Archive: Rivers

Two views of the river: Sunday's rain-swollen racetrack and the big concrete ditch we usually see.

C-146 stays close to the river in northeast LA, but the coyote recently tagged west of downtown has roamed as far as Hancock Park and back.

The drought has gone on so long there may be new Angelenos who have never seen the concrete Los Angeles River raging. Hola, El Niño.

After being lobbied by Mayor Eric Garcetti and river activists, the Army Corps of Engineers said it would recommend an ambitious $1 billion makeover of 11 miles of the Los Angeles River upstream from downtown. "The greatest thing to happen to the river since it was paved over,” say advocates.

A portion of the "Mother Ditch" that supplied the pueblo of Los Angeles, later encased in brick, has been uncovered and will be removed.

The blog LA Creek Freak may be closing in on the location of the natural drainage that used to flow — and maybe still does? — through what became the cities of Pasadena, San Marino and/or Alhambra.

The editors of Boom: A Journal of California asked writer Bob Sipchen and his son Rob to defend LA’s right to exist. Which they did.

Garcetti was taped for YouTube while floating in a kayak on the Los Angeles River.

Photographer Lane Barden has announced that the Getty Research Institute acquired his series of 130 images called the Linear City Porfolio. The three segments consist of low-altitude oblique aerial photographs of three major visual features of the LA landscape: the Los Angeles River, the Alameda Corridor railroad trench and Wilshire Boulevard.

You may have never thought you would see this. As of Monday, a 2.5-mile stretch of the Los Angeles River was officially opened to recreation: kayaking, fishing, or just walking along and checking out the blue herons and the floating trash. Here's where.

A portion of the Sepulveda Basin Wildlife Reserve was cleared of trees and brush in an abrupt move by the Army Corps of Engineers that caught the area's birdwatchers and volunteer caretakers by surprise. Reacting to an outrcy, the Army Corps halted work for more discussion.

The "infrastructure" firm HNTB has won the city's international design competition for the new bridge that will replace the decaying concrete 6th Street Viaduct over the Los Angeles River. Here's what they have in mind.

British readers of The Guardian got a glimpse the other day of a Los Angeles they may not have known about. West Coast correspondent Rory Carroll became the latest journalist to take one of activist George Wolfe's kayak tours on the short stretch of unpaved Los Angeles River in the Sepulveda Dam Basin. Carroll makes some cogent observations, but first he has to find the place.

Lauren Bon's latest project is to install a large working water wheel to extract water out of the Los Angeles River (once the city's main source) and irrigate land beside the Broadway bridge, near the Los Angeles State Historic Park where her cornfield transformed a former train yard in 2005. Check out the prototype.

Mayor Villaraigosa, architect Alex Ward and others consider replacements for the 6th Street Viaduct on "DnA" with Frances Anderton on KCRW. Listen there Previously at LA Observed: 6th Street...

Los Angeles is likely to be well represented in the commercials that air during Sunday's Super Bowl. Like this one showing a flying saucer crash near Downtown.

L.A. Creek Freak pretty much destroys the official notion that an oily sheen on the runoff in Ballona Creek comes from overflows at the La Brea Tar Pits — or is even a problem at all worth spending millions to fix.

Fun story on Off-Ramp over the weekend about architect Arthur Golding's concept of an open-air mercado with cafes spanning the Los Angeles River.

Cassie spent her adolescence on the streets of L.A. then got herself together, only to slip back into the rabbit hole of urchins, dealers and characters in...Frogtown.

Blogger Militant Angeleno explores the four arroyos that used to direct runoff from the Santa Monica Mountains across UCLA and on toward Ballona Creek.

"Yes, Los Angeles has always been a town for lovers," reads the caption for this 1871 map posted on Facebook.

Poet and L.A. River advocate Lewis MacAdams' dream of a park on the Union Pacific Piggyback Yard made a splash in today's New York Times real estate pages.

Ten friends, including journalists Anthea Raymond (public radio) and Bettina Boxall (Los Angeles Times), paddled down a two-mile stretch of the Los Angeles River between Atwater and Elysian Valley last weekend.

Eric Spiegelman was at Disneyland checking out an old map of California mounted in the Main Street railroad station when he spotted an unexpected geographic feature. "There are like a...