Pollution: A poet and performance
artist helped bring about the landmark order that
cities must keep trash out
of L.A. River.
By JOE MOZINGO,
Times Staff Writer
The day after a major decision to halt the flow of trash into the Los
Angeles River, Lewis MacAdams headed down between the downpours to the
spot where he first saw a bit of nature in the industrial wastes more than
15 years ago.
In those days, the poet was one of the river's few advocates, the spokesman
for a joke, really. Those who knew that the river existed generally thought
it was a giant gutter, as artificial as the LongBeach Freeway. MacAdams
once did a performance art piece about the river that was so poorly received
his girlfriend left him and the theater refused to pay. mBut in the
last decade his vision has percolated into the city's consciousness. Parks
are emerging along the banks, as politicians and fellow environmentalists
take up the cause to make the 51-mile river something people can do more
than laugh at.
To MacAdams, who founded Friends of the Los Angeles River and remain
chairman of the board, nothing reflects the change more than the Regional
Water Quality Control Board's decision Thursday night. After nine hours
of testimony, the board adopted a plan that will force cities and the county
to spend what could be more than a billion dollars to stop litter going
into the river. "This is historic," he said. "Ten years ago, we couldn't
even get people to admit it was a river. And now we get a unanimous decision."
The trash problem so vigorously discussed in a wood-paneled boardroom
is strikingly real at this spot just north of the Pasadena Freeway. A doomsday
environmentalist could not overstate it. The trees seem to be sprouting
Vons bags instead of leaves. A pool swirls around a fetid couch. A plastic
Sprite bottle races the ducks south in the turbid current.
MacAdams, who is now 56, first trekked to this spot with three
friends on a hot day in 1985. As part of another performance art piece,
which no one but them would see, they clipped a hole in a chain link fence
by the 1st Street Bridge and began following the concrete channel north.
The scene he encountered was an urban hell, so unholy it was almost beautiful.
"It was an awesome concrete scape," he said. Railroad cars clattered above.
Traffic from several freeways sighed and groaned. The din filled a chaos
of warehouses, switching yards, graffiti-tagged bridges and raw sunlight.
At the place where the Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portola camped on
a lush bank in 1769, the river was just a trickle in the low-flow slot.
They reached the end of the concrete bottom at dusk; the Army Corps of
Engineers did not pave this stretch, unlike most of the river, because
the water table was too close
to the surface. Surprisingly, the group found some willows and
reeds swaying in the current. Swifts dove after gnats and pools had formed
around rocks that had rolled down from the mountains. "There was
a sense that we got to life after all that death," he said. MacAdams
realized the waterway, at its heart, was actually a river, and Friends
of the Los Angeles River was born. "There is no question that if not for
Lewis MacAdams there would not be the renaissance going on on the river
today. Period," said Joe Edmiston, executive director of the Santa Monica
Mountains Conservancy, which has been building parks along the river.
A west Texas native with strong hippie credentials, MacAdams was an
unlikely candidate to guide public policy in Los Angeles. Just five years
before, he was living in the rugged Northern California coast town of Bolinas,
where he held the popular opinion that L.A. was nothing more than a profligate,
sun-stroked sprawl. "My only experience with people in L.A. was reading
Herb Caen's columns that they wear white shoes down there," he said.
He had spent the late 1970s writing poems, digging ditches and chasing
a woman he was infatuated with to Paris. But he had also been fascinated
by politics since his days at Princeton. In Bolinas, he was elected to
the board of the Public Utility District, where he worked to slow growth
in the rural area. But he wanted to write screenplays, as well as articles
for a Venice magazine called Wet. He reluctantly moved south with $200
in his pocket. The screenplays never made it to film, but his articles
gained him a little notoriety. He wrote a story of three Buddhist monks
taking three steps and a bow all the way up the state, and a profile of
an artist who had sex with a corpse as a performance piece. "That got us
both in trouble," he said. "Somehow, people identified me as if I was the
one doing it."
Inspired by the ecological passion of his friend, legendary beat
poet Gary Snyder MacAdams began focusing his art on the river. And even
today, while Friends of the River takes on more scientific, litigious and
political endeavors, MacAdams wants to keep the group true to the poetic
vision. To him, the river has personality--both sadness and humor.
The sadness is whatstruck him when he first saw the bleak channel, waiting
for a bus near skid row after working construction all day. But to see
its smile you have to look deeper.
He writes: The river is a rigorous mistress. But if you tickle her
with your deeds, you
can hear her laughing beneath her concrete corset. Laughing now, as
the city realizes it may have been overzealous in conquering hertempestuous
ways. But in the end, laughing because she has been around for thousands
of years and will outlast the humans who have channeled her.
Other leaders of Friends of the River, of which there are and have
been many, see it more as a traditional environmental cause. "Most
people in FOLAR roll their eyes when I start talking about the river as
performance," said MacAdams. The once-fringe group is closer to the
mainstream these days, though some say the river has simply moved to the
mainstream.
Many people have joined the river effort and were instrumental at pushing
the cause. And certain news events, like then-Assemblyman Richard Katz
in 1989 proposing to build a freeway in the river, helped rally the forces
to restore it. But with so many big-budget groups, from the Sierra
Club to the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, now weighing in on the
fate of the river, the group that was once a ragtag band of artists is
reassessing its position. "The hardest thing for me is figuring out
where I fit into all of this," said MacAdams.
Living in a rambling house on a hillside in Silver Lake, MacAdams is
a husband and father of two young kids. He coaches their soccer, football
and basketball games and just finished writing a book, published by Simon
& Schuster, about the genesis of the concept of "cool." Esther
Feldman, a former county planning commissioner, was inspired by MacAdams
on a walk along the river in the early 1990s, when she was working for
a branch of the conservancy. A tenacious activist, Feldman took his vision
and ran with it, helped build one of the first new parks on the river four
years ago. When she later went to work for the Trust for Public Land, she
carried the cause to that group, which also started developing river projects.
In MacAdams, she sees intelligence and grace. "Even when you terribly
disagree with him, he keeps a level of civility that is rare in environmental
arenas," she says. And Friends of the River have certainly had their
critics. Cities in southeast Los Angeles County, where flooding is a serious
concern, have been resentful of the group's strong advocacy of tearing
down the concrete banks.
Those issues have largely cooled down, as the prospect of altering
the banks has mtaken a back seat to building parks along the levees. But
MacAdams' eyes are still focused on that distant goal. After all,
despite MacAdams' vision to see a river with promenades and ponds, green
banks and a section where the water meanders through willows and alders,
the river is still much like it was back in 1985.
On this gloomy Friday at the spot above the Pasadena Freeway, the river
certainlydoes not seem to be laughing. The water is brown and rushing unnaturally
fast in its straight channel. There is so much urban refuse that
it is interesting just to pick through: some crime scene tape, a sink,
an old skateboard, red overalls, a baby bottle, a brick smoothed to a ball
by the distance it rolled. Over the years around here, clean-up crews have
found a hot tub, a Santeria sword and a skull. Grocery carts are
often so embedded in the detritus that they cannot be extracted by hand.
Bags are so high in the trees--from the floods that raise the river several
stories--that volunteers need long fruit pickers to grab them.
The trash collects along this eight-mile stretch from Burbank
through Los Feliz because there are trees to snag it. This slice of nature
has along way to go. "My goal is to see the steelhead trout return
to the L.A. River," MacAdams said. "That's the challenge we have not stepped
up to yet: How do we take out the concrete so the steelhead can run?"