The 1934 New Year’s Flood
A new era for Los Angeles waterways
Oh, my friends, do you remember?
On that fatal New Year’s night
The lights of old Los Angeles
Were a flick’ring, Oh, so bright.
A cloud burst hit our city
And it swept away our homes;
It swept away our loved ones
In that fatal New Years flood.
-Woody Guthrie
At Woodlawn Cemetery, one of Santa Monica’s oldest graveyards, an unassuming plaque marks the grave of twin brothers Winston and Weston Doty. Early child stars, the two brothers had their lives cut short by a fatal flood that changed LA’s relationship with its waterways forever.
Born in Ohio, the two brothers moved to Los Angeles with their recently separated mother at the age of five. She started working at a film studio and taking her sons to auditions. The boys were photogenic and talented, becoming prolific actors in the short films of the era. They acted in dozens of shorts and a 1934 version of Peter Pan. After graduating from Venice High School, both brothers studied architecture at the University of Southern California and spent two years as athletic cheerleaders for the school.
On the rainy night of December 31, 1933, the brothers were attending a New Year’s party at a friend’s home in Montrose when the saturated hillsides finally gave way, causing a deluge of water, mud, and debris to cascade down on foothill communities. Winston and Weston’s bodies were found in the Verdugo Wash the following day, along with dozens of others who perished in the flood.
Most years, floods are far from the mind of the average Angeleno. Surveying the feeble trickle of water flanked by massive concrete barriers that constitutes most of the Los Angeles River’s urban landscape, it’s hard to imagine it as a raging torrent sweeping away people and buildings. Every so often, like this past winter, we’re reminded that rain does indeed come to Los Angeles. And while today the water is precisely directed through a series of natural and engineered channels, skirting neighborhoods and racing out to the ocean, the network of concrete channels we are familiar with today has its roots in the disastrous floods of the past.
Early on the morning of New Year’s Day 1934, a lethal flood was unleashed on the northern part of Los Angeles, killing dozens and consuming hundreds of homes in the quiet, agricultural foothill communities of La Crescenta and Montrose. This flood, along with an even more destructive one in 1938, solidified public opinion in favor of a comprehensive flood control plan. The concrete channels that slice through Los Angeles today execute part of this plan, carrying water swiftly past the city to the ocean.
The Crescenta Valley, northeast of downtown Los Angeles, hugs the San Gabriel foothills. After California was annexed to the United States and the Spanish, then Mexican, rancho system began to disintegrate, the area shifted from ranching to agriculture, requiring more laborers to plant and harvest an increasingly diverse supply of produce. The valley grew in population and development increased in the early 20th century.
As the Great Depression sucked the United States into a downward spiral of poverty and austerity in the early 1930s, many of the families displaced by the Dust Bowl and worsening economic conditions in the South and Midwest migrated to California to seek work, land, and better futures. The agricultural communities outside of the burgeoning city of Los Angeles promised jobs and prosperity in the fruit orchards and fields spreading across the region. Farmers ruthlessly recruited workers from the Midwest, advertising more jobs than available and driving down wages. Workers flocked to Southern California, searching for work and opportunity.
But as with any gold rush, the rush for jobs out West didn’t prove fruitful for everyone, and many Dust Bowl refugees still lived in meager, ramshackle camps they scraped together in the canyons and valleys of the Verdugo Mountains. By the early 1930s, residential development began to encroach on the valley floor as streetcar lines and access to automobiles paved the way for unprecedented sprawl. Neighborhoods of single-family homes displaced farmland and pushed migrant workers farther out. The suburbanization of Los Angeles had begun.
The same steep-sided canyons that channel nutritious silt down to LA’s fertile fields can turn deadly with heavy rainfall, especially when the vegetation that would slow the flow of water and debris has been burned away by wildfires. In the fall and winter of 1933, a series of fires and heavy rains decimated local plant life, creating prime conditions for a devastating flood.
Shortly after midnight on New Year’s Day 1934, the rain, which had dumped seven inches in less than a day, triggered a landslide that brought with it mud and debris as hillsides collapsed and tumbled down toward the city. Twenty-foot high walls of mud, viscous with boulders and debris, cascaded down the hills, loose earth collapsing under their weight. When dawn broke, over three hundred homes lay in ruins, and many more structures and automobiles were heavily damaged and buried under feet of mud. An eight-foot boulder, dislodged from a mountain, traveled three miles before coming to rest on Honolulu Street. The tops of Model T automobiles poked pathetically out of the mud that had enveloped them.
The local American Legion Hall seemed like a safe place to wait out the night. Unfortunately for the sixteen people inside, the hall’s location placed it directly in the path of an oncoming debris flow from nearby Pickens Canyon. The deluge ripped the building open, filling it with mud that swallowed everyone inside before continuing its merciless rampage. Today, a small monument to the lives lost in the 1934 flood overlooks the site of the old American Legion hall, now a flood control channel.
By official accounts, forty people were declared dead, but it’s likely that more victims were simply unaccounted for. Folk legend Woody Guthrie, in the spoken introduction to his song Los Angeles New Year’s Flood, inferred that many more migrant workers perished in the canyons with no remaining kin to report them missing.
After such a catastrophic start to the year, city leaders started seeking a permanent solution to the devastating floods that were now a threat to rapidly growing residential communities.
Examining the aftermath, engineers noticed that the area surrounding Haines Canyon saw less damaging mud and debris flows than the other canyons in the area. The key factor turned out to be a gravel mining pit dug at the bottom of the canyon, which captured much of the debris and prevented it from spilling out into the neighborhood. This concept was adopted by the Army Corps of Engineers, who planned a network of similar debris basins at the mouth of each major canyon as part of new flood mitigation measures. The basins collect rocks and other damaging debris, filtering the water before it continues downstream and into storm drain channels.
Once a plan was in place, civic organizations and local leaders gathered support for improved flood control measures, and the state sold bonds worth over $26 million to finance the projects. In an October 1934 article, the LA Times speaks to the urgency of the project: “Day and night crews will be put to work on the State Emergency Relief Administration’s Verdugo Wash project early this week in the hope of having the debris dam and basin ready for the next rain.”
Today, debris basins line the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains and other ranges in the region, protecting downstream neighborhoods from damaging rubble. This cycle of constant earthmoving, shifting literal tons of earth from one place to another to accommodate human settlement (when they reach around 25% capacity, some of the rubble must be excavated and removed) is one of the often invisible but necessary infrastructure projects that makes Los Angeles possible.
Some Interesting Facts about Woodlawn Cemetery:
Woodlawn contains what is believed to be the world’s largest Masonic symbol. According to the Lucky Mojo Esoteric Archive, the emblem is 168 feet by 186 feet and surrounded by over two thousand Mason graves.
Since 2015, Woodlawn has offered “green burial” in its beautifully appointed Eternal Meadow, where instead of chemical embalming and concrete vaults you can opt for a natural burial using biodegradable shrouds, caskets, and urns. This section is noticeably wilder and, in my opinion, lovelier. When I visited in the throes of a spring superbloom, it was covered by California poppies and other native wildflowers designed to evoke “a natural cycle of flowering, degeneration, and re-seeding.” Notable social and environmental activist Tom Hayden is buried here, with a memorial bench overlooking the native plant garden.
