Places to Visit: Acresite Gate in Atwater Village

Brett Goldstone's Acresite Water and Willow Gate

The Acresite gate isn’t Brett Goldstone’s biggest or most elaborate river gate… but it’s very nice, and just enough off the beaten path, and along one of the nicest stretches of river, so I figure it’s worth alerting Creek Freak readers to.

Places to Visit: Ballona Creek Bike Path Sculpture Gates and Mini-Parks

McConnell Avenue gate by Brett Goldstone 2009

After yesterday’s talk, I rode the Ballona Creek Bike Path and checked out the still-relatively-new art gates there. In an earlier L.A. Creek Freak post, Jessica covered the gates’ and mini-parks’ December 4th 2009 dedication. Additional online coverage can be found at Ballona Creek Renaissance’s (BCR) April 2010 newsletter. After the jump are listing and mapping of the gate/park sites, and photos of the gates as they appear today.  

New and Events – 14 September 2009

Lots going on that many L.A. Creek Freaks will be interested in.

RECENT NEWS:

>There’s a big buzz on many graf-art websites about the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ use of federal stimulus funds to paint out the famous/infamous huge SABER graf-art mural on the west bank walls of the L.A. River downtown. I am not the biggest proponent of graffiti at the L.A. River (I think that some of it is great… but some of it I find kinda frustrating) but this whiting-out project seems pretty pointless to me. There are many greener projects that could have moved forward with those federal monies… which were supposed to create green jobs, no?

>TreePeople has a good-looking new website, including a new blog by their founder Andy Lipkis!

> The Water Wired blog is a great very readable resource for coverage of very fascinating water issues happening all over. Put it in your RSS Reader today! You might want to check out their recent coverage of Mexico City’s water issues from centuries of overpumping and on the New York Time’s coverage of nationwide neglect in enforcement of the federal Clean Water Act. The actual New York Times article by Charles Duhigg Clean Water Laws Are Neglected, at a Cost in Suffering is here. Duhigg was interviewed on Demoncracy Now earlier today.

>Mark Gold penned an editorial California’s water reform legislation is all wet that ran in the September 8th 2009 L.A. Times. Gold’s Spouting Off blog is also a great read.

Inglewood Gate - click for article and larger image (Photo: Bill Campbell)

>Bill Campbell at Metblogs shows off Ballona  Creek’s beautiful new Brett Goldstone gate at the bike path entry point at Inglewood Avenue. Bike over and check it out!

>The “eecue” site has posted even more great photos of the downtown Los Angeles L.A. River bridges.

>The L.A. City stormwater program’s blog “L.A. Team Effort” details the city’s plans to use $30M in Proposition O funding to upgrade city Santa Monica Bay stormdrain dry weather diversions. During dry months the city sends the trickle of urban runoff from many stormdrains into its sewage treatment plans. This prevents contaminated runoff from getting into rivers and oceans during the summer – when recreational usage is highest. 

>The Malibu Times reports that officials are investigating an unexplained recent fish die-off at Malibu Creek (via the On Water blog.) 

UPCOMING EVENTS – lots to choose from this Saturday!:

>The Ballona Institute is looking for volunteers at a Ballona Wetlands clean-up and restoration event this Saturday September 19th from 9am to 12noon. For information, send an email to massa30 [at] gmail [dot] com.

>The free Frogtown Art Walk takes place this Saturday September 19th from 4pm to 10pm.

>Lots of great creek, river and beach sites to choose from on Coastal Clean-Up Day this Saturday September 19th from 9am to 12noon at more than 70 locations in Southern California!

>Food and Water Watch hosts a talk by Bolivian water activist Marcela Olivera – Saturday September 19th at 4pm. Details here in our earlier post.

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)

What Happened to the Great Heron Gate?

Gate Interrupted

Something collided with the Great Heron Gate! As I biked past it this morning, only the right panel of the gate is standing. The doorway at the left of the gate is bent back. There’s yellow police tape strung across the space where the missing panel was. It looks like a car collided with it. I hope the missing panel is not irreparably damaged.

Another Sad Gate Shot

The Great Heron Gate was designed by sculptor Brett Goldstone. It was commissioned by the Friends of the Los Angeles River, with funding from the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority. The gate was dedicated nearly 10 years ago, on Earth Day 1999, and is the very first example of artistic gates welcoming folks onto the Los Angeles River. It’s located on the east side of Fletcher Drive near Ripple Drive in Frogtown, just south of the 1927 Fletcher Drive Bridge, at the entrance to Rattlesnake Park.

Decorative river gates have now become a cottage industry. Other great Goldstone gates are featured at the northeast side of Fletcher, Marsh Park, Steelhead Park, Acresite Street, Maywood Riverfront Park, Rio Vista Park (on the Rio Hondo), Centinela Avenue Park (on Ballona Creek), Whittier Narrows Nature Center (on the San Gabriel River) and many others. Other artists have gotten into the act and created welcoming gates into waterways in Los Feliz, Studio City, and South El Monte.

The Fate of the Gate?

Please leave a comment if you can let us know what happened to the Heron Gates! I will try to post some photos of the damage shortly – check back on Creek Freak very frequently – help drive up our statistics so we can sell out lucratively! Images posted above taken this morning, and below of how it used to look.

How it used to look (image from the Silver Lake News)

Walk the LA River in Elysian Valley on November 16th

Come on a Walking Tour of one of the very nicest earth-bottom stretches of the Los Angeles River.  Walk departs at 3:30pm on Sunday November 16th from the Great Heron Gates in Elysian Valley.  See public art, mini-parks, beautiful bridges, ducks, cormorants, willows, sycamores, cottonwoods, and mucho more!

The Great Heron Gates by Brett Goldstone (Photo from the Silver Lake News)

We’ll start with a brief history of the river and community campaigns for its revitalization, then walk for about 90 minutes.  It’ll be non-strenuous, casual pace, all ages and abilities.  Dogs on leash welcome.   The Great Heron Gate is located at the corner of Fletcher Drive and Ripple Street in Elysian Valley 90039 (near the intersection of the 5 and 2 Freeways.)  Street parking available on Ripple or Clearwater streets.  The walk was initiated by Occidental College’s Urban and Environmental Policy Institute, though it’s open to the public and free of charge – donations welcome though, and book purchases even better!

Guess who’s leading it?  That would be one Mister Joseph R. Linton, creak freek [sic] in residence and author of the somewhat-definitive-edition of the hyper-graphically illustrated Down by the Los Angeles River: Friends of the Los Angeles River’s Official Guide.

Osprey Spotting on the L.A. River

This afternoon I met up with a friend, Daniela, for a walk along the river. She’s actually a friend of a friend of my brother’s wife. She’s new in town and heard about my riparian proclivities and wanted to check out the mighty Los Angeles. Creek freak’s regular readers and I thank her for actually bringing a real camera. We met at the end of Dover Street in Atwater Village. We walked downstream along the concrete lip down by the river’s edge. The river was looking lush and green, with lots of ducks and coots, some cormorants, and occasional egrets and herons.

It was all very Los Angeles. We said “hola” to los tres fishermen, using tortillas as bait. Checked out carp they’d caught and stored in a small cooler. “Si, vamos a comer.” Further on, below the Sunnynook Footbridge, we went past about a dozen folks taking a break from a film shoot. We stepped over the camera rail tracks they’d set up and kept walking. Then we came across the osprey.

Just upstream of the Glendale Hyperion Viaduct, we spotted an osprey (sometimes called a fish hawk) circling above. We weren’t 100% sure it was an osprey – white under-bellied raptor with white shoulders turning to grays and blacks toward the outer part of its wings. A bit like this photo – though we weren’t anywhere near that close. Even though I’ve seen them here a few times, frankly, to my non-expert-birder eyes, they’re a bit similar to some sea-gulls. I know they’re really different, with very different behavior, but the size and color are slightly similar. (Creek freak probably just lost some credibility points with our birding readers right there.) Daniela and I discussed osprey anecdotes. She told me that when osprey grab a fish, they can’t let go until they reach solid ground, so sometimes they die trying to bring in too big a fish.

We crossed under the bridge, passed the Red Car River Park mural and Daniela spotted the osprey again. It was cruising out over the river, then took an abrupt turn plummeting downward. Into the water. Splash! and up with a small fish clenched in its talons. It was a fantastic sight! It was similar to this video. I told Daniela that of course this happens all the time on the L.A. River though I’ve seen osprey maybe a couple dozen times on the L.A. River (in the Glendale Narrows and in the Sepulveda Basin), and I knew that they were there for the fish, I’d never actually seen one dive and come up with a fish. A few years ago, I was leading a field trip for a group of Valley high school students in the Sepulveda Basin when I saw an osprey carrying a fish. Some of the students said they’d seen it catch the fish, but I missed it. Today was the first time I saw the pounce, the splash, and the getaway.

The rest of the walk was pleasant. No more dramatic birds of prey, though. We turned around at Brett Goldstone’s Water with Rocks gate at Fletcher Drive. We shared plums while we sat and talked for a while under the pleasant shade of tall cottonwoods and sycamores in North East Trees’ Atwater Riverwalk mini-park.

On my ride home, I spotted the osprey again, perched on an electrical wire that crosses the river just below Sunnynook. Now perched it looked a little different – mostly solid black, with a smallish head and a small white collar. I got off my bike, made my way below the pipe fence and sat on the sloped concrete wall and watched and waited. I was hoping it would take off so I could see it in flight and could confirm its osprey-ness… but he and I just sat.  After fifteen or twenty minutes, I began to get cold, so I mounted my bike and rode home. I checked online and the photos I saw here resembled what I’d seen in the field.

Sometimes I worry right before I’m about to show the river to someone new or to lead a walk along it. I think that maybe folks will be bored, or that they won’t see anything past the trash and concrete. More often than not, the river delivers something compelling… whether it’s a canvas on which we project our restoration dreams, a patch of flowers in bloom, a smiling family out for a bike ride, the sun illuminating a noble bridge, or just an osprey doing its job.

I can’t promise anything, but I recommend that you step away from the computer and take a walk along the stream in your neighborhood. Let me know how it goes.

Places to Visit: Rio Vista Park in El Monte

(This is the first in a “Places to Visit” series. I hope we’ll blog about various parks/streams/places and other noteworthy spots so that you, my faithful readers, can go and visit and enjoy these places!)

I first visited Rio Vista Park as part of last week’s conference on the San Gabriel River. Rio Vista Park is located on the Rio Hondo in the city of El Monte. It’s slightly difficult to find as it’s tucked away in a residential neighborhood, but well worth it. The address is 4275 Ranger Avenue, El Monte CA 91731. It’s on the west bank of the Rio Hondo directly across from the El Monte Airport, and a short walk or bike ride upstream from the El Monte Transit Center. (Note that the park is on the opposite side as the Upper Rio Hondo Bike Trail – to get there from the bike path, go west on Valley, right on Arden, right on Bisby and right on Shasta)

The current Rio Vista Park, which opened June 2008, is a rehabilitation and expansion project of an existing small park – and the site has a good hybrid/palimpsest feel of an older site that has been enriched by recent additions. The project was spearheaded by Amigos de los Rios partnering with the County of Los Angeles, the San Gabriel and Lower Los Angeles Rivers and Mountains Conservancy, and the city of El Monte. It’s part of what Amigos de los Rios call the Emerald Necklace – a large string of parks on the Rio Hondo and San Gabriel River.

The park celebrates multiple histories of the site, from the Tongva Native Americans to Hick’s Camp. Shade structures (visible in the picture on the left) are designed to resemble Tongva kich (pronunced “keesh”) housing made of thatched willow cuttings. Informational signage details the Tongva names and uses for native plants growing on-site.

Hick’s Camp was a colonia – a longstanding village that housed working class families, mostly immigrant agricultural workers. Hicks Camp occupied the park site and most of the surrounding neighborhood beginning from 1900 until it was demolished in the early 1970’s. Former residents of Hick’s Camp still gather for reunions. The park commemorates this history with a listing of the the names of Hick’s Camp families and a large camp map both etched in the sidewalk at the park entrance at Ranger Avenue. Interpretive signage explains the history of the site with time lines and historic photos. These tell important stories including the 1933 Berry Strike and the 1940’s successes in desegregating El Monte schools. Historic photos show the youth of the camp swimming and playing in the adjacent, still-natural Rio Hondo.

The park features an ample grassy area, picnic tables, a tot lot (with playful child-activated running water features) and an exercise course. The site features bioswales that detain and infiltrate stormwater. The plentiful new vegetation along the Rio Hondo is all native, with plenty of oak trees. Surrounding the park are more great gates by artist Brett Goldstone.

When folks from the conference visited the park last Tuesday night, there were plenty of local families using the park for walking, sitting and exercising. Mothers walked with strollers; kids cruised on the bmx bicycles. The winged residents were at home there, too: A small raptor (which we think was a juvenile Coopers Hawk) flew in and rested a while on a eucalyptus branch. We walked and toured the park, and looked east out over the Rio Hondo running wet in a concrete canyon and imagined what this place was and what it will be again.

Upcoming River Walk at the September 20 Frogtown Artwalk

This creek freak be leading a guided river walk in Elysian Valley (or Frogtown) – one of the nicest parts of the Los Angeles River.  It’s part of the 2008 Frogtown Artwalk, so you can do the walk, then check out local studios and galleries.

Great Blue Heron in the L.A. River in Frogtown

The walk takes place at 4:30pm on Saturday September 20th, departing from AGPS Architecture at 2413 Ripple Street (at Clearwater Street – one block downstream from Fletcher Drive), Los Angeles 90039.

It’s free.  No rsvp required – just show up.  The walk is along one of the nicest soft-bottom sections of the river, with willows, sycamores, ducks, turtles, fish, egrets, herons, and cormorants.  There’s also the wonderful 1927 Fletcher Drive Bridge, two pocket parks – Rattlesnake Park and Marsh Park, and beautiful artistic gates by Brett Goldstone.  I’ll be giving a brief talk, then we’ll do a non-strenous walk for about 90 minutes.  See you down by the river.