Every Bridge Over the Los Angeles River

The county of Los Angeles is divided by the Los Angeles River: east from west in the basin; and north from south through the San Fernando Valley. In its original state, the river had been a benign dry wash, which would grow to a deadly raging torrent during the winter months. Many of the early bridges to span the river were washed away during this periodic flooding, along with whatever and whoever happened to be on them at the time. In an effort to diminish its deadliness, the Army Corps of Engineers was enlisted in the middle of the last century to tame the river by paving its banks over most of the distance from its headwaters in Canoga Park out to the Pacific at the city of Long Beach. What resulted is one of the strangest un-navigable waterways anywhere. A big concrete trough. Spanning the river today are one hundred thirty-six bridges of one kind or another. Most of these bridges convey cars, trucks and shrinking numbers of pedestrians, but there are also railroad bridges, footbridges, natural gas pipelines, oil and water, and one equestrian bridge. While the river divides them, the bridges connect the diverse communities and neighborhoods that make up Los Angeles. From its inception, my overall objective with this project has been to reveal something of my environment that has been largely overlooked and/or misunderstood.