Down By the River

Meghan McCarty
| October 14, 2008 10:35 PM TrackBacks (0) Comments (0)
Down by the LA River - crossing Fletcher Drive into Elysian Valley.



"In a city of stars, it is a has-been.

In a city of bone-shaking earthquakes and blowtorch winds, it has been tamed into a toothless creature of unnatural nature.
In its latter days, its banks and beds have been plastered over with cement. It has been befouled by oil and DDT and cyanide and human sewage. It has had more value as a movie set, more usefulness as a punch line, more potential as a freeway, than regard as a waterway ...
Los Angeles brags about its beaches and its mountains. On the subject of its river, however, it is silent. Within the river's banks lies more acreage than Central Park -- walled up, fenced off, locked away from human eyes, like a loony aunt hidden in the attic, not to be discussed in front of company ...
In other cities, great rivers are fringed by great houses and grand legends. St. Petersburg's palaces edge the canals of the Neva, where Rasputin drowned, full of cyanide and bullets. Slave-built plantation mansions front the reaches of the Mississippi, where young Mark Twain learned his river pilot's trade and his storytelling one.

Not so here."

(Morrison, Patt and Lamonica, Mark. Rio L.A. Los Angeles, CA: Angel City Press, 2001)

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