The Whittier Narrows: the reshaping of a river and a community
By Charlie Craft, Emily Dobbs, Sara Weir
“Whittier Narrows is an incredible place that’s hidden in plain site . [It’s] a natural world, a native space, and a recreation space for communities that are marginalized in Southeast L.A. County.”
Picture green, rolling lawns leading down to a lake where couples take paddle boats out for a spin. A rental shop next to the water offers boats and tandem surrey bikes. A bell sounds as a family pedals down one of the many lakeside paths. These paths are frequented by joggers and dog owners. Walk down one and you will come across various play structures, picnic tables, and grills. The smell of families’ barbecues might make you hungry. Bring fishing rods and you can catch dinner from the lake in the form of trout, bass, or catfish.
This is the Whittier Narrows Recreation Area. The Whittier Narrows, located between the Puente Hills in the east and the Montebello Hills in the west, is a water gap through which the Rio Hondo and the San Gabriel River flow into the Los Angeles Basin. At the bottom of the basin, on the Rio Hondo, is the Whittier Narrows Dam.
“Whittier Narrows is an incredible place that’s hidden in plain site . [It’s] a natural world, a native space, and a recreation space for communities that are marginalized in Southeast L.A. County,” says Whittier College Associate Professor of History Natale Zappia.
The recreation space that Professor Zappia refers to is expansive, as it covers 144 acres and features three lakes (Legg Lake, Center Lake, and North Lake). The amenities include sports facilities for baseball, basketball, tennis, and frisbee golf, as well as facilities for BMX, trap and skeet shooting, and sporting dog training, to name just a few. The Narrows houses a nature center and 5 miles of nature trails, and it offers about a dozen different access points to the system of hiking, biking, and equestrian trails that extend throughout the basin. For many locals, these trails and parks are their closest or only access to nature and open space.
Life in the Whittier Narrows started long before the development of the area. The Tongva Native Americans migrated to the L.A. Basin from the Mojave desert, displacing some of the Chumash tribe living there already. The Tongva were christianized and renamed the Gabrielinos by Spanish settlers, who first came to the Basin in 1769, as explained in this article by the South El Monte Arts Posse. The settlers built Mission San Gabriel Arcángel next to the Rio Hondo to use it for irrigation, but when the river flooded the mission in 1776, it was moved to its current location in San Gabriel.
Flooding from the rivers was a common phenomenon. As this KCET article by David Reid explains, floods in the 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s prompted flood control throughout the L.A. basin. The reason these floods occur is because “annual rainfall is low, but it tends to come in sudden torrents, which overwhelm the arid ground’s ability to absorb them and produce flash floods.”(Reid. This means that the rainy season is brief but powerful enough to cause sudden flooding from the rivers.
With flood control as a primary motivation, developers, engineers, and businesses began to eye the rivers of the Basin. For decades, Americans had viewed water reclamation and irrigation projects as necessary in their own settling of the West — the “Manifest Destiny of water,” as Reid phrases it. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal (1936) poured funding into such projects. Under the accompanying Flood Control Act, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers took over river flood control projects. After devastating flooding from both the San Gabriel and Rio Hondo in 1938, the Corps added the placement of a dam at the Whittier Narrows in that year’s plans to redevelop the San Gabriel River. They would not, however, begin construction for many years, as citizens living on and near the proposed site would fight the Corps on it for over a decade longer.
The main fight over the development of the dam was between the Corps of Engineers and the El Monte Citizens Flood Control Committee, formed by people concerned with protecting the proposed site as, “home to thousands of people, several school districts, a number of farms, railroad tracks, oil wells, and an Audubon Society bird sanctuary (the precursor to today’s Whittier Narrows Nature Center,” as Reid puts it.
An amended plan for the dam protected the Audubon bird sanctuary, oil wells, and Union Pacific railroad tracks — all owned by powerful groups. While only civic groups and not the Corps could initiate such plans, the Army Corps were able to be selective about which groups they listened to. Thus, the modified plans further angered the El Monte citizens by showing a difference in interest and leverage between “large construction companies, oil companies, and the rich” versus “small businesses, everyday people, and the poor.”(Reid).
By the time construction of the Whittier Narrows Dam began in 1950, the plan had been modified even further to reduce the number of people displaced, but it was still high: over 2,000 people and 560 homes were moved by the time it was completed. However, the Audubon sanctuary, as well as some 700 acres of hiking trails, grass lawns, and lakes were preserved, forming the first open spaces that compirse the Whittier Narrows we now know today. The fight against development continues, although new consideration is being given to the issues of flooding, as well as the potential devastation of an ever-imminent earthquake.
Locals still remember the day the Whittier Narrows earthquake struck as October 1, 2017 marked its 30th anniversary. Both the initial earthquake and its aftershock caused severe damage to Whittier and surrounding areas. Although there was no reported damage to the Whittier Narrows Dam, people are worried about damage occuring in a future earthquake. In an interview by ABC News, local Margarita Rios, who lives behind the dam, says that she and other locals “know that the big one is coming and a lot of people don’t want to get worried about it, but we have to be prepared.”
“We know that the big one is coming and a lot of people don’t want to get worried about it, but we have to be prepared.”
In addition to a potential earthquake, the Dam also risks breaking or overflowing from future floods. This study by the Army Corps outlines the Dam Safety Modification Study (DSMS), the results of which indicated that there were risk factors that could cause malfunctioning, including premature opening of the automatic spillway gates, backward erosion piping of the foundation, and overtopping. The structure of the dam’s spillway is complex and made of many working parts, and the Corps says any part could malfunction at any time.
This is a concern because of the millions of people living in close proximity to the dam. According to this article by the Los Angeles Times, “The river and its aquifers serve more than three million people in the San Gabriel Valley and southeast Los Angeles County” and “an estimated one million people live and work along the floodplain.” People living near the dam notice the high risk of flooding due to the dam’s structure while observing from their homes.
During an interview by ABC News, another local living behind the dam, by the last name of Lobato, said, “Anytime there is a large amount of water behind there and they open all the floodgates, you can see the water crusting in the channel. The shortage of rain, for the most part, has kept the floodplain dry and the neighborhood quiet.” While a shortage of rain is a continual issue for most residents of the L.A. Basin, for people living behind the dam, it has been beneficial. But how long do local residents have before disaster strikes the Dam?
Despite the threat of damage from another flood or earthquake, future plans for development within the Narrows continue to be proposed. Since 2006, there has been a plan in effect to make the San Gabriel River Discovery Center (SGRDC). According to its website, the development of the SGRDC is “a collaborative process linking numerous federal, state and local agencies in cooperation with public institutions and private groups.”
In 2008, the SGRDC board approved a strategic plan to guide the construction of the Discovery Center. This plan ended up having four main goals: To inspire people to learn about the San Gabriel Valley and their own impact on the environment, to engage them in environmental learning opportunities and pushing them to explore and enjoy natural areas, to work with others to increase knowledge and generate action, and to promote healthy practices for environmental sustainability.
Since these four goals became the stepping stones to creating the Discovery Center, the only thing that has changed is the proposed architectural design. The fully created San Gabriel River Discovery Center would cost $24.7 million, inflated for today’s cost. The goal of this spending and construction is to create an area to educate the public about environmental concerns in and around the Whittier Narrows. However, not everyone is thrilled about this proposed Discovery Center.
The project is taking heavy backlash by environmentalists, saying that the new Discovery Center will do more harm than good over time. They argue that the the center that already exists is enough and that making a new one would just intrude on the natural surroundings. A primary aspect of the new design is to make a completely new parking lot in an attempt to allow more people to visit the Discovery Center. Yes, opponents say, there will be more places to park, encouraging families to visit and learn, but is paving over nature that exists a good way to help preserve the rest of it?
“My personal connection [to the Narrows] is a place called Earthworks, a seven-acre farm inside Whittier Narrows run by the community: mostly farmers of color, folks from San Gabriel Valley,” says Professor Zappia.
In addition to the current nature center, the Narrows already offers community projects that embody the goals of the proposed Discovery Center. One such project is the youth project at the Earthworks farm. “My personal connection [to the Narrows] is a place called Earthworks, a seven-acre farm inside Whittier Narrows run by the community: mostly farmers of color, folks from San Gabriel Valley,” says Professor Zappia. “There’s an organization called San Gabriel Valley Conservation Core [that helps] at-risk high school youth from South El Monte, in particular, to come in there and learn how to farm, learn about entrepreneurism skills, and sustainability.” Professor Zappia has taken students from Whittier College to the Earthworks farm in order to do a little farming themselves, and to enjoy having class outdoors. He believes in the significance of the Earthworks farm and other projects at the Whittier Narrows. “Like many projects like this, you see community differently. [You get] a sense of food justice, economic justice, environmental racism; all these issues that, if you were just driving on the freeway, you wouldn’t think about or connect to,” said Zappia.
