The Los Angeles River runs for 52 miles, draining a watershed shared with millions of other people. 60% of the L.A. River runs through the City for which it was named. Until William Mulholland captured Owens Valleys’ water in 1913, the Los Angeles River supplied the water for a city of 200,000 people. When the railroads came to Southern California in the 1870’s the river become the industrial corridor it has been ever since. Factories went up where once were wetlands. Railroad tracks lined the River’s banks.

THE GOLDEN PIG

Floods in 1934 and 1938 sealed the River’s fate. People were killed, though mostly in landslides. Railroad infrastructure was wiped out. Los Angeles County brought in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to tame the River, a project which emptied the relief rolls during the Depression. At one point 17,000 people were paving the river by hand. Buried under three million barrels of concrete, the river became invisible. Over the next half-century, the mighty Los Angeles all but disappeared from the map. Freeways like the 110, the 710 and the 5 were built in it. If it was referenced at all, it was as a flood control channel.

Twenty-three years ago Friends of the Los Angeles River came into existence as a 40 year art work to bring the Los Angeles River back to life, inspired by the earth art of Robert Smithson and the political provocations of the German artist and Green Party co-founder, Joseph Beuys.

Declaring the River Open

FoLAR’s first official act was to cut a hole in the fence and declare the River open. Its second was to build a totem on the Wallenboyd Theater’s stage in downtown L.A. from detritus the sculptor Pat Patterson had collected from the channel, then invoke the River’s vanquished denizens – rattlesnake to red-legged frog to fish hawk. From the beginning, Friends of the Los Angeles River’s fundamental imperative has been a magical one – to make the invisible river visible. From the Gran Limpieza to kayak descents to River School Days and the L.A. River Awards, practically everything FoLAR has done and does is meant to bring people to the invisible River, to experience it for themselves.

Gradually the river’s friends multiplied. Successful projects like the riverfront pocket parks in Elysian Valley begat larger successes like the State Parks in the Cornfield and Taylor Yard. The beautiful stretch of natural bottom river in the Glendale Narrows northeast of downtown began to attract hikers and bicyclists and kayakers and fishermen.

At the same time, most of the River remained isolated and inaccessible; and no stretch was more so than the river through downtown, the four and a half miles from the Hahamogna (AKA the Arroyo Seco) confluence south to the city’s border with Vernon. And the most invisible place along downtown Los Angeles’ River is the Union Pacific Railroad’s Piggyback yard, sometimes known as the Mission Yard or the LATC [Los Angeles Transfer Container Facility], a 125 acre intermodal facility where containers are humped between flat cars and 18 wheelers.

A View from the Roof

With approximately three quarters of a mile of riverfront just across the river from the County’s “Twin Towers” prison and Union Station, the century – old Piggyback Yard, the City of L.A.’s last active railyard largely disappeared from view, swallowed up by the megalopolis’s infrastructure. The 5 Freeway and the County USC Medical Center crowd it from the east. The Brewery artists’ colony, United Parcel Service’s mammoth Main Street facility and the San Antonio Winery border it on the north. The Sheriff’s “twin towers” prison, a Metro bus maintenance facility; and Piper Tech, the home of the City helicopter fleet, face the River from the east. A mountain of concrete aggregate and a junk foreign auto parts lot flank the River on the south.

LEWIS MACADAMS & TOM LABONGE BY THE LA RIVER

Few who didn’t work for the railroad even knew the yard was there. An early attempt to visit it with a class from the Harvard Grad School of Design ended abruptly when the railroad police threatened the students with arrest. A recent early Sunday morning would-be auto tour of the dilapidated facility with a Los Angeles City Councilman and a motor pool full of official- looking vehicles full of architects and landscape architects was similarly rebuffed. There is only one place to view the entire Piggyback Yard, the helicopter landing pad that tops the roof of the “Twin Towers” parking garage. One rooftop visit was cut short when a couple of suspicious off-duty sheriff’s deputies suggested that a pair of rooftop visitors might be terrorists casing the County lockup.

FoLAR’s Central City Initiative

FoLAR started focusing on the Central City in 1998 when it co-sponsored a planning charette with the Sierra Club called The River Through Downtown. A series of meetings with residents of four River-front communities were the first to look at the parkland possibilities in the Cornfield and Taylor Yard. A day of panels marked perhaps the first time that west-side environmentalists and central city politicians – groups long invisible to each other – began working together to create parkland in the most park-poor neighborhoods of the most park-poor metropolitan area in the United States.

The River Through Downtown grew into FoLAR’s Central City Initiative, which currently has three projects. We are collaborating with the Urban Land Institute, the American Institute of Architects and the Downtown Neighborhood Council to call for an international design competition for the replacement of the 6th Street Bridge over the Los Angeles River. We are working with the Natural Resources Defense Council to put high-speed rail underground beneath the Los Angeles River channel in the Central City.

At the beginning of 2004, I took Tad Friend, a reporter from The New Yorker, up on the helipad that tops the roof of the Sheriff’s parking garage at the Twin Towers, which is the only way to see the Piggyback Yard in its entirety.

Assembling the Team

In 2009, when former FoLAR Board member Mike Woo was on the City Planning Commission, a project called 1 Santa Fe came up for approval. Woo told his fellow commissioners that he would not vote in favor of the project without the developer making some gesture towards reconnecting the river and the city across about fifteen Red Line railroad tracks. To my surprise, Michael Maltzan, 1 Santa Fe’s architect, took on FoLAR’s challenge enthusiastically, creating a series of 40-foot wide piers above the light rail tracks that weaving together his project and the River.

Not long after that I was talking to David Freeman, at that point Mayor Villaraigosa’s Mr. Fixit, about the Piggyback Yard. He had no idea what I was talking about. “Draw me a picture,” he interrupted in his Tennessee twang. I called Michael Maltzan and asked him if he knew any architect who would work with me to create a picture of a post-industrial Piggyback Yard. “What about me?” he replied. I enthusiastically accepted his offer. On his own, Maltzan brought in fellow Frank Gehry alumnus Marc Salette from the firm Chee Salette Architecture Office.

At almost exactly the same time, Leigh Christy, an architect at the global architecture firm Perkins+Will, approached Carol Armstrong, the chief of the L.A. River office within the City’s Bureau of Engineering to let her know that Perkins+Will was interested in spending the one percent of its billable hours that the company dedicated annually to a project on the L.A. River. Carol put Leigh in touch with FoLAR. We accepted their equally kind offer. I immediately started trying to recruit landscape architect Mia Lehrer. It took a month, but I finally cornered her at a reception for the opening of hers and Fred Fisher’s Annenberg Community Beach House project, and convinced her to join the team. The hard core of the Piggyback Yard group was in place.

Planting the Seed

Our first meeting was held on the roof of the Sheriff’s “Twin Towers” parking garage looking down on the graffiti-spattered concrete banks and the Piggyback Yard across the river. Even meeting every other week, the study would ultimately take about eight months of steady work to complete, and involve the pro bono talents of a hundred people. The group brought in experts with a broad range of relevant expertise, from railroad history to air quality, from real estate development to flood detention to habitat restoration to High Speed Rail. The team was not afraid to ask the toughest questions and to integrate the answers into their work.

One of the most heartening aspects of the whole project was the enthusiasm of our expert witnesses. Once they were assured their knowledge was being taken seriously, many of them stayed involved, bringing even more skills to the process.

From the beginning, we knew we were not going to be able to build our vision overnight. There would be no magic wands. We often spoke of it in terms of planting a seed. For our version of civic gardening we were incredibly fortunate to obtain the services of Jackie Kain, former Senior V.P. for New Media at public television station KCET, and her crew to build our website which we see as a gathering place for ideas and exploration, and the building of a constituency to advance our work.

All over the world, communities have been remaking their riverfronts and either eliminating or undergrounding outmoded rail facilities. One has only to point to the tremendous success of Millennium Park in Chicago, built atop the Illinois Central railroad tracks that for a century separated the City of Chicago from Lake Michigan. What the Piggyback Group has proposed is eminently doable. Ultimately it will come down to how Los Angeles sees its own destiny, and especially the future of its river through the Central City. Is the Piggyback Yard going to remain an under-utilized industrial site employing 50 people? Will it become a place to store light rail cars? Or will it evolve into a regional park surrounded by housing and a clean tech corridor, with enough flood detention capacity to protect 2 million people downstream from a hundred year flood? We expect that debate to play out at Piggybackyard.org. We hope you will join us.

The River is Here

In closing I just want to say that I have been working on the L.A. River for almost twenty-five years. This has been the most skilled, the most selfless, and least diva-esque L.A. River project I’ve ever been part of. They’ve made the invisible river visible. Friends of the Los Angeles River, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the City and County of Los Angeles, and the River itself owe the Piggyback Group a huge debt of gratitude.

Lewis MacAdams