A Tale of Two Rivers: Los Angeles and San Antonio
Trudi Sandmeier 00:00
Today on Save As:
Leslie Dinkin 00:01
What I really liked about the L.A. River, I guess, is that it doesn’t pretend to be anything else, you know. It is a flood control channel. I think some spaces allow for more people and animals and plants and sort of this coexistence and other parts are just really hostile and kind of violent.
Trudi Sandmeier 00:25
Welcome to Save As: NextGen Heritage Conservation, an award-winning podcast that glimpses the future of the field with graduate students at the University of Southern California. I’m Trudi Sandmeier.
Cindy Olnick 00:36
And I’m Cindy Olnick.
Trudi Sandmeier 00:38
So, Cindy.
Cindy Olnick 00:39
Yes, Trudi?
Trudi Sandmeier 00:40
You had a chance to talk to one of our really recent graduates, Leslie Dinkin.
Cindy Olnick 00:46
Yes, we watched Leslie walk across the graduation stage. I think she needed a cart because she had not only one but two master’s degrees at the same time. She collected her hardware in Landscape Architecture and Heritage Conservation.
Trudi Sandmeier 01:04
Yeah, a bit of an overachiever, Leslie.
Cindy Olnick 01:06
Yeah. Yeah.
Trudi Sandmeier 01:07
The other exciting thing is that she actually was the recipient of the Outstanding Master’s Thesis award at our graduation a few weeks ago. So, congratulations, Leslie.
Cindy Olnick 01:18
So, you and Leslie, and I have been talking about the L.A. River for many months. And she and I got to actually meet on the banks of the river in Frogtown and talk about her thesis, which compared the L.A. River and the San Antonio. And we saw some fun stuff. I mean, we saw everything from a great blue heron to a woman dropping her phone in the river and miraculously getting it back. And of course, Lesley struck up a conversation with her on her way out. And she said, Well, you know, the river’s strong, but I’m stronger. And so yeah, she was gonna get that phone.
Trudi Sandmeier 01:56
Oh, my goodness, we are so addicted to our technology. Goodness. All right. So, let’s take a listen to Cindy’s conversation with Leslie Dinkin.
Cindy Olnick 02:09
We are here on the banks of the mighty Los Angeles River, here in Frogtown neighborhood. Leslie, thanks for coming back to Save As. Please say hello to our audience.
Leslie Dinkin 02:22
I’m Leslie Dinkin. I just finished my Master’s in Heritage Conservation and Master’s in Landscape Architecture at USC. And I’m really excited to be here. Thank you for having me.
Cindy Olnick 02:34
Yes, thank you for being here. And you’re one of the earliest graduates of the School of Architecture’s dual degree in Landscape Architecture and Heritage Conservation.
Leslie Dinkin 02:44
They approved it after my first year. I think I’m maybe the second.
Cindy Olnick 02:48
Already leading in the field. And you’re already using it. Tell us what you’re up to these days.
Leslie Dinkin 02:53
I’m working at Kounkuey Design Initiative, which is a nonprofit design and urban planning firm.
Cindy Olnick 03:02
All right. Well, Leslie, let’s go back in time for a second. Tell us a little bit about why landscape architecture, why heritage conservation?
Leslie Dinkin 03:12
Yeah, I grew up in Los Angeles and didn’t really think so much about history or the landscape, I would say. You know, we would study European history in school and did not spend that much time outside. But I went to school in Colorado and was introduced to the world of outdoor education and did a lot of work there. And I spent a lot of time in the Rocky Mountains in the Grand Tetons with students and would teach them whatever science was seasonal at the time. You know, we talk about snow science, if it was winter, or fire ecology, if it was summer, but our kids would come from really far away. Sometimes we’d have kids that would drive 24 hours in a bus.
Cindy Olnick 03:57
Oh, my God.
Leslie Dinkin 03:58
Yeah, to get to Jackson Hole. And I just had this growing feeling that the more that we were teaching them outdoor science in this magnificent space, that we weren’t really kind of creating those connections back home. And so, I was worried that they too at home were kind of disconnected to their city. And that kind of got me thinking about landscape architecture. And so, I initially went to USC just for the single Master’s in Landscape Architecture. But as I tried to start designing, I had a really hard time designing anything new if I didn’t understand what was there before or what was there currently. And then they approved the dual degree, which was amazing. And so, I immediately hopped on and started a second Master’s in Heritage Conservation.
Cindy Olnick 04:46
Excellent, which had more of the focus on context, perhaps.
Leslie Dinkin 04:50
Definitely, I think it just painted a fuller story. I think in landscape architecture we talked about the built environment or creating new environments or preserving environments. But maybe there’s less focus on the story. Now, it’s definitely changing, but I think heritage conservation just allows me to see the grander picture.
Cindy Olnick 05:13
Yeah, it all overlaps so much. All right. So, you have spent several years, highly devoted to the L.A. River in particular. So what got you fascinated with the mighty Los Angeles.
Leslie Dinkin 05:29
So as a kid, I went just one time, I don’t even know what year it was 2010 maybe. And we had to hop over a fence to even get close to the water. I couldn’t tell you where we were. And I remember feeling like we were in a place that we shouldn’t be and joking around with my friends that L.A. had a river. And I think that’s the majority of people’s view of the river at that time. And then fast forward 10 years, you know, it opened up to kayakers and people fly fish. And you know, they put in a bike path over many years. Different shops opened up and I think that the river has become a bigger gathering space. But we went here actually on one of the first days in the landscape architecture program, and I just realized how much it crosses through the entire city, so, like, through 44 different neighborhoods, over a million people live within a mile of it. Starts in Canoga Park, and that runs through around Griffith Park, and then it heads south towards Long Beach. So, it runs through Atwater, and then downtown and Compton and then North Long Beach, and then culminates in the San Pedro Bay. And it just feels like this great connector, and such a great opportunity to connect with nature in your own backyard.
Leslie Dinkin 06:53
My capstone studio was focused in Frogtown, actually, and we were thinking about how we could co-design the Bowtie and Taylor Yard parcel, which is just across the way, which offers 100 acres of space that the city bought. It’s highly polluted, but they’re trying to figure out how to turn it into a park. And me and a classmate, Lucia Bailey, were interested in figuring out how to co-design with a number of stakeholders. So, the river has, so many different people love the river, so many different people use the river, but they have different priorities. And then it often can get heated and so we were focused on dialogue and play. We built a board game, and it was tied to the Los Angeles Integrated Design Lab with Alex Robinson. And I worked there too for like two years.
Music: HoneyHoney 07:42
Went down to the banks of the river. Had to hop a chain-link fence. Concrete walls on the river. Water lapping up on the cement. Oh, but I love my new home. Listen to the big city sound. Watching that L.A. River down by the trains past Chinatown.
Cindy Olnick 08:26
So we are sitting on the edge of the river sort of overlooking it, and it’s part of the river that actually has some nature to it. This is kinda lovely. It’s got like the concrete banks on the sides, but in the middle, there’s water and trees and birds.
Leslie Dinkin 08:45
Yeah, this part is particularly interesting because I think a lot of people think it was designed this way. But the water table here is too high. So when they tried to lay the concrete down the water just lifted it up. And then also, this part of the river has its natural bend because Taylor Train Yard was already here. And so, the concretization and the straightening came after the trail yard was built. Okay, so a lot of the river was straightened, but not this part.
Cindy Olnick 09:12
Nature wins.
Leslie Dinkin 09:13
Nature wins sometimes.
Cindy Olnick 09:14
Sometimes. Okay, so when it came time to do your master’s thesis for the Heritage Conservation degree, you chose the L.A. River.
Leslie Dinkin 09:25
I had walked the entire Los Angeles River from Canoga Park to Long Beach over six days with a couple of friends. Fifty-one miles in a heat wave in an area that is not meant for walking. And so that was really exciting and fun. And it took us months to plan and we’re currently working on a book and a movie about it. So that will be out at some point.
Cindy Olnick 09:45
Excellent.
Leslie Dinkin 09:46
It felt like there was something there, like that I hadn’t explored it from a conservationist perspective. And I was really interested in the sentiments or the valuation of the river at the time that it was concretized. And I felt like the master’s thesis was the perfect time to explore that history and sort of figure out what valuation of spaces like this then lead to a future 80 years later where most of the river is covered in concrete and it’s cut off from its groundwater source and, you know, water is carried as quickly from the mountains to the ocean as possible.
Cindy Olnick 10:23
All right, so tell us the history of the Los Angeles River in 35 words or less.
Leslie Dinkin 10:30
Thirty-five words. It was Paayme Paxaayt to the local Gabrielino Tongva tribe and supported the largest indigenous population in North America.
Cindy Olnick 10:42
Really? Wow.
Leslie Dinkin 10:44
The river was never a river that you might imagine. Like it never looked like the Mississippi; it was always several meandering streams that were eluvial. Sometimes it would be there, sometimes they wouldn’t. And it would keep the whole Los Angeles Basin fertile. The whole area’s an eluvial plane, and the river made the whole area lush, like it was described as an oasis in the 1500s. But one quality of it is that it flash floods. And it’s great actually because it fertilizes the whole basin. But once people started living closer to it, it became quite dangerous
Cindy Olnick 11:22
A problem.
Leslie Dinkin 11:22
Yeah. And then in the 20s and 30s, when the floods came as they inevitably would, they ended up killing a lot of people and destroying a lot of homes. And so the city had to figure out what to do with this river. And it sort of became this evil thing, I think, in the middle of the city. It became this sort of villain. That’s the word, a villain. And then we kind of went to war with it.
Cindy Olnick 11:53
Man versus nature.
Leslie Dinkin 11:54
Yeah, it took 20 years, and they concretize every single part of the river.
Cindy Olnick 12:00
Meaning they just poured concrete on top of it.
Leslie Dinkin 12:03
Yeah, they, they straighten it, they dug a line, they just they had to decide where it would go, you know.
Cindy Olnick 12:08
And they meaning?
Leslie Dinkin 12:09
The Army Corps of Engineers. You know, at some point it emptied out into the Santa Monica Bay, you know, and so San Pedro was chosen. I think that it was moved like five miles east even.
Cindy Olnick 12:23
But it was also the city leaders.
Leslie Dinkin 12:25
City leaders, and I don’t think there were that many people at the time that were against it, concrete was really exciting at the time. It was a modern material, people were really excited about it, it was sleek, you know. People loved the freeways, not everyone. And I don’t think that nature was really valued that way. It felt like it was always going to be there. So, if you think about it like that, it’s not like, it was like this evil thing that was happening. Although now I think we can look back and know that it was a mistake. But it ended up really protecting a lot of people. They were really successful in what they did. I mean, you can even see it today how successful they are in that, you know, we had massive rain last year, and this year, and barely any parts of the river flooded.
Cindy Olnick 13:10
Yes. So very early on the L.A. River got a reputation as being not a river in the traditional sense, but a flood control channel.
Leslie Dinkin 13:22
Definitely.
Cindy Olnick 13:23
Concretized in the 30s, starting in the 30s?
Leslie Dinkin 13:27
Starting in the 30s. And it was finished in the early 60s. It so took a really long time. And I think that that part, I was also really fascinated by which was like, every day, you know, we sat down and still continue this monstrous project. It was during the WPA period, and so everyone was excited about it, I think because it supplied so many jobs. The walls are actually trapezoidal, rather than a box channel in many parts because you could have more people working on them. I think that it would actually hold more water if all the walls were box, but the trapezoidal channel was specifically so that more people could be working on the river at once.
Cindy Olnick 14:06
Really? So, they designed it in a different shape.
Leslie Dinkin 14:08
Which is also interesting and exciting because it allows accessibility to the water. You know, the area where there’s box channel you can’t really get anywhere close to the water unless you’re in the channel. But in Frogtown, you’re able to walk down to the water because it’s, you know, gradual.
Cindy Olnick 14:23
Because it’s the slanted walls instead of just straight up and down.
Leslie Dinkin 14:26
Exactly.
Cindy Olnick 14:27
Yeah. And we see people just sitting on there. But your thesis is not just about the Los Angeles River, right, because that’s not big enough for Leslie Dinkin.
Leslie Dinkin 14:37
Yeah, I was interested in thinking about another river that has been known as the big success story. So, I think if L.A. is the sad story, then the San Antonio River is known as the one to copy and you have many master plans all across the country that referenced the San Antonio River as the heroic story, the city that saved its river. And so, I decided to walk that river too. That one is actually much longer, it’s like 240 miles, but I just walked the part through their urban core, so from the headwaters, past their downtown. And so, I think we walked about 16 or 17 miles through San Antonio, following the river path.
Cindy Olnick 15:23
You are comparing the two rivers in a way, right? What were you thinking about?
Leslie Dinkin 15:28
I feel like there are so many different things. I started with their histories. And so, I was comparing the timelines of the two rivers. And they ended up having a pretty similar history. They both supported large Indigenous populations, they both had missions built near and around it and, you know, had settlement. And they both had also pretty big history of flooding. And so, you saw, you know, 100 people die here. And in 1938, you saw 60 people die there in the 1920s. And so, both cities were kind of faced with what to do with their river. The San Antonio River is much narrower. And so, it’s a little bit more intimate, I think, than the L.A. River. And so that might be one of the reasons that contributed to a very different future. But both cities had to contend with massive flooding.
Cindy Olnick 16:23
Right. But they made different choices.
Leslie Dinkin 16:26
They made different choices early on. And there were conservation groups in the San Antonio River that really supported the Beautification Movement, you know, City Beautiful. They were really about keeping the natural beauty of the river. And so even in the 20s, they were seeing the river as a valuable resource. And, you know, there’s a mayor quoted saying that, you know, other cities have their freeways or their skyscrapers, the San Antonio has its river.
Leslie Dinkin 17:17
When I started my thesis, I was in the library, and I had already chosen to work on San Antonio, and was moving forward with walking both rivers. And I was just looking through the San Antonio books in the USC library, and I pulled one out and it was called A Tricentennial History, and it was by Professor Char Miller and I was like, Oh my God, I didn’t even know that he worked in San Antonio. And it was all about the river. And he had another book called West Side Rising, which was all about the Latino population kind of coming together in San Antonio and, and the aftermath of them being sort of left out of the flooding plan. But I immediately reached out to him. And then we were able to talk about both rivers, which was really exciting.
Char Miller 18:01
What happened in San Antonio, that did not happen in L.A., is that the San Antonio Conservation Society, largely white wealthy women in the 20s, made its mark by claiming that the river was of value. They’re operating in parallel with preservationists in Southern California. And in fact, they’re getting fed information about how to protect missions because they were both missionary cities. No one thought the L.A. River was worth saving. And these women in South Texas thought it the San Antonio River was.
Leslie Dinkin 18:35
There were many different people that wanted different futures for the San Antonio River as well. And there were people that thought that they should concretize it and they even started the project. But then I think one of the mayors saw the river in its concrete form, and was like, No way, I will spend double to keep it beautiful, which didn’t happen in Los Angeles. But there were real estate developers who wanted to cover the river in concrete and create a street through downtown. The ecology and biology wasn’t so much a factor. It was really about how romantic and intimate the space was.
Char Miller 19:13
The intimacy of the San Antonio River, I think is the thing that really distinguishes San Antonio was built along and tightly along the San Antonio River. One of the things that makes the riverwalk so effective and, and the women and others who sort of pursued this understood it is literally you’ve got 10 feet of river or you can see people across the way. And as you walk up over bridges that they did deliberately so that you have an elevated perspective on this river, I mean you’re engaging with the landscape and you’re engaging with people who were also moving through the landscape. You can’t do that with a river like L.A. as it is now.
Leslie Dinkin 19:56
So, I think there was a lot of focus in the downtown area and not so much in the west of San Antonio. And so, with the initial modifications that were made to the river to help flooding like the Olmos Dam, and some channelization through downtown, they built this cut-off channel that would allow the river to meander through downtown, but it could, during flood events, would bypass downtown. All of those initiatives supported a specific group of people and left an entirely other group of people, a lot of the Latino people living in San Antonio, unprotected, and so they were still very vulnerable to flooding and are still.
Char Miller 20:34
They were very concerned with Spanish heritage, not Spanish-speaking contemporary members of their community unless they were artisans who could work on the missions and the like. They had no sense of the Indigenous world that what remained was mestizo and that’s just not on their radar screen. The women of San Antonio were no different, I think than the women and or men in California in that regard. Or in Tucson or in Santa Fe, El Paso, same kinds of people were articulating the exact same set of visions that were exoticizing the Spanish world because they thought Spain was white and Hispanics were not or Mexican Americans were not, and so they’re basically saving a heritage that isn’t their own from those for whom it is. They’re extracting that history to claim it as theirs, when in fact it’s not.
Music: HoneyHoney 21:29
Dip my fingers in the warm black water
Raw red skin on my knees.
Sail my boat down the L.A. River.
Thought I saw a body in the weeds.
Oh, but I love my new home.
Listen to big city sound.
Cindy Olnick 21:58
So, in your thesis you actually do sort of a diary.
Leslie Dinkin 22:01
Yes, two of my chapters are devoted to basically chronicling the walk from my perspective. We took photographs of everything there is to see. Rio Asch Phoenix took his film camera and took over 500 photos of the river. And then he also came to San Antonio and took like another 200.
Cindy Olnick 22:21
Yeah, so your thesis is like a photo essay in large part.
Leslie Dinkin 22:25
I was interested in exploring the history of the river to the point of when the decision was made, what they were going to do. You know, both cities had to contend with flooding. And the Los Angeles River went ahead and didn’t really think about beauty, they were just focused on getting the water as quickly from the mountains to the ocean as possible. And in San Antonio, they were focused on the same thing, how do we protect our people, but in doing so create a space that’s still friendly for pedestrians and whatnot. And so those choices that were made then impact the experience today, 80 years later, greatly. And so, I was documenting every part of each river to see how those decisions impacted our future experience. And then my imagining of the thesis that it can live on as sort of documentation of the river today. And then hopefully, you know, in 80 years, both rivers look really different than they do now. But that this documentation will serve as a record of what it looked like in 2023.
Cindy Olnick 23:29
Exactly.
Leslie Dinkin 23:31
It was a great thesis experience, I think the best experience I’ve ever had in school is when you come out with a different conclusion than you expected. Right? I think initially, I was going to San Antonio to see different strategies that they were using there that, you know, I could bring back home and think about reimagining the L.A. River. But what I really liked about the L.A. River, I guess is that it doesn’t pretend to be anything else. You know, it is a flood control channel. I think some spaces allow for more people and animals and plants and sort of this coexistence and other parts are just really hostile and kind of violent. Nothing you know, is really living there.
Cindy Olnick 24:09
No shade.
Leslie Dinkin 24:13
But it really asked you to think about like what we have to do to live in certain spaces, you know. When you’re walking in Paramount and it’s sunny and 105 degrees in the channel and there’s not another person, you know, is this the right move that we covered this entire area that was once a really lush river. Beautiful to just bare, white-like concrete sounds like walking in snow, it’s so bright. And then in San Antonio, it’s so pleasant. Like I enjoyed every moment of my walk. It was so easy. We got the map downloaded it from the San Antonio Riverwalk website, which we didn’t even need to do because there were maps every 100 feet.
Cindy Olnick 24:58
It’s interpreted. They want to people to be there.
Leslie Dinkin 25:00
And they did an amazing job, it is so friendly and the stone changes based on when it was built, you know. There’s lighting, there’s art installations everywhere, all the freeways, all the underpasses have art to make the spaces friendlier, and there’s noisemakers, and there’s like fish and we saw volunteers who were picking up apple snails that are invasive in the river. But you can’t swim in it. And there’s also massive, massive flood control. But it just looks different. It’s like a facade. It’s also a flood control channel, if you actually look at it, like you realize that you’re in the box channel, like there’s ladders to get out of it. But there’s a pathway the whole way. And there’s people running and every section is planted. But it is also a flood control channel, completely altered from what it used to look like. And so, it’s so pleasant, that it doesn’t really ask you to contend with what it takes to like live in a city like that, you know what I mean? It just kind of allows you to have a really great day. And as a landscape architect, I mean, so be it. You know, we saw people fishing, we saw people dancing, and picnicking, we saw families just like lounging, which I think is what you want in public infrastructure. You’re not confronted face-to-face with what it takes to actually live in certain spaces.
Cindy Olnick 26:21
Whereas there are also people fishing on the L.A. River
Leslie Dinkin 26:24
Definitely
Cindy Olnick 26:25
But it looks a little different.
Leslie Dinkin 26:26
It looks a little different, but they are catching massive fish and some places.
Cindy Olnick 26:29
Like they’re sitting on the concrete.
Leslie Dinkin 26:31
And I think that was basically the conclusion of my thesis was that no matter what we do, the water still flows and people are drawn to water. And so even if the river here is not as aesthetically pleasing, or pleasant. We’re sitting next to the river, and I can see all of these people, you know, sitting and enjoying themselves. The other night, I went to a concert on the slab just down the way, which is just like one part of the concrete that did stay on the ground. And so bands set up and then all the people use the trapezoidal channel as like an amphitheater wall, get out. Yeah. Which is kind of funny. So I think that people really in L.A. have adapted to a space that wasn’t designed for them. And then in San Antonio, the space was highly designed for people and people use it the same or more probably.
Cindy Olnick 27:18
I’m just looking at this like, really natural setting in the bottom of the river, but it’s surrounded by concrete. And then there are these huge power lines all around it, and there’s a big metal railing and, you know, there’s an asphalt bike trail, and it’s just all of it mushed together, right?
Leslie Dinkin 27:39
So my dream for the L.A. River is not to make it look like San Antonio, but just to make it accessible to people. I think this area is highly used, but there’s areas up and down the river that aren’t at all, because the path doesn’t go the whole way.
Cindy Olnick 27:53
Right. Now, there’s been no shortage of talk and planning and visioning. And I never use that as a verb, but about what to do with this Los Angeles River. And so, your thesis wasn’t really you know, an effort to come up with another plan for what to do with the river, it was really more about looking at the absence of heritage and conservation in the choices that that were made. Correct?
Leslie Dinkin 28:22
I think in San Antonio, every other step, you’re confronted with a photo of the past, or a plaque, every bridge has plaque below it. And above it, you know, so you could see when it was built, it just feels like they’re very focused around heritage. And they built their river plans with that front and center. I think in L.A., it is in the plans, but it just feels a little secondary, perhaps. There’s a bunch of different organizations like Clockshop that have been documenting oral histories of the river and whatnot. But I just want to incorporate people’s stories and current stories into the river. And there’s so many different organizations that are working to get people closer to the river, like Friends of the Los Angeles River. And there’s this new programming called LA River Arts, where they have different activities or teachings up and down the river at different miles. So, it’s not just focused around Frogtown, it’s everywhere. But I think that they’re still considered alternative movements, sort of, whereas in San Antonio, it just feels like river programming is essential and Central. Where in L.A. it still feels like it’s like these curious people. We had one day on the river where it was like 5 am I think in Long Beach. And this was the one day that we had to take an Uber just because it was impossible to park where our stopping spot was. And the woman was just like, what are you all doing with your backpacks? We looked like we were going for a hike, but we were in North Long Beach and she was like, wow, the L.A. River is as unknown to me as a glacier. And she was like, it’s fascinating. I’ve lived next to it my whole life and I never even thought to go into it. That’s one of the biggest differences, I think is that the L.A. River isn’t still not really central to most Angelenos’ lives.
Cindy Olnick 30:20
So you said your vision for the L.A. River is to have it more accessible. So, it happens to be accessible right here. So, we’re gonna go and just go down there for a sec.
Leslie Dinkin 30:32
That sounds really nice.
Cindy Olnick 30:34
Let’s take a little stroll.
Leslie Dinkin 30:37
This is your first time?
Cindy Olnick 30:37
Yeah.
Leslie Dinkin 30:38
Oh my God, this is massive. Yeah, that’s so exciting.
Cindy Olnick 30:45
Okay, so we’re walking down this concrete. I feel like Olivia Newton John in Grease.
Leslie Dinkin 30:51
Exactly.
Cindy Olnick 30:52
Where she sits on the concrete and decides she’s going to change her look. Pop culture is so important. And people’s awareness in terms of places and the river has been in so many films.
Leslie Dinkin 31:10
Terminator and it’s in Grand Theft Auto.
Cindy Olnick 31:12
Yeah, but it’s all about driving in it.
Leslie Dinkin 31:14
Exactly.
Cindy Olnick 31:15
There’s the drag race in Grease. Hiding in it, driving in it. Yeah, but now people kayak on it. Have you?
Leslie Dinkin 31:26
I have kayaked. It’s so fun. I recommend it to anyone. It’s really interesting because you start, you know, on the concrete channel, and then there’s parts of the river where you could be anywhere, you know, and then you come back under a freeway. Like it’s a really, really strange experience, but I definitely recommend it to anyone.
Cindy Olnick 31:45
L.A. is full of strange experiences.
Leslie Dinkin 31:48
In rainstorms, basically all of L.A.’s trash that’s around the street is brought here if it’s not screened beforehand.
Cindy Olnick 31:58
Oh, right, right.
Leslie Dinkin 31:59
Yeah. So you kind of get all sorts of things down here and they sort of decompose and are eaten by the water and the roots. It’s really interesting to watch.
Cindy Olnick 32:09
What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen down here?
Leslie Dinkin 32:12
I don’t think this is that weird, but we saw a lot of squash growing in it.
Cindy Olnick 32:16
Squash?
Leslie Dinkin 32:17
So, either someone was gardening in it or or the seeds were just carried down. But we talked to this one on unhoused person in the Sepulveda Basin, and he said that they get really excited when the rain comes because they just, the next day, they just go down and get more building material. So, they built extensive houses in the Sepulveda Basin. They also clean up a lot of the river and then they get money through recycling programs. Okay, cool. It’s kind of interesting. Not everyone, but this one. This one guy Caine.
Cindy Olnick 32:49
And does friends with the Los Angeles River or FOLAE, do they still have cleanup days?
Leslie Dinkin 32:54
Yeah, they have cleanup days, they actually have an Earth Day extravaganza on Sunday that I’m excited about.
Cindy Olnick 33:00
Oh, its Earth month! Oh my God.
Leslie Dinkin 33:02
But they’re amazing. And with FOLAR, we actually hosted a number of different L.A. River story slams, and so we had community gatherings of like 200, one of them was 500 people, where different people who love the river kind of got up on stage and told their story. We have these two fly fisher people that went up and talked about how fishing in the middle of the city brings them so much joy. One of them was a woman who had never fished before, and literally learned to fly fish in the L.A. River and now has a whole community of women fly fishers and she takes them out. And it was amazing. It was like such a fun event. And a lot of people who came, we had it at Frogtown Brewery, had never been to the river either. So, you know, they all went to see it and then went and got a beer and listen to stories about the river. And, that’s like the most exciting part I think for me.
Cindy Olnick 33:56
That’s amazing. That’s why we live in Los Angeles.
Leslie Dinkin 33:59
I think if the thesis really taught me anything is that that both rivers have only looked like this for a very short amount of time. If you think about it on a geological spectrum. It’s been only 60 years since both rivers were flood control channels. And so, in another 60 years, I really have no idea what it’s going to look like. Freeways look so permanent and concrete just feel so permanent. But in Sepulveda Basin, you’ll see that a lot of the concrete already looks like rocks, you know, when it breaks down. It’s really interesting to think about what is next for this place, the water will keep flowing and it’ll eventually do what it wants to do. We can’t keep it like this forever.
Cindy Olnick 34:39
Touche. Well said. Well, I want to thank you, Leslie, for the great work that you did on your thesis. It was a pleasure working with you. And I want to thank you for giving me an excuse to for the first time, crawl under a railing and go sit on the concrete banks of a beautiful river and have this bizarrely uniquely Los Angeles experience.
Leslie Dinkin 35:02
It’s weird, right? But it’s so nice.
Cindy Olnick 35:04
It’s so great. Well, thank you ma’am.
Leslie Dinkin 35:06
Thank you for having me.
Trudi Sandmeier 35:11
Well, that feels like a really excellent way to start the summer with a little bit of a journey to the Los Angeles River. Thank you, Cindy, for such a fun interview and for taking us all there. Certainly, it makes me want to check it out and spend a little time looking at all the interesting parts of the river.
Cindy Olnick 35:31
Mission accomplished. That’s what we do here at Save As.
Trudi Sandmeier 35:33
It’s a great way also to wrap up our season four. Can you believe that we have four seasons of Save As? And so while we’re going to be going off the air for a little bit here for our summer hiatus, there’s lots to listen to if you need to get your fix. We have a big back catalogue of episodes that you can check out.
Cindy Olnick 35:55
Photos, show notes, transcript, this, other episodes: SaveAs-dot- place. And we hope that if you haven’t already you will subscribe so you will know when we’re back in the fall. If you would like to leave us a review, please do and of course the more the merrier. So please tell a friend and also you can connect with us on the Instagram at Save As NextGen.
Trudi Sandmeier 36:29
This episode was produced by Cindy Olnick and Willa Seidenberg. Thanks so much, Evan McAvenia who helped us out with social media this season. Our original theme music is by Steven Conley. The song L.A. River is by HoneyHoney. Save As is a production of the Heritage Conservation program in the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California.
