Fr. Crespi’s Beautiful Storm Drain

This month in 1769 a small but intrepid band of Spanish explorers encamped in the L.A. basin near present-day Elysian Park. Led by Gaspar Portola and accompanied by Padre Juan Crespi, the contingent was charged with surveying the vast California wilderness between Mission San Diego and Monterey Bay. Their long trek met with many discoveries, but few apparently as enchanting as this one. Fr. Crespi’s journal reads:

“[W]e entered a very spacious valley, well grown with cottonwoods and alders, among which ran a beautiful river….which we named Porciuncula.”

Just a few days prior, the group had celebrated the Catholic feast of St. Francis Assisi’s Porciuncula, or “Little Portion,” an Italian chapel consecrated to Mary, Queen of Angels. Following custom, they named the river after the feast. And though he felt the jolts of three earthquakes during his stopover, Crespi effused that the locale offered a pleasant climate and “all the requisites for a large settlement.”

The river must have been very idyllic indeed. According to historians Leonard and Dale Pitt:

“The waters originated in the San Gabriel and Santa Monica Mountains and converged near what is today Elysian Park, spilling out from there onto the floodplain. Rather than flowing all the way to the ocean, the river sank into the soil, creating the numerous lakes, ponds, and marshes of [a] vast wetland… When, periodically, the water gathered enough volume, it flowed westward into Ballona Creek and emptied into Santa Monica Bay…”

Thanks to the padre’s glowing report, El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula (The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels of the Little Portion) was founded in 1781, not far from where he had camped.

From the beginning, Los Angeles’ fate was closely tied to the waterway. After receiving their plots of land, one of the first duties of the new pobladores was to dig a Zanja Madre (Mother Ditch) to convey the Porciuncula’s precious waters to their arid village. Eventually they constructed a huge wooden water wheel at the river’s edge near Solano Street to ensure a steadier flow. A remnant of the Zanja Madre can still be seen today down the center of Olvera Street.

But Padre Crespi’s “beautiful river” had an ugly side. In 1825, massive flooding shifted the Porciuncula’s course, moving its mouth several miles southward to Wilmington and destroying its former wetlands. A pair of harrowing floods struck again in 1861 and 1864. In The City That Grew, Boyle Workman recalls witnessing the latter during his boyhood:

“Houses, torn from their foundations, floated downstream with the smoke still escaping from their chimneys. Horses, cows, sheep and now and then the ghastly form of a human being, were part of the strange driftwood. Sometimes the water came in waves of 15 feet in height… The river became a boiling yellow lake.”

After enduring yet more catastrophes in 1914 and 1934, Angelenos decided they’d had enough of Fr. Crespi’s beautiful river. In 1938 the Army Corps of Engineers began encasing its entire length in concrete to create a nearly 60-mile storm drain.

Today, despite repeated calls by environmentalists to heal the riverbed, only tiny portions hint at its once natural state. One of the few such stretches is the popular Verdugo Narrows, near Griffith Park. An early morning visit can only be described as rejuvenating. Atop the bank, friendly cyclists whisk along a bike path, while below, the bed teems with waterfowl and other flora and fauna. Even with 238 years of change and concrete, it’s still easy to see why the Franciscan padre was so captivated.

Sources:

• The Los Angeles River Web Exhibit
• Los Angeles: From Pueblo to City of the Future, Arthur Saul et. al., 1976.
• Los Angeles A-Z, Leonard Pitt and Dale Pitt, 2000 ed.
• The City That Grew, Boyle Workman, 1935; as quoted in Victims of the Feliz Curse, Mary Bingham, 2007.