A Freeway Runs Through It
The lower
Arroyo Seco was channelized in 1938 because of rainfalls like this. Norm
Brooks (PhD ’54), Irvine Professor of Environmental and Civil Engineering,
Emeritus, took this shot looking downstream at the two-lane bridge that
connects JPL with its east parking lot on March 4, 1978, at the end of
what National Weather Service meteorologists rated a series of “moderate-intensity”
storms during which the rain gauge on Mount Wilson recorded 24.16 inches
of rain in six days. What looks like a dead tree wedged against the pier
is really water being thrown two meters into the air, from which Brooks
says a flow of about six meters per second can be calculated.
The Arroyo
Seco runs some 20 miles from the San Gabriel Mountains to the Los Angeles
River. Spanish for “dry gulch,” it’s actually a good-sized
canyon whose intermittent stream, permanent ponds, and fertile flood-plain
have been a sanctuary for wildlife and humans for at least 8,000 years.
In the last 100, it has also become the chief conduit between downtown
Los Angeles and Pasadena, containing, at various times, a wood-planked
elevated bikeway, the Santa Fe railroad, the Arroyo Seco Parkway, the
Pasadena Freeway, the Metro Rail Gold Line, and soon perhaps again a bicycle
expressway. At the same time, its streambed from just south of JPL has
been dammed and encased in concrete in response to the catastrophic floods
of the 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s. And, of course, the Arroyo is
home to the Rose Bowl, a golf course, swimming pools, tennis courts, hiking
trails … It’s in this context of balancing refuge and recreation,
torrents of water and streams of cars, that Caltech, Occidental College,
and UCLA last year jointly offered a course entitled, “Re-Envisioning
the Arroyo Seco Corridor: Watershed, Transportation, Ecological, and Community
Building Issues.”
William Deverell,
Caltech associate professor of history; Robert Gottlieb and Marcus Renner
of Oxy’s Urban and Environmental Policy Institute; and Richard Weinstein
of the department of architecture and urban design and Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris
of the urban planning department, both at UCLA, taught the course in concurrent
sessions on their home campuses. The class shared a reading list (which
included Eden by Design, cowritten by Deverell and Greg Hise, associate
professor of urban history at USC) and met jointly twice, but otherwise
took a different focus at each institution. Oxy took on issues important
to the surrounding communities. UCLA offered a graduate-level “studio”
course that did things like redesign the Pasadena Freeway’s abrupt
transition to a surface street, using the Arroyo to create a gateway to
the city of Pasadena. And Deverell’s class explored the Arroyo’s
historical and cultural legacy.
Of the course’s 45 students, three were Caltech undergrads. John Harris (BS ’02), Derek Jackson, and Meghan Smith (BS ’02) did fieldwork with Deverell as well as classwork, he says. “It was great to tap into the students’ knowledge of geology, biology, and so on, and apply that to local history. And it was fun to spend time with the students off campus, out of context.” Their destinations included the Huntington Library, where dining-room furniture belonging to Caltech trustee Henry Robinson (as in Robinson Lab) is part of an exhibit on the works of Charles and Henry Greene. Says Harris, “We were all very surprised to learn about all the ways that Caltech was related to Arroyo culture.” For example, renowned tile maker Ernest Batchelder taught art at Throop Polytechnic, Caltech’s forerunner, leaving in 1909 in protest over the school’s increasingly theoretical bent. But he and his wife remained active in school affairs: the Coleman Chamber Concerts bear her name.
For those
of you who aren’t up on local history, it starts with the Tongva,
rechristened the Gabrielinos by the Spanish—hunter-gatherers whose
women wove beautiful, complex reed baskets, now highly prized, as well
as huts large enough to shelter an entire extended family. The Arroyo
was relatively unused by the Spanish ranchers and farmers, and many dispossessed
Tongva still lived there when California joined the Union in 1850. Pasadena
was founded in 1886, the year after the Santa Fe railroad arrived and
just in time for the land boom that followed. “The Arroyo was a nationally
acclaimed recreation area that drew and retained visitors from all over
the country,” says Harris. For tubercular, asthmatic Easterners,
it was a small conceptual leap from “warm, dry air is good for the
lungs” to “living outdoors is good for you,” and thus was
born the Arroyo Culture, which would define Pasadena’s, and indeed
Los Angeles’s, self-image until the 1920s—an idealized vision
of the desert southwest, both Tongva and Hispanic, adapted for American
life.
The Arroyo
Culture applied the notion of “living in nature” to all aspects
of existence—the California bungalow, with its spacious patios and
sleeping porches, and the plein air (literally “open air”) style
of painting being just two of its manifestations. The Arroyo and its banks
became populated with bohemians and artisans (including Batchelder) of
all sorts—the Southern California incarnation of the Arts and Crafts
movement that had sprouted in England. This urban wilderness became the
archetype of a new, suburban lifestyle, says Deverell; not city, not country,
but something in between. (Of course, this was a lot easier to achieve
at the turn of the century, when the county’s population was comfortably
under a million.) Even so, not everyone could afford to live in a Craftsman
house by Greene and Greene (or even a modest bungalow), and support grew
for officially turning the Arroyo into a park so that the working classes,
too, could experience nature.
In 1928,
in a spirit of noblesse oblige, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce—the
men who moved and shook the Southland in the days before plate tectonics—commissioned
a report called Parks, Playgrounds and Beaches for the Los Angeles Region.
Two years in the making by the Olmsted brothers and Harland Bartholomew,
the leading landscape architects and city planners of the day, this comprehensive
blueprint also included large wilderness reservations suitable for camping,
hiking, and horseback riding. These were to be connected by parkways or
“pleasureway parks,” laid out so “that no home will be
more than a few miles from some part of it; and … so designed that,
having reached any part of it, one may drive within the system for pleasure,
and with pleasure, for many miles.… [They] necessarily should be
greatly elongated real parks.” Landscaped to be screened from their
surroundings, and “having few cross-traffic intersections,”
they would “produce, along with the topographic conditions, some
sense of spaciousness and seclusion, and a variety of scenic effects.”
Yes, recreational driving was already an acknowledged pastime—by
1930, there were two automobiles for every three people in L.A., the highest
per-capita ratio in the world, says Eden by Design.
The proposed
Arroyo Seco Parkway ran from downtown Los Angeles to the San Gabriel Mountains,
feeding into what is now the Angeles Crest Highway. But as studies by
blue-ribbon commissions are wont to do, this one sank without a ripple.
In the words of the Techers’ project report, “Shamefully, the
reasons this plan for a countywide parkway system failed were primarily
political ones. The proposal would have required a new countywide agency
with extensive powers to appropriate spending, but the Chamber of Commerce
… did not want to share their power…. Business leaders were
also opposed to the plan because they believed that it would take up too
much valuable real estate…. Even during the Depression, hundreds
and thousands of people were migrating to southern California from other
parts of the country, making the real estate business extremely lucrative
… ‘city beautiful’ ideas were pushed into the background.”
Although
much of the Arroyo’s floor was eventually converted into a chain
of parks, the result was neither the originally envisioned “pleasureway”
nor a proper freeway, but something in between. Dedicated December 30,
1940, to coincide with the Tournament of Roses (the Rose Bowl had been
built in 1926), the Arroyo Seco Parkway is the oldest limited-access highway
west of the Mississippi. It’s been designated an American Civil Engineering
Landmark and is eligible for the National Register of Historic Places.
It was laid out so that you could see magnificent vistas from behind the
wheel, it followed the contours of the landscape, and it featured decorative
walls and bridges, but it also had a large median and wide lanes for its
day, and banked curves to keep the traffic humming at the state speed
limit of 45 miles per hour. It was designed to carry 27,000 cars per day,
and now handles about six times that. Furthermore, says the Techers’
report, “Most of the adjoining parkland goes unused, except by the
local residents. Many acres of parkland have poor street access or have
dilapidated facilities, and most of these parks are not even known to
be open to the public.”
So, what
can be done at this late date to reconnect the freeway to the Arroyo Culture?
If we can no longer “live in nature,” can we at least drive
in it? In March, the combined class presented their work to invited guests
at the Los Angeles River Center and Gardens, at the confluence of the
Arroyo
and the Los Angeles River. Among the Techers’ proposals was one to
restore the original sight lines. Says Harris, “If a few ‘shielding’
trees were removed in a couple of places, views of the mountains could
be much more dramatic.” And, says the report, “all chain-link
fences should be removed or obscured with something artistic and natural.
These barriers and other roadside structures could be built with Arroyo
stone or use aesthetic designs that are culturally significant to the
Arroyo.” Better signs and more historical markers would raise awareness
of the surrounding parks, which need renovation, and a low-power radio
transmitter like those that broadcast freeway closures could beam a program
on Arroyo culture and history into your car.
It could
happen, says Tim Brick, director of the Arroyo Seco Foundation, who was
in the audience that day. The foundation released its own Arroyo Seco
Watershed Restoration Feasibility Study in Caltech’s Ramo Auditorium
five months later, on August 21. “I was impressed by their recommendations,
and we went back and beefed up parts of the watershed report from it,”
said Brick. “They really caught the spirit of the Arroyo.” He
continued, “Caltrans has recently obtained Federal Scenic Byway status
for the Parkway, which means that a lot more attention will be paid to
upgrading its ‘look’ and historical character.” Meanwhile,
according to UCLA’s Loukaitou-Sideris, the Metropolitan Transit Authority
and Caltrans are studying UCLA’s proposed ArroyoWalk, which “connects
and highlights a number of cultural sites” accessible to pedestrians,
while at the same time “proposes visual elements to enhance the motorists’
views and perception of the area as a cohesive landscape.” And Renner
reports that Oxy’s students have produced a brochure and Web site
(http://students.oxy. edu/wheatley/bikeproject.htm) on expanding bicycle
use in the Arroyo area, and another brochure listing its cultural resources.
He’s including them in an Arroyo educators’ guide that will
go out to 50 to 100 teachers of grades
K–12 in October.
The joint
syllabus for the course calls the degree of collaboration “unprecedented,”
and Renner concurs. “It
was an experiment, and we learned how to do it better next time, which
we’d like to do.” Says Deverell, “It was a joint idea by
all three campuses that just sort of grew out of discussions. I’d
like to do it regularly—the mountains one year, the beaches the next,
and so on. It’s this kind of flexibility, and the resources of the
Huntington Library, that makes teaching humanities here so rewarding.”
—DS
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