Return to the Center of the Seventh Street Bridge

Detail of the dedication plaque on the Seventh Street Viaduct

There’s a promising new report about possibilities for the future of the Seventh Street Bridge over the L.A. River, so I got another call to head into the bridge and show off the space. I plan to write about the new report, but I ended up with more than enough photo and video material for one post, so I am going write about the bridge here, then separately post about the report later. 

Thankful on 37 gallons of water a day

You know how everyone always says there’s no way Angelenos could live on local water alone?

I had to test this assumption as my warm-up to a standard Thanksgiving exercise, naming something I’m grateful for: freshwater and all the lovelies it supports, in the myriad chain of life descending from the availability of freshwater.

There are obvious lovelies – cottonwood, willow and sycamore trees along riparian corridors.

And the well-known extirpated and endangered freshwater species – steelhead trout, salmon…

Vaquita marina. Image: www.animalpicturesarchive.com

Or the less obvious – cuties like the turbid-delta-dwelling vaquita porpoise, who are squeezed to less than 250 individuals in the Gulf of California, thanks initally to habitat loss and now more hazardously, gillnet/trawler entrapment.  Of course there’s skepticism regarding the loss-of-habitat angle, after all the Colorado River Delta only shrank when Mexico lost 90-95% of Colorado River flows, or as the Center for Biological Diversity says:  ”the (vaquita) also suffers by living in a habitat that is today a shadow of its former self. The Colorado River, once a raging torrent that fed a lush floodplain at the delta, has been reduced to a trickle by dams and water diversions to neighboring southwestern states.”

North Atwater Creek in the Rain

North Atwater Park's new stream swollen with rain. Griffith Park's recognizable Beacon Hill is in the background. All photos by Joel McKown

Creek Freak reader Joel McKown sent us these photos of North Atwater Park doing its job during today’s rains. For more background on this creek restoration park project, see the post from earlier this week (follow links there for details.) 

What’s Up, Whatcom Creek?

Fish ladder on Whatcom Creek

I recently made a quick trip to Bellingham, Washington, where Whatcom Creek flows through the center of this old salmon fishery/lumber town-turned-college town.  It’s a sweet place, walkable, bikeable, with generous greenway trails that were former railroad lines.  Bellingham has its own issues, of course – among them paved-over historical wetlands currently used as railyards that are slated to become bermed mixed use development (bermed, of course, to protect from storm surges, flooding, you know, stuff that happens in wetlands) instead of restored habitat that would benefit salmon fisheries.  Just more of the everyday environmentally harmful planning decisions which are the background noise to big news stories like the fight over a coal shipping depot.

But back to the beauty.

Here’s some photos from a quick jaunt along Whatcom Creek.  These photos were taken right next to Bellingham’s Civic Center, just a few steps of descent from the street (and spitting distance from Occupy Bellingham, which was holding firm in the 30° nights!).  My friend giving me the tour – and my coworker who advised me to look for this creek – tell me salmon still run the Whatcom.  This bridge used to be a barrier until the fish ladder was installed (there are other barriers upstream, however).

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Enjoy the photos – and believe in the possibility of such a visage – perhaps a somewhat drier one – with steelhead trout, on the Arroyo Seco, or Las Virgenes Creek, Ballona Creek… We don’t need fake creeks in Los Angeles, we need real ones that bring spring runs for our fish, shade trails, offer us seasonal cycles of willows budding, fluffing out, turning from silvery green to yellow, golden, deciduous, delirious.

Our waterways are restorable, it is about political will, whether the public wants it enough.  Do we?

Announcing Scott Wilson’s Passing

Scott Wilson 1922-2011

Your creek freak writers are planning some more personal articles about Scott Wilson soon, but I wanted to post a few links with the news that Scott Wilson has passed away. Wilson, founder of North East Trees, was born in 1922 and died on November 7th 2011.

> North East Trees blog
> L.A. Times obituary
> Chance of Rain (read Lewis Macadams’ comment)

Folks whose lives Scott touched are invited to celebrate his life and legacy on Sunday, November 27, 2011, from 2pm-5pm, with a program starting at 3pm. The event will be at the Women’s Twentieth Century Club of Eagle Rock, 5105 Hermosa Avenue, Los Angeles 90041.

North Atwater Park Creek Construction Nearly Complete

View, over construction fences, from North Atwater Park. Seating and viewing areas in the foreground. Central green creek area has been hydroseeded. In the distance is the new mostly-permeable-surface parking lot.

I got a chance to look over the fences at the under-construction natural creek park at North Atwater Park. Officially the project is called North Atwater Park Expansion and Creek Restoration. It’s looking like it’s 99%+ complete… though it will be good for the native vegetation to grow and get itself more established during the cool wet season ahead. 

Creek Freaks tour historic San Marino canyon creeks

The four L.A. Creek Freak blog writers: Jessica Hall, Joe Linton, Joshua Link, and Jane Tsong.

Earlier this week was a rare coming together of all four L.A. Creek Freak authors: Jessica Hall, Joshua Link, Jane Tsong, and Joe Linton. We all know each other, and run into each other at various functions, and keep in contact… but I think it may be the first time that all four of us spent good creek-freek time together. We’ve all contributed to this post – Joe did the compilation, so I’ve tried to weave and acknowledge… and any errors are mine.

The occasion was a private tour of some of the historic creeks and canyons in the city of San Marino, and the adjacent southern border of the city of Pasadena. Our expert guide was Alan Jutzi, Avery Chief Curator of Rare Books at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens. Alan is the curator for the Huntington’s upcoming show Water Began It All, which Jane is designing. She wrote about here earlier. Water Began It All is open weekends November 19th, 2011, through February 18th, 2012 at the Flora-Legium in the Botanical Center. As Jane described, the show features the work of Michael Hart, who’s an artist but better known for running the Sunny Slope Water Company, located in Pasadena and the San Gabriel Valley. Hart is responsible for using existing landscape and historical documents to map out these canyons, creeks, zanjas and more. Michael Hart’s prints, including exquisitely detailed maps (much better than the roughly mapped google map below) will be available for purchase in the Huntington bookstore.

Hart’s work was reviewed in last week’s L.A. Times Lost L.A. column by Sam Watters. The article is a good creek-freak read, and includes Hart’s piece, Old Mill in San Marino, a location that  featured prominently in the tour this post describes below.