Stream Restoration Planned at Hazard Park

Remnant Wetlands in Hazard Park (April 2009 Photo)

There’s an effort afoot to restore a degraded streambed in one of Los Angeles City’s oldest parks. The 25-acre Hazard Park, named after Henry Thomas Hazard who was the mayor of Los Angeles from 1889 to 1892, became a city park in 1884. It’s located on the east side – along Soto Street, between Valley and Marengo, near County USC Medical Center.

After being a creek for milliena, the Hazard Park creek site became part of the city’s zanja system – municipal ditches for irrigation and water delivery. It subsequently was a railroad spur track (splitting the park into two) for the Pacific Electric streetcars/trains. The rails have been removed, and a very degraded stream is slowly making a comeback.

Today, there are telltale signs of riparian habitat, including cattails and dragonflies, and even some standing water, during the wetter months… but it’s rather weedy and uninviting for most 2-leggeds. To visit the wetlands site, you can pretty much enter Hazard Park anywhere and proceed downhill. One way is to go to the Recreation Center (where Playground Street turns into Norfolk Street – 2230 Norfolk Street, Los Angeles CA 90033.) Go south into the park, between the Rec Center and the baseball fields. Pass the tennis courts, then turn left onto the path between the tennis courts and the tot lot playground. The ground dips down into a low weedy area. To get to the wettest parts, turn right and head down (south) toward the Charlotte Street Bridge.

Various groups – including the city of Los Angeles, the Hazard Park Advisory Board, BlueGreen, North East Trees, the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers Watershed Council, the Sierra Club, and others – have done work to clean up, plan and publicize restoration efforts… but there’s still plenty of work and funding needed. Lately, with funding from the Sierra Club, the Hazard Park Teen Club, working with Carrie Sutkin, Val Marquez, and Carmelo Alvarez have produced a Hazard Times newsletter (which included some paid illustration work by me.) I couldn’t find the newsletter on-line, but they’ll probably send you one if you ask. To get involved in the Hazard Park stream restoration efforts, email Scott Johnson at outwardscott {at} yahoo {dot} com.

Sunset Magazine Bikes The River

At a checkstand near you!

The Los Angeles River bike path hits the big time!  The latest issue of Sunset Magazine urges its readers to get on their bikes and head over to Atwater Village, see some art, eat some pasta, and do some yoga.  They also recommend that Creek Freak Joe Linton’s famous multi-thousand-seller book.  Spring is actually a great time to bike or walk the river.  The willows have leafed out. Flowers are in bloom. Lot of young birds have hatched.  Why am I sitting in front of the computer?

If you don’t want to go alone, volunteer at a clean-up or bike the River Ride!

(Thanks to Jenny Price for getting Sunset onto our urban river.)

Redevelopment along the Cornfield Yards in 1954

1954 Ann Redevelopment Project

A big thanks to Edgar Garcia of the city of Los Angeles Planning Department’s historic preservation team for this very-late-breaking exclusive story. Though the news is 55 years old – and a bit of stretch to claim that it really belongs here (it’s more a story of near-river redevelopment than a river story,) Creek Freak found it interesting and decided to pass it along.

There are implications for today – especially for the city’s Cornfield Arroyo Seco Specific Plan which proposes undoing quite a bit of what seemed like a good idea many years ago. It’s also scary in its casual cold language about removing homes and displacing people; making more clear why “urban renewal” and even “redevelopment” have such a bad reputations among most under-served communities today. It’s a cautionary note for those of us who would use redevelopment tools to improve our city – we need to be careful to consider the impacts of our actions, and how our actions will appear in the future. Hopefully plans being made and implemented today won’t appear as shortsighted as this past example does to me today.

What the Ann Street neighborhood looked like in 1954

In the 1954 publication Accomplishments: City Planning Commission, one of the accomplishments touted is the approval of the Ann Redevelopment Plan, signed into law on September 3, 1954, by Los Angeles Mayor Norris Poulson. The Ann Redevelopment Plan is named as such after Ann Street, which runs perpendicular to Spring Street and Main Street, from the Cornfields (now Los Angeles State Historic Park) to William Mead Homes. The 33-acre plan area is bounded by North Spring, Mesnager, North Main, Llewellyn, and Rondout Streets. The Ann plan was the first redevelopment plan approved in the state of California.

The document describes the “Conditions Within Project Area” as follows:
- “66% of the 102 residential structures are substandard, many of which are unfit for human occupancy.”
- “Crime, juvenile delinquency, and disease rates are considerably above the city-wide average.”
It further concludes that “[t]he existing residential structures… should be eliminated at the earliest possible moment in the interest of public welfare.”

The maps tell the story better than my words do. The existing map shows plenty of housing… the redevelopment map shows consolidation into what today might be derisively called “super-blocks.”

It always seemed odd to me that William Mead Homes (a ~500-unit public housing project owned by the Los Angeles city Housing Authority) is an isolated island of housing surrounded on all sides by industrial development. Well… William Mead Homes weren’t alone until the city took out the adjacent housing via the Ann Redevelopment Plan. The maps also show that there were plenty more adjacent commercial establishments than today’s single liquor store.

A couple other interesting things show up on these maps:
- On the upper left of the existing land use map, between Mesnager and Sotello, there is an unlabeled pair of dotted lines that, I think, indicate the location of the pedestrian bridge that extended across the Cornfield Yards from Spring Street to Broadway. (Bridge photo here.) It looks like the bridge connected with a fair amount of housing – perhaps where railroad workers lived who commuted on foot to jobs at the Cornfield Yards and/or on North Broadway?
- Both maps show the City of L.A. animal shelter (at the intersection of Ann and Naud.) This is the shelter that gave the name “dogtown” to the area, and to the gang located there. The animal shelter (now the North Central Care Center) was relocated to Lincoln Heights, but the name dogtown can still be found graffitied on walls in the vicinity of where the dog pound used to be.

To make things conducive to industrial development, the Ann Redevelopment Plan calls for “[r]elocation of present residents,” “[r]emoval of all existing residential structures,” and “vacating unnecessary streets and widening others to suitable widths.” Sadly, banishing housing and vacating and widening streets is exactly the opposite of what the Cornfield Arroyo Seco Specific Plan (CASP) plans today. The CASP wisely proposes to add housing back into the area (mainly mixed-use – which, as the map shows was there before – some directly across from the Cornfields), to narrow streets and to dedicate small-scale new steets to create a walkable grid. Perhaps the historical grid can be restored – maybe start with the now-vanished Shieffelin and Beale Streets? Were those 1950′s street closures revocable?

Daylighting in the Heart of Seoul: The Cheong Gye Cheon Project

Last week I attended the standing-room only talk entitled “The Cheong Gye Cheong: a good example of sustainable development” by Dr. In-Keun Lee.  Dr. Lee is the Assistant Mayor for Infrastructure for Seoul, South Korea.

For many years I’ve used the following pair of images when I speak about the future of the Los Angeles River:

The Cheong Gye Cheon - Before

The Cheong Gye Cheon - After

That pair of pictures are worth a couple thousand words… but I will add another couple thousand words to tell you more about the project that I learned about the project at Dr. Lee’s talk – and some of its implications for Los Angeles.  It’s a somewhat familiar story, echoing many aspects of river projects throughout the world – but inspiring in scope and in the rapidity in which it was accomplished. 

Laundry and bathing in the Cheong Gye Cheong about 100 years ago (from Seoul city website)

Cheong Gye Cheon means more-or-less ”clear stream creek.”   The Cheong Gye Cheon runs through the heart of the city, and is a tributary to the much larger Han River.

The Cheong Gye Cheon has its history of flooding, dredging, straightening, and plenty of other degredation as a consequence of intensive human development in its watershed.

In the 1950′s, while some folks in Los Angeles were “improving” our river by adding tons of concrete, Seoul decided to solve their stream’s issues (mostly related to sanitation) by concreting over their creek.  Cheong Gye Stream became Cheong Gye Road.  In the 1970′s, to add insult to injury, the Cheong Gye Freeway was added atop the road atop the buried creek.

In 2002, an ambitious mayor (now president of Korea), Lee Myung-bak, was elected after campaigning on a promise to restore the Cheong Gye Cheon.  From 2002 to 2005, at a cost of about $380 million (U.S.), the city tore down the freeway, ripped out the road, and daylighted 6 kilometers (about 4 miles) of their stream.

The primary opposition to the project was from businesses and drivers who feared traffic congestion… to address this, the city invested in public transportation, including creating bus-only lanes and pedestrian bridges, reforming parking policies, etc.  Per Dr. Lee, Seoul embraced a “paradigm shift… from car to human-oriented street.”   Many merchants are pretty happy now to be next to the “most preferred destination” in all of Korea.

An interesting feature that Dr. Lee showed that I hadn’t seen before are these pillars rising in the middle of the stream:

Ancient Pillars in the Cheong Gye Cheon (photo by Steve)

They are indeed remnants of (and reminders of the folly of) the  former highway that occupied the space.  I think that these sorts of leave-behinds create interesting historical interactions.  Another example of this is Northside Park in Denver, Colorado.  Designed by Wenk Associates, the new river park has some remnants of concrete structures from a former sewage treatment plant.

There a lots of beautiful features: art installations, signature bridges (many just for pedestrians), and even these wonderfully ancient-feeling stone step bridges: (note the side step in the middle, just in case two people meet in mid-crossing and one needs to step to the side)

Stepping Stone Bridge across the Cheong Gye Cheon (from Seoul city website)

The city has studied the project and found increases in fish, bird and insect diversity,  and also in property values.  Even though I think that this is a great project, I will pass along some criticisms.  The water in the stream is actually pumped from the Han River; it’s highly treated to ensure that it’s safe.  This is good for the public interacting with it… so it doesn’t function so much as a drainage… but more as a water feature… though it’s clearly dramatically better habitat than the double-deck freeway had been!  There also appears to have been a fair amount of gentrification and displacement.

Nonetheless, the story of the Cheong Gye Cheon is inspiring.  It’s a very dramatic transformation.  There’s lots of documentation online - from virtual tours to videos to history to how the engineering works – all available in English - at Seoul’s official Cheong Gye Cheon website.  You can even get your own commemorative Cheong Gye Cheon sports towel (to my friends and family – I’m putting you on notice that I’d love one of those for my birthday.)

Lastly, here are a couple lessons that I think we draw from this that apply to Los Angeles:

Vertical Channel Walls:
   The cross-section seems very smart – vertical channel walls, with paths below grade, accessible via ramps.  This allows for a great deal of flood capacity, with good access and visibility.  I suspect that it also creates a fairly cool and quiet place.  This sort of configuration could make sense for many places on the L.A. River (and Arroyo Seco, Rio Hondo, Ballona Creek, etc.) where there are currently sloped walls and very constrained rights-of-way.  Places like downtown Los Angeles.

Use of Street Right-of-Way: 
   Many parts of the L.A. River (and other local waterways) are constrained by freeways and streets.  Naturalization generally requires more right-of-way than the river currently has.  The more vegetated the channel is, the rougher it is, hence the roughness slows down the water, decreasing flood capacity.  To restore vegetation in the riverbed, we will need a wider channel to maintain flood capacity.
   In my dreams, I say that we take out at least a few lanes of the 5 Freeway from Griffith Park through Frogtown… and of the 710 Freeway from Vernon to the Pacific Ocean… and of the 110 Freeway from South Pasadena to Lincoln Heights!!!
  More realistically we might be able to narrow streets like Valley Heart from Studio City to Sherman Oaks and Avenue 19 from the River Center to the old City Jail.  Use that additional right-of-way to create more natural and more pedestrian-oriented green space.  Let’s do it! 

Enjoy the clean safe cheongyecheon!

Governor thaws frozen bonds

After 4+ months of being on hold, environmental projects such as the Topanga berm removal and stream restoration, Malibu Lagoon restoration, and Ballona Wetlands restorations will be kicking back into gear.

The state was able to sell some bonds and so infrastructure projects are back in business.  

Happy enviros are forwarding the Gov’s press release and scouring the lists to see if their project is on it, and with some confusion, as different lists are circulating. 

While relieved at this turn of events, I wonder if we’ve advanced any discussions about the meaning/wisdom of depending on bonds for funding, our microcosm of the financial morass taking place in the macrocosm.  Just sayin’…

Updates: Gate and Garden

Fixing the Great Heron Gate

Today it’s up-to-the-minute updates on things that Creek Freak covered earlier:

As I was bicycling to speak at an Earth Day event, I passed a Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority crew re-assembling Brett Goldstone’s Great Heron Gate. As I had reported in an earlier post, the gate was damaged, apparently hit by a car. Thanks to the quick quality work of the MRCA, it’s all better now.

I also got a chance today to check in on my friend’s mom’s native rain garden that I wrote about earlier. Nearly all the plants are alive. The snapdragon didn’t make it. The heuchera is blooming wildly, the irises too, and the California Buckwheat is spreading nicely. There’s a wildflower that came up all over but hasn’t bloomed yet – I think it’s clarkia. At nearly three months out it’s looking good, but the test will be getting it through the hot summer without too much or too little water. I’ve been dropping by and watering once a month or so (in between Spring rains.) All these plants and seeds are from the Theodore Payne Foundation native California plant nursery.

Below is a photo gallery.

Alum root (Heuchera) in Bloom

Buttercup (yellow flowers) and Alum Root (pink flowers)

Juncus (the tall straight reeds)

View of the Garden Bed (note that it's pretty shady)

Urban runoff?

 

 

Streams present and past, from Pacific Palisades to Bel Air. Blue streams are present, red are gone, baby, gone.

And here's the (mostly former) streams of the Hollywood Hills and part of the upper Ballona Creek watershed. Blue lines on the right will soon be deleted, as soon as I get around to the Elysian Valley and streams Northeast.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am in the midst of a depressing exercise of stream deletion, viz. the image at right.  Once again, mapping streams of LA, and then deleting them to be able to say with some reliability what’s left.  It’s painstaking as well as simply painful.

 

While simultaneously reaching for some (legal) numbing agent and zooming in a former stream on the north slope of the Hollywood Hills on GoogleEarth, however, I noticed urban runoff dribbling down the gutter.  I was looking for any chance that a stream channel persisted (further down the road, there was in fact an open semi-channelized waterway – so it wasn’t entirely empty hope).  Curious, I followed the runoff upstream, till I arrived at what was clearly a stream.  And it is pretty apparent that the runoff is coming from the stream.  The next canyon over showed a similar pattern of runoff.  And it was in the month of July, so not seasonal, this.

 

The stream is dribbling (dark stain on left side of the street). From GoogleEarth, dated July 31, 2007.

I often find myself wondering during conversations about “urban runoff” how much of it is genuinely from some idiot watering his or her driveway.  True, we have no shortage of waste from poor water management, and plenty of it is polluted.

But here is interesting evidence that some runoff is from a stream just being a stream – and that it would still be flowing in a stream if we hadn’t rammed a street through it.  Suggestive to me, anyway, that we might want to have a policy for managing this urban runoff a little differently than treating it like wastewater.

News and Events – 16 April 2009

N-n-n-news:

South East Trees' Latest Masterpiece!

> The new Cudahy River Park opens along the southeast stretch of the Los Angeles River!  What will North East Trees think of next?

> L.A. Streetsblog looks at federal stimulus money going to California bicycle projects – looks promising that funds will go to the lower Arroyo Seco Bikeway.

> Friday-tomorrow noon is your deadline for entering L.A. Creek Freak’s first-ever contest.  Win the Audubon Center at Debs Park’s guide to Animals of the Los Angeles River by merely commenting on our blog.  Right now the odds are better than 1 in 10.  No purchase required.  Void where prohibited.  Your results may vary.

>Friends of the Los Angeles River’s 2008 fish study is now on-line!  Creek Freak reviewed it here – one of our most perennially popular posts! Now let me tell about that one that got away…

E-e-e-events:

>Tomorrow, Friday April 17th at 2:30, the City of LA hosts a talk  on the revitalization of Seoul’s  Cheong Gye Cheong river.

>This Sunday afternoon, April 19th, Long Beach’s Wrigley Area Neighborhood Alliance hosts tours of the Dominguez Gap – a restored wetland park along the lower Los Angeles River.    Creek Freak visited the site recently and the wildflowers are blooming beautifully!

>Also this Sunday, April 19th at 3:30pm, Friends of the LA River hosts a walk along the scenic Glendale Narrows stretch of the L.A. River.  Meet at Steelhead Park, on Oros Street in Frogtown.

>Support your local bloggers Joe Linton and Damien Newton as we teach you how to blog like we do – plus mucho other useful free stuff on the web at our Internet Skills Class on Tuesdays April 21st and 28th.  We teach it again May 4th and 11th.

Spring cleaning opportunities abound:
> This Saturday April 18th at Taylor Yard with North East Trees.  Yo! it’s Earth Day!
> Next Saturday April 25th at Taylor Yard with North East Trees and local Obama folk.
>Saturday May 9th at Taylor Yard and many many other sites with Friends of the L.A. River.

>On April 25th and 26th, Urban Photo Adventures leads their Los Angeles River photography tour – see and capture some of the grittiest industrial sites along the mighty Los Angeles.

Bike the Emerald Necklace on the San Gabriel River and the Rio Hondo with the city of El Monte’s Tour of Two Rivers bike rally on Saturday May 16th.  Then bike the Los Angeles River on the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition’s River Ride on Sunday June 7th.

Bridges as Habitat

Austin's Congress Avenue Bridge with Bats Emerging at Dusk - Photo: Wikipedia

My friend Vicki returned recently from a trip to Austin, Texas. She told me about Austin’s Congress Avenue Bridge which houses the largest urban colony of bats – Mexican Free-tailed Bats to be exact. When the bridge was reconstructed in 1980, the design serendipitously ended up with a series of crevices on the underside of the bridge which just happen to be just the right size for these bats to roost in. The bridge is home to up to 1.5 million migratory bats during the summer. The bats eat lots of insects, which helps keep the mosquito populations in check. The city hosts bat festivals. Tourists come to view the bats from a specially built bat observation deck. There’s even a manual for bridge designers on how to make new bridges more bat-friendly. I want to go check it out.

Locally, I’ve seen cliff swallow nests on the bottom of bridges – at many times and in many places, including under the North Broadway Bridge by L.A. State Historic Park. In California, we have manuals on how to make bridges swallow-unfriendly. Truth be told, swallow-unfriendly is not so bad as it sounds – it’s actually a good idea to minimize adverse environmental impacts by keeping swallows from building under bridges where we plan to do construction work.

View of Sidewalk on Bridge - note the asphalt sidewalk repair in the foreground, and the uneven railing to the left.

Diagramed Side View of Bridge. Yellow Arrows show which way bridge shifted. Red Arrow shows the gap where the bees were flying in and out.

Side view of Bridge

I was out exploring along a local creek last week and spotted a similar phenomenon here. I came across a bridge – which shall remain nameless – because I don’t really want the city to go out and “fix” it (but if you really want to check it out, you may be able to figure it out – or just ask me privately.) Part of the bridge had shifted and settled at some point, and, lo and behold, created bee habitat. A steady stream of bees were zooming in and out of a crevice. It’s L.A.’s own bee bridge!

So… all this got me thinking… Are there other examples creek freak’s asute readers are aware of where bridges serve as habitat – deliberately or inadvertently? Please post under comments if you’re aware of this – especially any that I can check out locally.

Is habitat something we could be factoring into future bridge designs? Could we build in various types of nooks and crannies for nests, perches, etc. I suspect that the engineers who design these bridges might not like lots of critters hanging out in their monuments… but if it turns out to be half as as successful as Austin, it could be a tourist attraction… and could begin to make up for a small portion of habitat we’ve lost along our woebegone waterways.

(Note: Nothing in this blog entry should be remotely construed as support for the demolition of historic bridges.)

FilterForGood Challenge

Brita's environmental site: www.filterforgood.com

Tag! I’m it! Siel, of the fun and informative Green LA Girl blog, challenged me to blog about five things I am doing this Earth Month (apparently Earth Day wasn’t enough) for the good of the earth, and to pass the challenge along to five other bloggers. Yup, it is definitely a viral marketing tie-in for the Brita corporation, who do seem to be concerned about the environment, health, and clean water – and against bottled water (yay! bottled water is pretty nasty for the environment.)   And, if you suspect an interested motive, you’re correct: if I do all this, I may win cool water filter products from Brita.

Here are five things I am doing for good this Earth Month:

1. Gardening-For-Good – Siel pledged to get her garden going, so I’ll start there, too… er… I mean, in my garden though, not hers!  Spring is the best time in the garden. This month I will plant more of my summer veggies – corn, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers… mmmm.  I will work with my neighbors to finish creating our new multi-functional raised bed / seating bench in front of Los Angeles Eco-Village – similar to this one.

2. For-the-Good-of-Hazard-Park – On and off now for a while, I’ve been working on some illustrations for a campaign planning to restore a creekbed and wetlands at Hazard Park. The park is located in Boyle Heights, near County USC Medical Center. This month I will finish my illustrations and will post here at Creek Freak to get the word out on this excellent campaign. Keep your RSS tuned here. I’ll probably post the illustrations at my art blog, too.

3. Parking-For-Good – It’s probably more aptly Not-Parking-For-Good or Less-Parking-For-Good (or maybe Finishing-the-In-Lieu-Parking-Report-For-Good – ok, enough!)  This month I promise to complete my work coordinating the writing and disseminating of a white paper by Dr. Richard W. Willson. The topic (a bit wonky, but actually really good for the environment) is how the city of Los Angeles might implement an “in-lieu fee” to reduce excess parking at new developments in transit-rich areas. Instead of building excessive unneeded parking, new development could pay a portion of the money they would have spent to build infrastructure for bicycing, walking, transit, and/or shared off-street parking. The report was commissioned by the Green LA Transportation Working Group. I’ll be posting that final report on our blog soooon! This month!

4. Reading-For-Good – I am going to read the newly released book This Could Be the Start of Something Big. It’s co-written by my friend and stalwart environmental justice activist Martha Matsuoka. It’s about how regional equity movements are improving our cities.  What, you might ask, is “regional equity”??  Well… it’s a grassroots movement that builds on past work for civil rights and brings it into the way we grow and shape our cities and regions.  There are, of course, entire blogs on it.  Here’s another brief explanation of regional equity, from an article on-line:

Proponents of regional equity blame widespread spacial inequality on a combination of public policy and market forces, and they call on policy makers, elected officials, and community activists to take a regional approach to economic growth so that all residents will benefit.

5. Bicycling-For-Good – I’m going to keep bicycling all over. I am looking forward to a Los Angeles that doesn’t have any cars. I’ve been thinking that I should write a blog entry making those connections between bicycling and environmental/watershed health. Look for that soon, too, here at your friendly neighborhood creak freek.

Here are five bloggers whom I’m passing the challenge along to – they’re all friends and they all have excellent and informative blogs that you should all read immediately!  (Note to my fellow bloggers – no pressure – I will continue to read and adore you, even if you don’t accept my challenge to advertise Brita!)

Andrea at (among others) the L.A. Eco-Village Garden Blog
Erik at Home Grown Evolution
Federico and Yuki at (among others) the Los Angeles Eco-Village Blog
Ilsa at Rambling L.A.
Liz and Shay at C.I.C.L.E.

The good news is that I expect that all of us blogistas so routinely track and savor inbound links, that I probably don’t even need to notify any of them (other than by publishing this blog with their links), though I will.  They’ll probably have discovered that I’ve tagged them before you’ve read this far!

The rules are simple – and to comply with the contest, I’m obligated to post them here. If you’re tagged (or even if you’re just reading this) and you’re up to the challenge, post five things you plan to do for the environment this Earth Month on your blog. At the end of your list, tag five of your favorite blogs, and include a link back to this post using the hyperlinked text “FilterForGood Blog Meme Contest.”