The dry gulch has many faces.
Commuters weave down it on the West's oldest freeway. Top engineers
converge in its dusty draw to mount America's exploration of space.
And on New Year's Day, millions of television viewers enviously admire
its stadium, washed in the warm winter sunlight.
It passes the Rose Bowl and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and goes
under at least seven historic bridges before emptying into the Los
Angeles River. Seeking to build the arroyo's image as a watershed is a
coalition of planners, environmentalists and political leaders. They
are wrapping up a half-million-dollar study of ways to tie together
natural areas in the drainage, give the river its meander back, and
"daylight" lost tributaries now buried in storm drains.
To create the impression of the arroyo as a public green space,
planners are also working with Caltrans to shut down the Pasadena
Freeway for a Sunday next year so people can amble and ride bikes down
what was originally meant to be, in its true sense, a parkway.
"When you think of a river as a whole, it gives some kind of
coherence to that little park down the street," said Robert
Gottlieb, professor of urban and environmental policy at Occidental
College, who is planning the event. "If there's anything that
connects the corridor today, it's the freeway."
Despite the traffic careening down its southern reach, the arroyo fits
ideally into a growing strategy of restoring and creating urban open
space, Gottlieb said. It connects the mountains to the Los Angeles
River 21 miles away. It traverses white, black, Latino and Asian
neighborhoods, streets lined with old hotels, lofty mansions and
teetering bungalows. And it is flanked by enough public land that
expensive property acquisition would not be a major issue.
"The arroyo captures the county's demographics and it has a lot
of potentially rich ecological reservoirs to play with," Gottlieb
said.
The study--called the Arroyo Seco Watershed Restoration Feasibility
Study--brought together numerous scientists, engineers and
consultants, as well as agencies including the Santa Monica Mountains
Conservancy, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works and the
National Park Service. Ideas ranged from the everyday--new parks and
bike trails--to what critics might call delusional--say, fishing for
steelhead trout in Pasadena.
The public relations campaign for the arroyo is not nearly as
quixotic, though, as the quest to convince people that the Los Angeles
River is worth fixing up. That stream, which has attracted almost $100
million in state funds for its restoration, is lined in concrete
almost from head to toe, ratcheted down by a rust belt of industry
from downtown to Long Beach.
By comparison, the arroyo water trickles, and occasionally roars,
through a lost era. Already some parts have been restored. In
Pasadena, horses clop through sand and brush, past prickly pear cactus
and rocky ravines. Joggers move between scenes of the city's oaken,
soft-lit gentility and the raw dirt of a desert wash.
"Is the arroyo going to be a hard sell?" asked Lynne Dwyer,
executive director of Northeast Trees, which is leading the study with
the Arroyo Seco Foundation. "No, it's like mom and apple pie.
Creeks and the Arroyo Seco."
The most ambitious element of the study--and always the most
controversial idea when it comes to river restoration--is a look at
possibly ripping out the concrete banks and recreating a natural
meander to the watercourse.
"One of the things that makes it more feasible here is you don't
have development right up to the arroyo like you do on the L.A.
River," said Terri Grant, assistant head for the watershed
division of the county Public Works Department.
Engineers at Montgomery, Watson & Harza estimated that it would
cost $500 million to buttress bridges and buildings, and construct
earthier, tree-lined banks to contain flood waters. Instead of rushing
down the constant slope of the channel, the water would drop off small
steps into ponds and twist in braids through a much wider stream bed,
slowing its descent.
Although you might not know it in Los Angeles, flowing water naturally
does not move along a path as straight as the Harbor Freeway, but
bends and pools and twists. It branches and merges and doubles back on
itself like, well, a river.
The two main parts of the arroyo under consideration for being let
loose from the channel would be in Pasadena: a stretch through the
Brookside Golf Course north of the Rose Bowl, and another south of the
Colorado Street bridge. Other parts closer to Los Angeles would keep
the banks and lose the concrete floor.
"The idea is to create a natural stream system, which requires a
lot more space than is currently taken up by the trapezoidal,
concrete-lined channel," said Chip Paulson, an engineer at
Montgomery, Watson & Harza.
'I Think They're Insane'
Critics call the plan pie in the sky. Officials at the Rose Bowl
Operating Co., which manages much of Pasadena's section of the arroyo,
including the golf course, vehemently disapprove.
"I think they're insane," said Porfirio Frausto, president
of the board for the company. "They're talking about naturalizing
a flood control channel. Well, why do you think it is a flood control
channel?"
The county and federal governments began constructing the region's
channels in the 1930s to stop deluges that periodically devastated the
basin and valleys.
Frausto said the stream would eat into the golf course's terrain and
periodically flood the greens, depositing silt and flotsam while
shutting down an economic engine for the city. Frausto said the
36-hole course brings $3.5 million to Pasadena annually and provides
parking space for the Rose Bowl.
"They say, 'Don't you want to see salmon in the Arroyo Seco?'
" he said. "Well, I want to see myself fly too. . . .
They're nice people, but we'll fight this tooth and nail."
Los Angeles River advocates met similar opposition, and have largely
shifted their focus to less rancorous proposals.
Another, perhaps less dramatic, part of the Arroyo Seco study suggests
that a hidden network of waterways that used to feed into the arroyo
can be unearthed.
"Where did all these ancient creeks go?" Dwyer said.
"Well, now they're storm drains. Are they in people's backyards
or can some of them resurface?"
Looking over county maps, she and her Northeast Trees colleagues
determined places where the underground pipes could be dug up to
create natural-looking creeks twisting their way to the main arroyo.
Rainbow Canyon, a small tributary coming off Mt. Washington, is a
prime candidate because the drain pipe runs under an existing nature
park.
"As it is, the water is still running through a watershed, but
once it hits a pipe, it's not doing any good," she said.
Yet even in its ambiguous state, the watershed supports a wide variety
of life, especially in the upper reaches.
To study the fish there, biologist Matt Stoeckler climbed into a
shadowy bowl of the Angeles National Forest near the arroyo's
headwaters a few miles above Pasadena. Deep in a remote gorge, the
loose rock slopes are so steep that the trail has to leave the river
bottom and skirt along a ridge to the east. Stoeckler stumbled upon
bears and found pools as deep as 15 feet, supporting healthy
populations of rainbow trout.
"If you see fish 7 or 8 inches long, with a crimson side, that's
definitely a rainbow," he said.
After his trek and a swim, Stoeckler considered how to improve the
habitat for the rainbow, as well as how to bring migrating steelhead
trout back up from the ocean and allow native species to thrive.
The key element relies on the same old controversy, however: restoring
a natural meander. The water simply moves too fast in the straight
channels for the fish to swim upstream.
"If the system is deconstructed and naturalized, the fish will
come back," Stoeckler said.
For less controversial improvements for the fish, he suggested that
Pasadena install netting at the Devil's Gate Dam where the stream
water is diverted into the drinking water system. "It's got to be
screened so it is not sucking in these rainbow trout," he said.
Seeking to Link Wildlife 'Islands'
Of course, fish are not the only wildlife that use the arroyo.
Biologists mapped out bits of open space from La Canada Flintridge to
Mt. Washington, looking for links that would allow wildlife to wander
between these "islands" and maintain healthy populations.
As it is, bobcats have been sighted as far south as South Pasadena,
though deer will not go as far, and mountain lions and bears stay in
the mountains.
"It doesn't call out to us right now to build a corridor for
mountain lions from the Santa Monicas to the San Gabriels," said
Verna Jigour, a conservation ecologist who prepared that part of the
report. But, she added, bobcats and foxes might move between the
ranges.
In the end, the study presumes to answer the question that haunts Los
Angeles' urban park movement: Can we all get along?
Yes, equestrians, mountain bikers, bears, homeowners, commuters,
soccer players, nature lovers and rainbow trout can live peacefully
with flood waters, freeway overpasses, stadiums and rocket
laboratories--all in one dry old gulch.
TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC
Improving the Arroyo Seco
A coalition of environmentalists and government agencies is wrapping
up a study that looks at ways to improve ecological habitat and
recreational opportunities in the 46.6-square-mile Arroyo Seco
watershed.