The river is just an embarrassment. There’s nothing we can do when someone makes fun of us for that one. :)

Well, we could point out that the Army Corps of Engineers completed the major channelization project in 1941, and that the last really disastrous episode of flooding along the river was in 1938. :-)

For most of its length, the LA River is not naturally a year-round river. But at its peak, it can carry a volume comparable to the average flow of the lower reaches of the Mississippi. (And that was true even before the increased runoff due to urbanization.)

Because the LA River watershed is so steep – it has a greater drop in altitude over its short course from the San Gabriels to the ocean than the entire length of the Mississippi – that flow can include large volumes of debris, which can dam existing channels and cause the river to change course, to divert its flow to new channels.

The combination of poorly-defined seasonal channels and large-volume flow with heavy debris loads gives the LA River and its tributaries a tendency to wander all over the landscape. Before channelization, it changed course with some frequency. (Blake Gumprecht’s excellent book, cited above, examines this in considerable detail.)

Prior to channelization, flooding was a frequent and quite serious problem along the LA River. And, unlike in areas with well-defined year-round riverbeds, it wasn’t easily predictable – last year’s high-and-dry location far from the river could easily become this year’s floodplain.

In the San Fernando Valley, the attentive map-reader and observer of topography can easily chart the course of half a dozen different fossil channels of the Tujunga Wash.

With over 70 years of relative safety from flooding, that hazard has mostly vanished from the collective local memory, leaving only annoyance at the concrete eyesore, and little appreciation for the freedom from catastrophic flooding that ugly channel represents.

I definitely second the recommendation of Gumprecht’s book – the historical context it provides may not improve the looks of the river, but it makes it much easier to understand how it got that way.

And I’d also encourage everyone to check out the LA River Master Plan I mentioned above – it’s a truly ambitious piece of urban planning that attempts to restore the beauty and environmental benefits of the river without sacrificing the flood protection we currently enjoy.

The river is just an embarrassment. There’s nothing we can do when someone makes fun of us for that one. :)

The 405 on the other hand is crap.

As for the river…well, it is what it is. If you’ve never actually walked along it, it’s an eyesore. Up close it’s, uh interesting. I’m from Kansas City and we got a nice river separating the city from the ‘burbs…and Kansas. Yeah, it was a shock when we moved here and I was like, “That’s not a river, it’s storm drain.” But now, I have a fuller appreciation for it. There’s a lot of neat little pockets of coolness on/near it and it is fun to walk. In fact, I’ll be heading over to the Burbank section tomorrow. I highly suggest taking a tour with FoLAR to see more of the river.