The Piggyback Yard Conceptual Master Plan envisions a vast, new Park offering a wide range of activities for a diverse community, a developed mixed-use Mission Road corridor, an Arts Campus, a restored Los Angeles River, and a new Transit District, adjacent to Downtown and central to the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The Broadened River variation proposes to restore and widen the Los Angeles River at the Piggyback Yard to create a thriving natural habitat within its course. (more…)

IRA MARK ARTZ ANALYZES PIGGYBACK YARD HYDROLOGY

Providing Channel Capacity for River Revitalization

The Piggyback Yard is one of the most valuable land areas in the entire City for river restoration because of its immense water storage potential compared to other single-owner parcels of land.

This is where the Piggyback Yard Project provides its most significant contribution to the hydrology of the River: By storing peak flow, the volume of water in the channel is reduced. This in turn allows additional space in the channel for habitat plantings and related revitalization features, both adjacent to the Piggyback Yard and downstream. (more…)

Through an iterative design process, our collaborative design group has studied multiple ways of giving the overall concept developed for the Piggyback Yard a compelling expression in terms of urban design, architecture and landscape architecture. We sought to find the proper balance of building density and open space for the site as a whole, and especially for the Mission Road corridor, we considered various alternatives for major elements of the park and, most importantly, we studied several ways of transforming the river to achieve its naturalization, revitalization and accessibility. (more…)