In a city with many famous features and elements, including such mega-stars as the Hollywood Hills, Beverly Hills and Santa Monica Beach, the Los Angeles River is more like the well-known character actor that you’ve seen in dozens of movies and TV shows, but you can’t remember their name. That’s especially ironic when it comes to the LA river, as it gave its name to the city.

Certainly, in terms of size and majesty, the Los Angeles River can’t compete with the Nile or the Amazon, or even the Thames or the Seine, but that last point is important: it gave its name to arguably the most famous city in the world. In addition to that the LA River has several other significant claims to fame, which I’ll detail below.

Usually Angelenos, and the wider world, only get interested in it when Southern California gets a lot of rain, and there are news reports of possible floods in Los Angeles. There’ll be a sudden surge of people googling “Los Angeles River flooding”. That’s also ironic as the river never floods anymore, since it’s now designed to be a flood control channel, for which it works very well.

So, what’s the deal with the LA River? Why is it so obscure? Why is it a concrete channel for much of its length now? And is it even a “real” river?

Early History of the Los Angeles River

The Los Angeles River begins in the far southwest of the San Fernando Valley, winding its way for 51 miles down to Long Beach, where it empties into San Pedro Bay. While mostly fed by storm drains, various reservoirs and a water treatment facility today, in the past it was a good-sized, free-flowing river, that was fed by snow and rainwater, as well as numerous springs that arose in the mountains around it.

There are four mountain ranges in the river’s watershed: the San Gabriel and Verdugo Mountains to the north and east, and the Santa Susana and Santa Monica Mountains to the south and west. All of them form part of the Transverse Ranges, an entire network of mountain ranges running east to west across Southern California, that were formed by tectonic activity over many aeons.

In pre-Columbian times the river served as a source of food, water and community space for the Tongva, the First American people that occupied the area of today’s Los Angeles. It’s estimated that there were forty-five communities along its serpentine path, drawn by the abundance of animal and plant life to be found along its banks. Of particular use were the oak trees, which grew along the river’s length, providing shade, wood and acorns.

However, by the mid-eighteenth century, change was coming – a tidal wave that would sweep away the old Tongva way of life.

The Spanish Crown had long claimed much of what’s now the U.S. west of the Rocky Mountains. Now concerned about the Russian, British and French Empires encroaching on what they considered their domain, the Inspector General of New Spain (as Mexico was then known), José de Gálvez, gave orders to send an expedition up the West Coast from Mexico. The aim being to find out what the land contained, in terms of resources the Spanish could exploit, and establish a series of missions, military bases and farming communities, to assert their control.

The River Renamed

What became known as the Portolà Expedition was duly dispatched from Sonora. It worked its way up the coast and, in mid August 1769, the explorers camped on present-day Boyle Heights. Looking down on the river below one of the members of the expedition, the Franciscan missionary Padre Juan Crespi, named it El Río de Nuestra Señora La Reina de Los Ángeles de Porciúncula, which translates to the River of Our Lady Queen of the Angels of Porciuncula.

The reason for the long-winded name is that August 15 is the feast day in honor of the Virgin Mary’s Assumption into Heaven, when she became Queen of the Angels. The Franciscan Order having a small church called the Porciúncula Chapel dedicated to her, at Assisi in Italy.

Crespi was much taken by the area. Crucially he described the river as being, well, a river.

A good-sized, full-flowing river with very good water, pure and fresh. (It is) a very lush and pleasing spot, in every respect. Southward there is a great extent of soil, all very green, so that really it can be said to be a most beautiful garden.

Bearing in mind that Crespi was describing it in August, at the end of Summer (and the driest part of the year), it’s an important point.

Of course, the obvious thing to do nowadays would have been to ask the locals what they called the river that ran through their land – but Spanish Conquistadors didn’t work that way. Unfortunately now we don’t even know what the Tongva called the Los Angeles River, although other place names of theirs do survive, such as Pasadena and Malibu.

The Spanish weren’t very creative with their place names. When coming across a new feature, like a river or island, or naming a new settlement, they would consult the calendar and name it after the Saint Day that it fell on. That’s why California has so many towns and cities with a name that starts with “San” and “Santa”. Angel Island in San Francisco Bay probably got its name because it was first sighted by a Spanish explorer on the same day, in 1775.

A River Runs Through It: Founding of Los Angeles

Within a couple of years the Spanish had established a mission in the San Gabriel Valley. Following up on that, in 1781 a small farming village was founded on the west bank of the river, near where it emerges from what are now known as the Glendale Narrows onto the alluvial plain below. The tiny pueblo of just 44 settlers from Mexico took its name from the river on which it sat, becoming El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula.

Although it was quite a while until people settled on the name of Los Angeles for the waterway, as for a long time it was called the Porciúncula River (as LA was often referred to as Porciúncula). In fact it was only when California became part of the U.S., in 1848, that the town’s name was officially shortened to Los Angeles, and its main waterway to the Los Angeles River.

LA River Changes Course

One of many myths concerning Los Angeles is that it was built in a desert. In fact LA’s climate is Mediterranean and when it does rain here it really rains. In a normal year we get between fifteen to twenty inches of rain in the city (most of it between November and April), but in the mountains it can be as much as 50 inches. And in a very short time span.

Not only that, but the river also has a huge drop in elevation over its course. The highest point in the Los Angeles River’s 834 square mile watershed is at more than 7,000 feet above sea level, in the northwest San Gabriel Mountains. The river itself starts at an elevation of 800 feet at Canoga Park, making a drop of 16 feet per mile on average (as a comparison the mighty Mississippi drops an average of one foot per mile). This means the water can move very quickly and with a lot of force.

So the river was unpredictable, spilling onto the surrounding flood plain during particularly heavy storms (our climate is dominated by the El Niña/La Niña weather system). This abundance of water actually turned parts of the Los Angeles basin into wetlands, which in turn facilitated the growth of large forests (the area would have looked a lot like the Angeles National Forest does today).

It also led to the river completely jumping its banks after a very severe storm in 1825 (or 1835, historical accounts differ) and, rather than making a right turn south of Bunker Hill and heading towards Venice, which it had done up to this point, it instead made a beeline for Long Beach. The river has followed that course ever since, leaving its old estuary to become the marshland now known as the Ballona Wetlands.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Los Angeles River, and its various tributaries and source streams, supported extensive farming, which was one of the main industries here at the time. In fact the alluvial plain that Los Angeles sits on is especially fertile, precisely because the river was frequently flooding it with mineral-rich water and sediment. Additionally, the river served as the principal water source for the city until 1913, when the LA Aqueduct replaced it, bringing water from California’s High Sierra to Sylmar, in the San Fernando Valley.

By that time the city had reached a population of well-over 300,000 inhabitants (from about 100,000 in 1900), so it’s not surprising that the city felt that it needed a new water source. With growth being so explosive, the city’s leaders wanted to be sure that a lack of water wouldn’t slow its development.

River Wild Is Tamed

However, the river continued to run through the center of town, relatively unmolested, until the Great Flood of 1938. Caused by severe storms in February of that year, the resulting floods killed no less than 115 people and caused $40 million worth of damage to the city and the surrounding area, destroying over five thousand buildings and several bridges.

Afterwards Frank Shaw became the first mayor of a major American city to be recalled from office, partly due to what was seen as his incompetent handling of the crisis, and partly because of some very credible allegations of corruption at City Hall.

Following this disaster, the Army Corps of Engineers went to work encasing the river in concrete as a flood-prevention measure. They straightened, deepened and widened the river so thoroughly that there’s never been a flood since, but the work also had the effect of reducing the once beautiful watercourse to a grey and very ugly shadow of its former self.

Officially the river ceased to exist, technically transformed into a flood-control channel (it’s the longest paved river in the world, a tribute to the U.S. Army’s dedication to its work). To make things worse the city physically turned its back on it, using the river banks to build freeways, and place rail tracks and electricity pylons. What should have been some of the nicest parts of the city actually became its ugliest.

Nevertheless it still provided value as an incredibly efficient storm drain for LA: a drop of water can reach the sea faster than a car on the freeway driving alongside the river (the water doesn’t have to deal with LA traffic). Bearing that in mind perhaps it’s not surprising that some had the idea of turning it from a water freeway into one for cars. Throughout the 1960’s, and even up to the end of the 1980’s, there were proposals to let cars use the river’s concrete channel, at least in the “dry” season. Thankfully they were never realized.

The Los Angeles River as a Film Location

However, with its radical new design, the Los Angeles River also proved itself to be a fantastic location for Hollywood movies. with a special focus on the action genre.

Over the years the river has had significant supporting roles in Point Blank, Grease, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Point Break and Chinatown, the latter film being the fictionalized version of a scandalous chapter in the Los Angeles River’s own story (how the LA Aqueduct really came to be built).

Reimagining the River

By the 2000′s the Los Angeles River had become little more than a joke in the city to which it gave its name. used only as a post-apocalyptic location for action movies and as a punchline for late-night talk-show hosts. Many of Los Angeles’ inhabitants were unaware of its existence, even as it wound its way behind their houses and apartment blocks, underneath freeways and past enormous rail yards, industrial wastelands and low-income communities

It was a prime example of LA’s destructive impact on the natural environment that gave it life. The Los Angeles River seemed to be a cautionary tale.

However, not everyone had given up on it. Activists, such as Lewis MacAdams, continued to insist that the river should be open to the public and could be restored. Out of his efforts the Friends of the LA River was formed (FoLAR), which continued to lobby the city to restore the river’s natural ecology and reconnect Angelenos to it.

It was a long and lonely struggle but finally, in 2013 the newly-formed Los Angeles River Revitalization Corporation announced plans to transform the river, well, back into a river, with a proper riparian ecosystem. Part one of the plan was officially declaring it to actually be a river – it turns out that names really do matter.

Since then, popular support for the revamp has steadily grown, culminating in an announcement that Frank Gehry had been commissioned to design a masterplan (although many environmental advocates are opposed to significant elements in it). In 2022 the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted to approve the new masterplan, which aims to completely restore the river and bring it back to life, even as it continues to serve its vital role as a flood control channel.

The River Today

The flood control part of the river’s job is even more important than ever, as the watershed of the LA River is now home to a population of over 9 million people, living in no less than 43 cities and unincorporated territories.

Over the last few years numerous other riverside projects have been announced running the gamut from bridges (such as the Sixth Street Viaduct and La Kretz Bridge, which have already been completed), to parks, housing and, critics argue, gentrification. Also the city is planning to build and renovate 32 miles of bike paths alongside the river, to be completed in time for the 2028 LA Olympics.

The Los Angeles River, it seems, is back, no longer the butt of bad jokes, and a new chapter in its history is being written.

How to Explore the LA River

One of best places to see the Los Angeles River is from Griffith Park – which is the only place from which you can see almost all of it. We talk about the importance of its water to early LA on our daily Griffith Park & Hollywood Sign Hike, which starts at the Greek Theatre and climbs to the top of Mount Hollywood, which has phenomenal views.

Another way to see the Los Angeles River is to do this great tour, which goes along the waterway itself and up into the hills of the surrounding neighborhood. It’s a fantastic introduction to this often forgotten and surprisingly hidden part of LA. You can even have lunch after the tour at Spoke Bicycle Cafe, right on the banks of the river.

Talking of a bicycle cafe… a great way to explore the river is to bike it. There’s a nice stretch of bike path north of downtown, in the Atwater Village/Frogtown area which is both easy and safe. For more information on how to do it read our article on bicycling in Los Angeles.

Fancy kayaking on one of he unpaved sections of the river? The non-profit LA River Expeditions organizes kayaking trips in Elysian Valley near Griffith Park (more information here). It’s a great organization and a great way to experience the river.

If you have any feedback on Los Angeles River: LA’s Mighty Waterway please email us or reach out on social media, we’d love to hear from you.

– By Damien Blackshaw (Twitter)