Landscape Desired

In 1768, when Gaspar de Portolá led the first Spanish land expedition into Southern California, there were 26 Gabrielino Indian villages within a few miles of the river, all able to survive without cultivating crops thanks to the bounty of a river that “meandered this way and that through a dense forest of willow and sycamore, elderberry and wild grape,” overflowing at times “into vast marshlands that were home to myriad waterfowl and small animals. Steelhead trout spawned in the river, and grizzly bear roamed its shores in search of food.” The vegetation covering much of L.A. was not the desert scrub and chaparral that today appears within weeks on lawns left untended, but “a sometimes impenetrable jungle of marshes, thickets and dense woods.” Much of Beverly Hills, it should come as no surprise, was a fetid swamp.

If the Spanish saw a “full-flowing, wide river” in a “very lush and pleasing spot, in every respect,” ideal for a settlement, by the 1850s “the once tree-covered plain was now barren and desolate.” The forests had been felled, the wetlands dried and the river diverted into a series â of irrigation ditches, often spilling over with “garbage and foul matter.” Though it once flowed plentifully near downtown all year long, by the turn of the century it had become a dry wash for most of the year and “the once-ample stream had become a local joke” that’s gotten no funnier in the intervening years. By the time the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had lined the river’s banks with cement, they were, Gumprecht writes, “closing the coffin on a river that was by and large already dead.” Today it is a river in name only: “Nearly all of the water that now flows in the river is treated sewage, authorized industrial discharges, and street runoff.” The Los Angeles River has become the world’s most grandly named sewage slough.

While tracking the river’s transformation, Gumprecht has produced an astoundingly well-researched environmental history of Los Angeles, as well as a detailed accounting of the political structures that have shaped the river’s, and the city’s, development. In the end, he expresses admiration for Lewis MacAdams and the Friends of the L.A. River’s quixotic struggle to restore the river to a more natural state, but stops short of joining them in their hope that the concrete can be peeled back and Eden restored.

Some more catching up: Also out since last spring is Michael Jacob Rochlin’s self-published Ancient L.A., a collection of three short essays illustrated copiously with Rochlin’s snapshots of L.A. cityscapes and period photos of the same. The first chapter asks “Why is our city the way it is? Why did it grow the way it grew?” and answers that its current population centers owe their locations to Gabrielino villages. “For proximity to sources of forced labor, Missions and Pueblo were placed adjacent to Indigenous Villages. Ranchos reoccupied the desolated sites. Boomtowns replaced ranchos. Grids filled-in open space and melded with adjacent grids.” Now downtown sits near the site of Yangna, San Pedro at Tsavingna, Redondo at Engnovagna. Trails from village to village became roads and, finally, freeways.

Rochlin’s passion for the city does not prevent him from decrying its failings: “Because of the violence of our transitions, our constant motions, our accelerated pace, our ignorance of our own nature, our blind eye to the past and our sacrifice of order for organization, Los Angeles has indeed become bleak — bleak, caught in limbo and without footing.” A second essay concentrates on Bunker Hill, condemning its contemporary incarnation as “a glass and steel projection of central power pasted atop a decapitated hill — a high-modern corporate utopia yet to match any part of the rich mystique and organic excitement its predecessor embodied.” The final chapter is an elegy to the survivors of bygone L.A.: “Old buildings, brick buildings. Old faded dusty cracking brick buildings.”

Ancient L.A. is a thoroughly good read, thanks to the wacky lushness of Rochlin’s prose, with its fearless alliteration and metaphor-mixing (“In limbo between iconoclastic paradise and vulgar wasteland, we commuter frogs ponder our pond atop freeway frying pans”), and to the gloriously uncaptioned, slightly out-of-focus photos. A section about Suangna, the largest of the Gabrielino villages, is illustrated by images of its likely location today: an Ugly Duckling used-car lot, traffic beside an oil refinery, neo-Nazi graffiti on a storm drain, an empty field. With their quiet contrast to the text, the photos force you into taking the long view, that “Our city is part of a cycle. Inescapably, it will soon be ruins, buried, and we, just as were the peoples before us, forgotten.”

LANDSCAPES OF DESIRE: Anglo Mythologies of Los Angeles | By WILLIAM ALEXANDER McCLUNG University of California Press 277 pages | $35 hardcover THE LOS ANGELES RIVER: Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth | By BLAKE GUMPRECHT | Johns Hopkins University Press 369 pages | $40 hardcover ANCIENT L.A. By MICHAEL JACOB ROCHLIN Unreinforced Masonry Studio | 236 pages $25 paperback