you float a boat on it? Yes or no? If not, you can dump pollution into it.
JENNY PRICE: The upstream folks–conservative upstream folks–finally got what they’ve been wanting for a long time, which is that they wanted to declassify most wetlands as being protected under the Clean Water Act.
GILLIAN JACOBS: Sure enough, in 2008, the Army Corps of Engineers–who had jurisdiction over a lot of the river–ruled that of the 51 miles of river less than four were navigable and therefore worthy of protection.
VIVIAN LE: This decision was essentially granting permission to polluters and developers to treat the river like crap again. Taking away its clean water protections was basically accepting that the LA River would never be more than a flood control channel, setting back decades of forward-thinking momentum achieved by environmentalists.
GILLIAN JACOBS: If this decision had happened 30 years earlier, perhaps nobody in Los Angeles would’ve put up a fight. But after decades of activism, the LA River finally had some advocates and one unexpected ally.
HEATHER WYLIE: Hi, my name is Heather Wylie. I worked for the Army Corps of Engineers. I left as a whistleblower…
GILLIAN JACOBS: At the time, Heather Wylie, who declined an interview for this story, was working as a biologist within the Army Corps of Engineers.
HEATHER WYLIE: And my agency, the Army Corps of Engineers, decided to take it upon themselves…
GILLIAN JACOBS: When she learned that her organization was about to strip the LA River of its clean water protections, she got to work.
VIVIAN LE: Wylie leaked the information to a number of top environmental lawyers as well as the House Oversight Committee. At the same time, she was also furiously researching to find any proof that the river actually was “traditional navigable.”
GILLIAN JACOBS: Which led her to a YouTube video called George’s LA River Commute.
VIVIAN LE: It’s a short comedy video that was posted on YouTube. You see a goatee guy in a suit trapped in his car in standstill LA traffic. Out of frustration, he gets out of his car, hops in a kayak, and rafts down the LA River–all set to the music of Green River by CCR.
GEORGE WOLFE: We were coming at it from just, “Well, isn’t this goofy? Isn’t this funny? Here’s LA traffic. Of course, everybody relates to that. And here’s this guy who manages to get off the freeway and get in the boat.” And that just seemed like a quintessential LA situation.
VIVIAN LE: This is George Wolf–the George of George’s LA River Commute. He and a friend had posted the video for fun, thinking that just a handful of people would see it. But when Heather Wylie clicked on that YouTube link, she realized that this could be the way to prove the LA River was, in fact, navigable. So, she called up George immediately.
GEORGE WOLFE: And it took Heather sort of hashing some of this stuff out in a very kind of manic way over the phone… She’s like, “I saw the video of you on the river, and you have to get out there! What are you doing? You got to get the news! You have to get this covered! And we need to see people in boats on the river!” And I’m like, “Who are you again?”
GILLIAN JACOBS: After determining that she was not, in fact, an Army Corps spy, George signed on to help. He would play one part in Wylie’s plan to save the river’s clean water protections.
GEORGE WOLFE: In her mind, she was like, “Oh, here are these boaters. That’ll be one part of the whole strategy.” And she was already reaching out to her congressman. And then he’s going to approach it from this whole other very large political angle. And how that works with the Supreme Court–I don’t know.
GILLIAN JACOBS (FIELD TAPE): You’re a guy in a kayak.
GEORGE WOLFE: I’m a guy in a boat, you know? And we tend to be simpler folks.
GILLIAN JACOBS: George assembled a group of a couple dozen kayakers, including Wylie, for a three day kayaking trip down all 51 miles of the river. They scheduled the trip for the dead of summer, when the water runs at its lowest, just to prove that–even under the harshest conditions–it was possible.
VIVIAN LE: And in July of 2008, the fleet launched at the river’s headwaters at Canoga Park High School, amongst the concrete, chain link fences, and “Do Not Enter” signs.
GEORGE WOLFE: Inevitably, the helicopters show up. the helicopters swoop around. And then before long, a couple of policemen on foot show up.
VIVIAN LE: Not long into the trip, the police stopped the caravan to see if they had permits to be on the river. They didn’t have one to kayak the river. But as it turns out, George’s wife, Thea, was filming a documentary about the whole river trip. And they were actually able to present a film permit instead.
GEORGE WOLFE: Because it’s LA, it’s easier to get a film permit to go on the LA River than it is to get any other kind of permit to access the river. So, then they looked it over, and they were like, “Well, they have a film permit. I don’t know. Who are we to stop them?”
GILLIAN JACOBS: And so, they carried on through the San Fernando Valley, around the movie studios, through downtown LA, avoiding discarded refrigerators and shopping carts. Along the way, they could see the soft bottom portions of the river, where the concrete refused to take and trees and plants managed to find a way up despite the channelization.
GEORGE WOLFE: And yet you see the hope because you see the trees and the brush all pop up through it. You see majestic birds–like the great white herons and the egrets and kingfishers and those red-legged stilt birds–and you see owls and hawks and an amazing panorama of life going on. And that’s the thing that makes the LA River. That river is the weird juxtaposition of stuff.
GILLIAN JACOBS: They watched as the walls of the river itself morphed as they headed south–from narrow, towering, concrete walls, to a wide-open, trapezoidal channel, to that final open stretch out to Queensway Bay and Long Beach.
GEORGE WOLFE: We could see the Queen Mary in the distance, which was kind of ironic. Here we were in these little, teeny-tiny boats; and there was this majestic ocean liner, awaiting us at the very end. It seemed appropriate as an ending point.
VIVIAN LE: After a round of celebratory pizzas in the parking lot, the group headed home.
GILLIAN JACOBS: George and his team collected data and measurements during the trip and wrote up their experience into a big report.
GEORGE WOLFE: And we sent it off to the EPA and then didn’t hear anything.
GILLIAN JACOBS: It took two years, but in 2010, the EPA stepped in and overruled the Army Corps of Engineers, declaring that all 51 miles of the LA River were navigable and therefore would keep all of its Clean Water Act protections.
CANDICE DICKENS-RUSSELL: We were all just kind of like… You know that last scene in The Wiz where they’re singing Brand New Day and dancing in the streets? It felt like that. We were just like, “Whoo! The LA River is navigable!”
GILLIAN JACOBS: This is Candice Dickens-Russell, again, CEO of Friends of the LA River.
CANDICE DICKENS-RUSSELL: It was a buzz. It kind of rippled through the office, and everybody was just like, “Oh my gosh, this thing just happened.” It was a big deal. It was a big deal because it meant that there were going to be some formal and very real protections for the river that were coming in.
GILLIAN JACOBS: The kayaking stunt helped to restore the river’s environmental protections and renewed a lot of interest in it. But river advocates say that there is still a lot to be done when it comes to revitalization.
CANDICE DICKENS-RUSSELL: The community surrounding the river has been surveyed so many times. They’ve been asked what they want so many times, and so little of that has come to fruition. We have work to do. We have serious work to do.
VIVIAN LE: The river itself passes through 17 different cities as well as county and federal jurisdiction. It also impacts a number of different communities. So, there are a lot of conflicting ideas for how to make the river a better place for Angelenos or how to do it in a way that respects native ecology or how to do it in a way that avoids green gentrification or how to do it equitably. It’s slow work.
GILLIAN JACOBS: But although there has been disagreement on what revitalization should look like or how we’ll get there, there is one thing that all of these agencies and organizations and advocacy groups and individuals and kayakers can agree on: the LA River is a river.
KAYAK TOUR GUIDE: I’m going to hand out some paddles to you all.
GILLIAN JACOBS (FIELD TAPE): Oh my gosh. Listener, we are scrambling.
VIVIAN LE: After George Wolfe helped to reestablish the river’s navigability status, he founded La River Expeditions, which leads kayak tours at certain spots of the LA River. Since then, the group has gotten around 15 to 20,000 people into boats and out on the water.
GILLIAN JACOBS: Last summer, Vivian and I were two of them, which–for very indoor people–was a huge gamble.
VIVIAN LE (FIELD TAPE): Can you say something for me?
GILLIAN JACOBS (FIELD TAPE): One, two, one, two, one, two, one two. I’m very afraid. Just kidding.
VIVIAN LE: We met up at the Sepulveda Basin, which is one of the few natural sections of the river that was never concreted. To be quite honest, the launch site was not much to look at. It was a wide-open, scraggly overflow zone, a big concrete overpass was blocking part of the river view, and parked along the banks were some shopping carts filled with scrap.
GILLIAN JACOBS (FIELD TAPE): I’m on the river. I’m wearing a helmet. I am observing. I see a pipe–a rusty pipe–ahead.
VIVIAN LE: But once we rounded the bend, under the belly of that big concrete overpass, you could see it. It’s still a river full of life.
GILLIAN JACOBS (FIELD TAPE): Whoa. Canadian geese flying above.
GILLIAN JACOBS: And although city leaders tried to bury it, it’s still here.
VIVIAN LE (FIELD TAPE): There’s fish here. There’s a bunch of little fish here–a bunch of little baby guys.
GILLIAN JACOBS: You can get a small sense of what the LA River once was. And even though it represents so much of what we did wrong in Los Angeles, it is also a reminder that we could still get it right.
GILLIAN JACOBS (FIELD TAPE): It’s beautiful. A flying egret.
GARY: See that egret?
GILLIAN JACOBS (FIELD TAPE): Yeah, gorgeous. Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous.
VIVIAN LE: After the break, Gillian comes back to talk more about the LA River. Stay with us. So, I am back with producer and friend of the show Gillian Jacobs. Hello, friend.
GILLIAN JACOBS: Hi, friend!
VIVIAN LE: How are you?
GILLIAN JACOBS: I’m good. How are you doing?
VIVIAN LE: I’m doing great. Yes. So, we like to use these codas to chat about the things that we came across while reporting our stories, but for whatever reason, they don’t make it into the episode. And today we actually wanted to talk about two things–the first being a story about what the LA River could have been.
GILLIAN JACOBS: Yes. So, in our reporting, we discovered that in the 1930s, as we all know, Los Angeles City leaders turned to concrete as the solution to the city’s flooding issues. But you and I learned that it didn’t have to be this way. There was actually an alternative idea for flood control being thrown around a few years earlier that would’ve created a very different Los Angeles.
PATT MORRISON: In the late ’20s, early ’30s, the city and, I think, the Chamber of Commerce commissioned a study. And they said, “Look at Los Angeles. We’re on this point of incredible growth. What should the city look like?”
GILLIAN JACOBS: That’s Patt Morrison again, author of Rio LA. So, she says that, in the late 1920s, as Los Angeles was experiencing this super rapid growth, the LA Chamber of Commerce actually had all of these concerns about all of the things that came with population growth–stuff like pollution and traffic and disappearing public park space. And there were already, by this point, conversations about constraining the LA River. And some of the Chamber worried that this approach would just make these other issues way worse.
VIVIAN LE: Which was absolutely correct.
GILLIAN JACOBS: They were dead on. Dead on! And also, listen to the 99PI episode about America’s lost public transit if you want to hear more about why we don’t have better public transportation in Los Angeles.
VIVIAN LE: Yes. Shout out to our own show.
GILLIAN JACOBS: So, okay, I’m taking you back–time machine. So, at the time, the Chamber formed a subcommittee of about a hundred different high profile Angelenos. One member was the director, Cecil B. Demil. Another was the actress Mary Pickford–a very important person in the early history of Hollywood. Google her if you’ve never heard of her.
VIVIAN LE: Please do.
GILLIAN JACOBS: And this committee commissioned a proposal for the urban redesign of Los Angeles that would tackle all of these other issues as well as the flooding problem.
PATT MORRISON: And when I finally saw it, I started to cry because it was the city that we never got that we should have gotten. It was called the Emerald Necklace.
GILLIAN JACOBS: So, the Emerald Necklace proposal was co-created by the sons of Frederick Law Olmsted, who was actually the landscape architect that designed Central Park. And Olmsted Sr. designed something very similar in Boston decades earlier. And like that plan, the Los Angeles Emerald Necklace imagined a series of interconnected parks and greenways along the coast and all throughout the city. And it would’ve created a more natural river path and also absorbed flood overflow.
PATT MORRISON: And if you look at it, keeping that intact–even marginally intact as green belts and as overflow zones–would have made this a paradise. As much as we love it now, we know it is an imperfect paradise.
GILLIAN JACOBS: I don’t know about “paradise,” but it would’ve been awesome. And the Olmsted plan wouldn’t have just provided protection from floodwater. It would’ve connected the entire city by green space. And rather than funneling out precious rainwater to the ocean, a lot of it would be able to absorb back into the water table through these parks.
VIVIAN LE: Right. Yeah. That’s so sad to think about. It would’ve solved so many issues. So, what ended up happening with the Olmsted plan?
GILLIAN JACOBS: Well–unsurprising–the proposal was shot down immediately. It was actually killed by the Chamber of Commerce itself, which was the entity that commissioned the plan. And almost no one even knew it existed for decades.
PATT MORRISON: It took too much stuff off the market. And it was the Depression; we couldn’t afford it. And so, now we have to live with the consequences a hundred years on.
VIVIAN LE: It is striking how the Olmsted plan was the exact opposite approach to flood management that we ended up with. And it would’ve created a fundamentally different Los Angeles. You and I both live here. And it’s not that Angelenos don’t value park space, but it does feel like built into Los Angeles is the feeling that this kind of public space is not a priority for the city itself.
GILLIAN JACOBS: And you have good reason for that feeling. So, the trust for public land puts out a park score, rating the hundred most populous cities in the country. And Los Angeles ranked 88 out of 100, which is…
VIVIAN LE: That’s really bad. That’s such a bummer. I mean, you can feel it, but that is such a bummer.
GILLIAN JACOBS: I know. We know it’s bad. I didn’t know it was that bad. And I did want to say that the Olmsted plan has served as an inspiration for some of the proposals to revitalize the LA River. So, one day, we might see some elements of that design. I don’t know. We’ll see. I mean, don’t make Patt Morrison cry. That’s just what I want to say to LA power figures.
VIVIAN LE: Yes. Protect Patt Morrison at all costs, please.
GILLIAN JACOBS: Please! Don’t make her ever cry ever again.
VIVIAN LE: Yeah. So, maybe one day we’ll see some reflection of the Emerald Necklace in Los Angeles if we could ever get our act together. And that’s the good news. That’s the good news portion of the coda. And it originally was going to be the only thing we were going to talk about, but something very recently happened in the news. And it felt like it was important that we talked about it because it could possibly impact the future of the LA River.
GILLIAN JACOBS: Yes. So, a big part of the main episode was this key moment in 2008 when the La River’s clean water protections were put in jeopardy because of an interpretation of a Supreme Court decision. So, Vivian, do you want to take away the recap?
VIVIAN LE: Sure. Yes. So, the Clean Water Act protects “navigable bodies of water.” That’s the language of the law itself. And then in 2008, the Army Corps of Engineers declared the LA River non-navigable. But eventually, the EPA stepped in and overruled the Army Corps of Engineers and declared that the LA River was navigable again, which preserved its Clean Water Act protections.
GILLIAN JACOBS: Yes. So, the EPA was able to step in and preserve the LA River’s clean water protections because of this long-standing precedent called the Chevron doctrine. The Chevron doctrine basically meant that when a law is vague or ambiguous, federal courts need to defer to an agency like the EPA to interpret that law. So, the reason why the LA River was able to keep its clean water protections was because the Clean Water Act had this ambiguous language: “navigable waters.” So, the EPA had the power to interpret the meaning of “navigable.”
VIVIAN LE: Right. Because there was some confusion about the language of the Clean Water Act, scientists and biologists and engineers that work within the EPA–as an entity–they were allowed to make the decision of whether the LA River specifically was worth protecting rather than in court by some non-expert judge.
GILLIAN JACOBS: Yes. But while we were reporting this story, the Supreme Court overturned the Chevron doctrine. And so, now it’s not clear how long the EPA’s protections will last.
VIVIAN LE: Which is super scary. That is really scary.
GILLIAN JACOBS: This is my version of a horror film. We don’t know if this is going to have an impact on the LA River. And there is a possibility that someone else in the future will challenge the river’s clean water protections and this ends up in court–but maybe not. I don’t know.
VIVIAN LE: Right. And it’s important to note that this ruling has other huge implications, too, outside of the LA River–protections for other ephemeral waterways, like wetlands and creeks, can be challenged. It also means that all sorts of federal regulations could end up in court–from the Clean Air Act, climate protections, endangered species protections… So, it’s a mess.
GILLIAN JACOBS: And this is why activism and raising awareness of the river and the importance of the river is so key. And that’s why all the measures that people have been taking for decades are important to preserve.
VIVIAN LE: Right. And those protections start with people actually knowing about their rivers and these waterways. That’s where kind of the caring starts. And the activism goes from there. So–yeah–I know it’s not the happiest note to leave this episode on, but…
GILLIAN JACOBS: Well, we had to tell you, dear listener.
VIVIAN LE: You gotta know. It’s important that you know. Well, thank you so, so much for reporting the story with us. And thank you for overcoming your fears and getting into a kayak.
GILLIAN JACOBS: Oh, my gosh.
VIVIAN LE: I know you were super worried about that.
GILLIAN JACOBS: I’m just glad that this podcast does not have a YouTube channel because otherwise Vivian would be showing footage of me just failing at kayaking.
VIVIAN LE: You did great.
GILLIAN JACOBS: Only for you, Vivian, and only for 99PI will I get into a kayak.
VIVIAN LE: Well, thank you, Gillian.
GILLIAN JACOBS: Thank you, Vivian!
VIVIAN LE: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Gillian Jacobs and me, Vivian Le. Edited by Kelly Prime. Mix by Martin Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real with additional music by Mya Byrne. Fact-checking by Graham Hacia. Special thanks this week to George Wolfe, Eileen Takata, and Andy Salas.Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor.Our intern is Nikita Apte. The rest of our team includes Chris Berube, Jayson De Leon, Emmett FitzGerald, Gabriella Gladney, Christopher Johnson, Lasha Madan, Jeyca Maldonado-Medina, Neena Pathak, Joe Rosenberg, and of course–the bossman–Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered 371 miles and six blocks north of Los Angeles, in the Pandora building… in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites as well as our brand new Discord server. There’s a lot of nice people talking about architecture and complaining about Robert Moses there. There’s a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.
GILLIAN JACOBS (FIELD TAPE): Okay. I can do this. I can do it. I can do it. Come on, baby! Come on, baby! I’m getting it! Hello! That was, like, a Level One rapids, and it nearly killed me.
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