In with the Old!
With all the talk about L.A.'s long-overlooked river brimming the dailies and fluttering over dinner parties, it's no wonder things are finally starting to happen. Heck, even our good friend Jay Babcock of Arthur magazine has started his own L.A. River blog. Of course modifications to the city's river are not new. It's seen everything from wanderin' grizzly bears to real Italian vineyards along its shores, and that's just in the couple hundred years anyone's been paying attention.
Back in April of 1909, the "Federated Improvement Association" proposed throwing up a dam across the river about where the 10 Freeway crosses it now. Behind this dam a lake would build up, eventually stretching all the way to Elysian Park and "kept at a depth that will permit navigation by sail 
boats, motor boats, canoes and other small craft." "From the top of the banks to the water's edge will be built beautiful terraces with myriads of flowers, palms, shrubbery and other greenery as artistic embellishments," reported the Los Angeles Examiner. "The banks will then compare well with the famous Hudson River."
Unfortunately the banks today are mostly cement and not all that attractive, a fact which the Friends of the L.A. River and other green-leaning folks are all too aware of. They would like to see the Army-engineered flood controls dismantled and the riverbed restored to some semblance of a natural habitat. This is a great idea, if a little baby step-ish.
For one thing, the river happens to have several freeways as it's close companions on much of its journey to the sea. If you've been down there, you'll know. . . the noise is unbearable. Never mind the exhaust fumes seeping through the chain-link fence and down into the channel. Look at the end of the Arroyo, once a beautiful channel with old oaks and meadows. . . now with a six-lane freeway jammed right up it. Throwing a couple parks alongside the gridlock just doesn't make it nature again.
You see, the L.A. River has the misfortune of running through some of the most densely populated and exploited regions of the Southland. These areas are getting crummier and more congested every day as developers throw up wretchedly designed structures for quick profit. Look around, nearly every bit of space not graced by a building is paved over so people can pilot their own personal combustion engines hither and thither. And ruthlessly assailed by architectual monstrosities like downtown's Orsini fortress, the unique combination of Old World Spanish and blandishly "modern" that makes L.A. look like L.A. is rapidly vanishing (or at least becoming hidden behind really big buildings and freeway exchanges). So an extremely made-over river? Sure it might look good off in the distance, wending its way past Home Depot, when gazing down from a desk in the US Bank tower, but down here at ground zero, L.A.'s turning butt ugly.
And of course it's only going to get worse as the population and development expands and expands unchecked. The river, pretty as it may become, will be no match for the din and discharge from the hordes of humanity that surround it. So here's an idea. Let's better the FoLAR model. How about Friends of the Corner of Figueroa and César Chávez Streets? Or Friends of that Little Scrap of Land that used to be a Vacant Lot until some Jackass built 200-units of "artists' lofts" on it? I'll bet neighborhood grassroots organizations could restore L.A. to it's original state, block by block, in just a few decades. Look for scrub brush "public areas" and oozing tar pits, unfenced and accessible by all Angelenos. Look for activists gleefully eradicating "non-native species" like "commuters" and "top producers;" dismantling McMansions and Coscos; and ripping out sprinkler systems with their bare hands with a frenzied ecological zeal. Again grizzlies will outnumber gringos. Out with the new, in with the old!