About Us
This blog was created by Jessica Hall and Joe Linton, who are also the main writers. We also welcome posts by other dedicated Creekfreaks. To contact us, email jishica [at] gmail [dot] com and linton.joe [at] gmail [dot] com respectively.
Jessica Hall
Photo courtesy Miguel Luna
I am an ecologically-based landscape designer with my roots here in the LA area. My focus is to reinsert nature back into urban form, to humanize LA by wilding it. A little. I have a particular thing for streams. In 2001, I co-authored Seeking Streams: A landscape framework for the upper Ballona Creek Watershed, and was honored to also receive a Switzer Environmental Fellowship and subsequent Leadership Grant. Guess what I did with it…mapped historical streams of Los Angeles. Fast forward to the present, where I am a senior associate at Restoration Design Group. One of our interesting projects is a feasibility study to restore an already earthen-bottom reach of Compton Creek. I also consult for the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Commission, where I am completing a Ballona Creek Greenway Plan, something I began while a Watershed Coordinator there. My work was featured in the news story Lost Streams of Los Angeles (Los Angeles Weekly), by Judith Lewis, my sometimes harsh assessments of LA included in the Phillip Rodriguez documentary Los Angeles Now, and my silliness exposed in the short film, Stream Spirit Rising (“hello little creek!”). I sit on the boards of the NGO Cultivating Sustainable Communities and the LA League of Conservation Voters. I guess I should close by emphasizing that all opinions – especially the rants – expressed herein are mine and mine alone, except, of course, for the ones written by Joe.
and
Joe Linton
Joe Linton is an artist and activist , living in Koreatown, Los Angeles. He has been a longtime advocate for the revitalization and restoration of the Los Angeles River, serving in various capacities as volunteer, board and staff for the Friends of the Los Angeles River. He’s done additional river advocacy through work for The City Project, Urban Semillas, Occidental College’s Urban and Environmental Policy Institute and while serving as a Council Deputy to Los Angeles City Councilmember Ed Reyes. He’s lead hundreds of walks and tours of the river and its tributaries, and has advocated for parks, landscape, bike paths, master plans, water quality enhancements, and much more. Linton wrote and illustrated Down by the Los Angeles River: Friends of the Los Angeles River’s Official Guide, published by Wilderness Press in 2005 and available at bookstores all over. Down By The Los Angeles River is a guide book to places to walk and bike along the river and its tributaries, with sections on history, projects underway, historic bridges, and much more. Linton was recognized in LA Weekly’s 2006 people issue as the river’s unofficial “minister of access.”
Joe Linton lives at the Los Angeles Eco-Village, where he gardens, havests rainwater, attends potlucks, writes policies, blogs, and various other activities. He has lived car-free since 1992. He was one of the founders of the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition and has advocated for non-motorized transportation alternatives, including bikability, walkability, transit-oriented-development, traffic calming, parking reform, and more.
Linton is available for contract writing, project management, speaking, walks and tours – and even passive water-harvesting garden earthworks. He can be reached at linton.joe {at} gmail {dot} com.
Contributors
Jane Tsong
Jane Tsong is an artist and designer.
In central Pennsylvania, where I grew up, hedgerows and vacant lots were our playground. Our favorite toys included fireflies, milkweed, japanese beetles, mud, and pussy willows. In highschool, I would walk for hours through cornfields and new growth forests, to see what I might find. Those spaces are still my favorite: the ones that have no name or fixed use, that are full of possibilities…
I passed over Los Angeles via LAX many times before actually moving here. My first impressions were of a vast landscape of uniformly gridded streets, lit equally uniformly at night. Even in a car, you could drive for hours and the landscape hardly appears to change. Learning more about the history of land use in this area, I was relieved to find that all those featureless flat stretches of the city actually once had their own quirks, ruts, swampy areas, creeping inhabitants, things that only an adventurous local of a certain vintage might know…. all those things that make each place different from every other place in the world, all those things that make you feel something when you know a place. These idiosyncrasies are mostly still there– under the asphalt and infill. It just takes a little looking to discover the patterns. Even among this big grid, every place once had a spirit of place.
September 10, 2008 at 12:25 pm |
Hi…thought that this was a interesting article. Haven’t seen the actual list, but nonetheless:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080909205412.htm
January 19, 2009 at 7:18 pm |
Just wanted to say I found your blog via the FOLAR site! Keep up the good work!
February 20, 2009 at 7:31 pm |
A friend just sent me to your blog and I was very impressed by the quality of writing and knowledge about the waterways in LA. Bravo! I added a link on my blog to your blog, for an exhibition which is currently up at Cypress College Art Gallery entitled ecoLOGIC.Hope you might get a chance to see it before it closes on Saturday, Feb. 28th!
March 5, 2009 at 11:15 am |
Develop another part of Del Rey Lagoon; you must be kidding me?
March 5, 6:13 AM ·
ShareThis Feed: http://www.examiner.com/x-4314-South-Bay-Community-Examiner~y2009m3d5-Develop-another-part-of-Del-Rey-Lagoon-you-must-be-kidding-me
Until you’ve seen this trash can dream come true
You stand at the edge while people run you through
And I thank the Lord there’s people out there like you
I thank the Lord there’s people out there like you..
–Elton John, Mona Lisa’s and Mad Hatters
For many years now I have been writing a local newspaper column and contributing to on-line blogs; all with the aim to increase awareness of our little slice of paradise: Westchester & Playa Del Rey.
I had moved away from the beach for a while, and ended up in New York City, which is as about as far away from the left-coast as you can get and still remain on Terra firma. And I can tell you, New York is a “lonely town, when you’re the only surfer boy in town.” I tried not to think of it too often, but sometimes when I was huddled up in my Manhattan apartment, with snow flurries dancing through the trees on Central Park and the sky the white-grey color of a sepia print, my thoughts would inevitably turn to those long summer days on the beaches of Playa Del Rey, and of old friends and warm spring swells and soft summer nights void of taxi horns and never ending waves of humanity.
One day I returned; surprised to see that the town I left no longer existed. It seemed like half or more of Westchester and Playa Del Rey had been lost to airport expansion, and that which was left was being “densified” by development. Everywhere vacant lots were being overbuilt with apartments and condominiums, and many of the old places: restaurants and stores, had closed. Sure, it was still a great town, but other storms were brewing off on the horizon, and in the end I felt again as though I was living on an island; not now bordered with water, but surrounded by roads that fed people through and sometimes intersecting our town.
One weekday morning I took a leisurely drive over Manchester hill and down on to Vista Del Mar, before heading back north to the Village of Playa Del Rey. I wanted to see if the weatherman’s promise of an early summer swell was developing, but instead I sat for close to a half hour in bumper-to-bumper traffic, crawling along the road under the bluffs. I was alarmed and confused. Accident? Fire? How could this be? No one ever drives on Vista Del Mar and Culver Boulevard in the early mornings; what is going on? Que Pasa? Had they built a new highway; the Vista Del Mar/Playa Del Rey Highway?
And it just got worse from there.
So fast forward to yesterday, when I got an email from a fan of my column(I have about seven folks that read my columns, and three are related to me; and they have to read it of they don’t get an allowance), and I was shocked to learn that some nitwit wants to develop the north end of Playa Del Rey Lagoon. And then I further learned that another nitwit still is trying to develop the Dunes area. Folks, we don’t need anymore homes and the traffic is already unbearable, and who in their right mind would build on a lagoon and risk killing off more fragile species?
I have to say at this point, I don’t like to be colored with any shade, or marked by some antiseptic moniker. I am not against some development. I think we need to get a new grocery store on Manchester, and a few places along Culver Boulevard could use a little lipstick, and maybe a bank would be a good idea. But more homes? No way.
I thank my new friend for slapping me in the face and waking me up about this new Lagoon development at Egret Park. I have been busy and I missed it.
Finally, since she asked me, I have some advice.
It comes from a movie called Network-1976:
Howard Beale:
I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth; banks are going bust; shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter; punks are running wild in the street, and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it.
We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat. And we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be!
We all know things are bad — worse than bad — they’re crazy.
It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we’re living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, “Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials, and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.”
Well, I’m not going to leave you alone.
I want you to get mad!
I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot. I don’t want you to write to your Congressman, because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street.
All I know is that first, you’ve got to get mad.
You’ve gotta say, “I’m a human being, goddammit! My life has value!”
So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell:
I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
Duke’s Law: “Bury the dead, they stink up the place.”
The Laws, (equi. to those of Douglas Coughlin; Amare et sapere vix deo conceditur );
Duke will be rememembered as a Logical Negativist who flourished in the early part of the 21rst Century and who propounded a set of laws the world generally ignored, to its detriment.
June 2, 2009 at 11:08 am |
We ordered crayfish for a science investigation in my 3rd grade classroom. Our investigation is over and I would like an eco-friendly and humane way to send my little buddies on their way. Do you know of a natural crayfish habitat where I might release them, in or around Los Angeles?
June 2, 2009 at 5:51 pm |
Hi Juanita, Unfortunately crayfish are not native and highly destructive to our natural aquatic habitats. They eat the eggs of fish and frogs. Can you keep them for your class next year? Otherwise, there’s always gumbo…
June 11, 2009 at 3:13 pm |
[...] of the Santa Monica Mountains, The Los Angeles & San Gabriel River Watershed Council Blog and Jessica Hall. Map from [...]
June 12, 2009 at 2:20 am |
I found your blog whilst researching my gang O’frogs brought home in some plants (bromeliads) stored at a friend’s house with a backyard bordering the La Ballona Creek. I used to play in that creek in the fifties and I remember when there was an open creek at Sawtelle and Palms blvd. in West L.A. Actually I lived on Sawtelle in Culver City. Back to those mouthy frogs. Before this invited invasion I had one frog living as a bachelor for two years. Now I have a crowd that is deafeningly loud outside my back door and more tadpoles in the lineup. I’m going to re-endow my friend with a bucket of them. I found out some of my neighbors think I have a pond! My friend thinks they might be Spring Peepers. Y’all just might know something about that. Any insight will be welcome. Last night I was sitting out in my shop with the door open and one of them sauntered by with hardly a glance in my direction! What gall! Every now and then one hops in and I have to dissuade he or she and place them back at the go point. When this batch were tadpoles I thought gee I hope a couple survive! it might be nice hearing that restful sound. Well, they don’t seem to need quite the watery environment, just a couple of plants that store their own water in the leaf axils.
P.S. Having been a local yokel in this area (a couple years short of sixty)I have seen wild life dwindle, but for the last twenty or more I have noticed it come back like Gangbusters. Not quite tent worm eating up all the Chinese Elms but more humming birds, more insects,hawks etc. I remember my eyes burning and tearing up while taking my grandmother to the bus station in Los Angeles in the mid fifties. If you have no history to compare with it’s easy to run screaming, “The Sky’s falling!” Along with our short comings we have the technology to do a better job cleaning up after ourselves and our direction is forward. I have traveled in Java and Malaysia etc. and have seen what a mess some areas are along with some beautiful jungles (rainforests) and Islands that they haven’t gotten around to paving over so far.
Think positive and don’t believe all the rhetoric you hear. There’s usually a hand in your pocket following shortly and shame on you if you resist, after all, they say, “We Care”
Mark
June 12, 2009 at 3:30 pm |
Mark, thanks for the stories! Send us a photo of the frogs – if they’re small and have a little mask over the eyes they may be Pacific Chorus Frogs (formerly called Tree Frogs). Those little guys are natives, and typically predated upon by the non-native bullfrogs and red slider turtles that people get at the pet store and then unfortunately release into our creeks and ponds when they can’t handle them anymore.
Would love to get your Ballona stories down as a post!
I agree there’s been some nice regeneration – sometimes all we got to do is change the way we manage the landscape. I grew up here and never saw a pelican, due most likely to the DDT devastation. Every time I see one at the beach I think about how successful we can be in restoring the environment, when we have the political will to act.
Thanks again, Mark.
June 14, 2009 at 3:02 pm
Jessica,
Thank you for your prompt feedback, It’s nice to have a frog name to research. I will have to surriptiously (spell check thinks that this word is misspelled) scout out those frog locations. They are in a very small but foliage dense eight by ten ft. area under shade cloth.
On the subject of La Ballona Creek and wildlife in general:
I see herds of squirrels around town, a brace of raccoons walking down my fence and standing up to stare me down, after using their clever little hands to turn my carnivorous plant container into an barely recognizable mush. There is no water near my home and a postage stamp little park at the end of the block with no water! in the middle of Culver City! Now that’s visual signs of progress. All this, thanks to loud and persistent voices getting some concrete action and overall education.
On the OTHER HAND! While house, garden and various animal sitting I looked over the back fence to watch the ducks and other fowl eat and play and the view that meets my eyes is a TRASH MORASS floating with the DUCKS! I don’t mean twenty or thirty cups and paper but a slick of trash about 50 yards long! It made me sick to see it. I’m not for authoritarian law making but watching from a bridge over looking La Ballona creek during a storm and seeing a snow like coating of styrofoam endlessly flowing to the ocean I start lean in that direction. I’ve been to the shore and seen so much styrofoam ground up that the small waves broke on the shore more like soup than water.
Someone please enlighten me as to the new law banning the sale of styrofoam cups et al. I would be happy to admit my ignorance if I missed it. You can’t even recycle the stuff.
Regarding the previously referenced Duck Soup, I recognize this doesn’t happen every day, but this day was a sunny day with no high wind or rain water movement, just the regular daily tide action.
So just another little rant. Thanks for the opportunity. This is the second time I have ever done this after many moons online.
P.S. Do you have a phone number I can use to report this horror scene when it does happen. That garbage could have been scooped out as it was in a localized area (duck hangout).
Maybe a surface float across would keep it contained. They used that and a huge metal box, probably a filter to get some oil two weeks ago.
Mark
P.P.S. Multiple millions have died and continue to die in Africa after the removal of DDT. There are some other views on that subject.
July 30, 2009 at 2:12 pm |
Hi guys,
I couldn’t find just an email address to send you a message, so I’ll do it this way.
I’m looking for suggestions from you for a good person to give a talk on the la river project(s?) up here in San Francisco to a group of sustainable development people, which would include environmentalists, urbanists, and developers. Know any knowledgeable people who are also great speakers?
Thanks in advance.
Mary Davis
August 11, 2009 at 10:37 am |
I like your site. I grew up along San Rafael Creek. My childhood in “LA” was quite different with that “stream” as we called it, Johnson’s Lake (Mirror Lake) and the larger Arroyo Seco nearby. I’ve slided on the spillway that leads down to the the Arroyo Seco, and explored every nook and cranny.
August 11, 2009 at 11:53 am |
Hi. Great article in the L.A. Times today!
I recently graduated with a degree in landscape architecture. As per our requirement to graduate the students are to develop a senior project or thesis. Growing up in the San Gabriel Valley I chose to develop my project in an around that area. In a nutshell, my project, inspired by Olmsted and Bartholomew’s 1930’s plan for the Los Angeles Region, sought to reconnect Los Angeles. My concept was simple, transform the concrete lined drainage channels back to their original state while simultaneously providing a means of transportation in the form of greenways. While doing research for this project I was pleasantly surprised to come across others who had similar visions! I applaud both of you for your great work. I am looking to get involved and would love to share my project with you both. Thanks for you time!
August 11, 2009 at 12:22 pm |
Steve – That Olmsted Plan is a real inspiration. If you’re up for, perhaps you could write a guest blog – and post images from your work. Let us know if you’re interested.
August 11, 2009 at 12:52 pm |
Hi –
Read the great article in the LA Times and love the site.
I live on Hudson near Brookside and have been fascinated by the brook since I discovered it running though a neighbor’s backyard. I always wanted to know why it goes underground south of 9th Street – was it buried or did it flow underground naturally?
Anyway, I’m a documentary filmmaker and was wondering – has anyone done a doc about the streams of LA? If not, I’d be interested in exploring the idea.
Cheers, and thanks for the site.
August 11, 2009 at 2:38 pm |
Hi Gabriel. My assessment of that stream (I hope this makes sense) is that the flows you see at Wilshire Country Club go into a stormdrain that runs roughly parallel to the original stream, down city streets. The stream in the backyards appears lower and slower than what you see at WCC. There are maps that indicate capped springs at the school on Wilshire and it appears that those flows might go into the backyard stream. Neighbors could easily confirm if the water levels go up very much in big storms (I think I remember being told that it never fluctuates too much) – a clue for determining flows. Below 9th Street/south of Olympic, the flows from the backyard stream go into a storm drain, and joins the parallel drain that I believe carries the Wilshire Country Club flows. It all goes down to Ballona Creek. Maps indicate that it didn’t go underground, and was a perennial stream (as it is still today).
Would love to chat about a documentary.
August 11, 2009 at 2:40 pm
and the school I referenced was Burroughs Middle School on McCadden and Wilshire
August 12, 2009 at 6:03 pm |
Hi Jessica –
I’d love to talk about a documentary. Please send me an email with contact info and I’ll get in touch.
grotello@gmail.com
August 13, 2009 at 8:45 pm |
Greetinsg Jessica, I read the article in the LA Times, and have been browsing your super blog. Bravo to you! I live in Laurel Canyon, where we have many seeps (some on the road ice up on winter mornings – very dangerous!) Have you made any drainage/flow maps of LA?
August 14, 2009 at 8:31 am |
Yes, there are maps accessible via the sidebar (Find a Creek or Wetland in Your Neighborhood), although those maps are at a scale that may not show everything in Laurel Canyon, nor seeps or springs per se. There are more detailed maps that can be provided. Additionally, you have a local reporter, Joanne Deutch, at the Canyon News doing some great research on the history of water in your area who can provide more context to go with it. I hope to publish a link to her story when it comes out.
August 21, 2009 at 3:51 pm |
Bravo!
Hi Joe, Hi Jane, didn’t realize you were working together. Hope to catch up with both of you soon.
Cheers, ilsa
August 23, 2009 at 10:22 am |
@Ilsa – will be great to catch up with you. I’ve been enjoying Rambling L.A. (and linked it here once in a while – ie: the toad nookie piece!) Keep up the great work.
October 17, 2009 at 1:03 pm |
Hi, An FYI about links on some of LA River’s headwater creeks in the Simi Hills. (In case it might help getting a few more postings on ‘west of Sepulveda Basin’ – not complaining!, just pouting…).
#1 The State agency overseeing Rocketdyne’s SSFL (Santa Susana Field Lab) cleanup (relating to Bell Crk, Dayton Crk, & Chatsworth ‘Reservoir’ watersheds and Chatsworth Formation’s deep watertable toxic contributions to LA River). They have many pdf document files on the concerns and process.
Calif. Env. Protection Agency, Dept. of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) @
http://www.DTSC-SSFL.com/
#2 The West Hills Neighborhood Council had a meeting in Sept’09 about the proposed Bell Creek Greenway Project (in Bell Canyon), a segment of the National Park Service’s recreating the ‘De Anza Historic Trail’. The Friends of the LA River & Trust for Public Land co-presented. Being unable to go, sorry have no ‘report’.
Link to announcement @ http://acmela.org/bellcreekgreenway.html
Link to W.H. neighborhood @ http://www.westhillsnc.org/
Thanks for all you do cover.