Arthur Africano

Elijah Sedustine meets the LA River

"I feel a little itchy, I'm not going to lie." Tyler Sedustine has just emerged from the Los Angeles River, his dripping wet two-and-a-half-year-old son Elijah ensconced in his arms. That his first instinct is to hose off will likely strike few Angelenos as strange. Just twenty-four hours previous, the idea of dipping your toddler in the our eponymous waterway could have been deemed not just mildly odd and possibly toxic, but also illegal.

On May 27, however, the city threw open a 2.5-mile stretch, known as the Glendale Narrows and located between Fletcher Drive and Oros Street, for the first time since the whole river was encased in concrete and re-classified as a "flood control channel" back in the late 1930s. Suddenly on the list of approved activities are boating or fishing for the bass, tilapia and catfish who call the river home. "I've been told they're good eating," swore Fernando Gomez, Chief Ranger for the Mountains Recreation & Conservation Authority (MRCA), on hand for the official kickoff.

And yes, incidental exposure has been deemed safe, though Gomez doesn't blink an eye at the question. Patiently wrapping people's heads around the idea that it's less concrete wasteland than honest-to-god ecosystem is a major reason why MRCA has joined the Los Angeles River Pilot Recreation Zone program, donating more than a dozen rangers and numerous volunteers to patrol the area during its run from Memorial Day to Labor Day, Sept. 2. "The river is why L.A. is where it is," said Gomez, noting that it once served as the local fresh water resource. Food for thought in our age of reinvigorated water wars.

More »

Jessica Ritz

Grand Park

What began as a public-private partnership bidding process to find a food vendor for a beloved urban park launched a massively successful mid-market burger chain.

Granted, any business gets a leg up when an already successful restaurateur such as Danny Meyer is at the helm. Shake Shack now has locations throughout Manhattan, as well as other cities in the northeast, Florida, the UK, Turkey, and the Middle East.

And it all started in a public space, New York City's Madison Square Park, where hungry people were already gathering and bringing food to a picturesque, engaging environment, and firmly establishing demand. The Shake Shack structure itself is a sharp piece of contemporary design and compatible with its setting. A win-win situation. (Admittedly, it's hardly the healthiest food imaginable.)

Quality food can help reinvigorate public spaces, an area in which Los Angeles needs a lot of help. So why does it so rarely happen?

More »

Courtesy Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND)

One of Liz Craft's "hairy guys" in West Hollywood Park

This week, two artists dance with hula-hoops, another uses graffiti to obscure paintings of high-heeled, made-up models and a third installs hairy bronze statues in WeHo.

5. Just say no
In 1962, Judson Dance Theater started at the Judson Church in Greenwich Village. Programming was informal; writers and artists contributed as much as dancers and choreographers did. Trisha Brown worked at Judson, as did Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer, who developed her No Manifesto there. ("No to spectacle. No to virtuosity," it started, then continued to list all the tropes of performance Rainer wished to reject.) Rainer and Forti will be at the Hammer this weekend, along with a number of other artists, dancers, theorists and historians, talking about where the dance world and art world meet. 10899 Wilshire Blvd.; Fri., April 26, 5-9 p.m.; Sat., April 27, 10-2 p.m. (310) 443-7000, hammer.ucla.edu.

More »

Eva Recinos

See also:
*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week
*Southern California's First 'Parklet' Asks the Question: What is a Park, Really?

If you felt like Downtown needed more nature to counteract its vast plains of concrete, consider your pleads heard -- somewhat.

Earlier this month, the City of Los Angeles and Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council (DLANC) unveiled two parklets on Spring Street between 6th and 7th Streets -- in front of L.A. Cafe and Syrup Desserts -- to encourage residents to walk and bike more often. By definition, a parklet uses the space normally given to a parking spot and turns it into a mini-park.

Last year, a similar parklet sprung up in Long Beach as part of the project Park(ing) Day. The original inspiration for parklets came from San Francisco's "Pavement to Parks" program, and besides giving a different look to public space, the parklets serve as experiments in a larger project. For 14 months, the Spring Street Parklet Impact Study brings together USC's School of Architecture, the DLANC and the Lewis Center at UCLA to analyze the effects of the parklets in the city.

More »

Alissa Walker

See also:
*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week
*Our Best of L.A. issue and our Best of L.A. app
*Fugly Buildings: Our Series on the Most Hideous Buildings in L.A.

During our recent run of 95-degree autumn days -- can we be done with those? -- the last place one would think to seek relief is in the landlocked asphalt wonderland of downtown Los Angeles. But downtown is now home to the city's most accessible, life-affirming aquatic refreshment, in a vibrant public space nestled unassumingly, almost secretly, in L.A.'s newest park.

The plaza below a restored 46-year-old Arthur J. Will Memorial Fountain, once obscured by the ramps of a parking garage, has been transformed into a vast "membrane pool." An inch of water creates a rippling canvas for a field of choreographed geysers where kids, dozens of kids, in swimsuits and Crocs and sunblock, squeal as they weave between the columns of water. Nearby, fluorescent pink chairs are occupied by smiling, towel-holding parents and buttoned-up city employees, more than a few of whom kick off their shoes and wade into the pool themselves. The whole scene looks even prettier at night.

"It's huge," my friend Kalee Thompson, a writer and Highland Park mom, gushed about the fountain. "It's a great place for kids to play a game of tag on a hot day and a fun place to meet up for a play date or picnic since there is also a big expanse of lawn, public bathrooms and even a Starbucks."

The fountain plaza -- which I've dubbed Toddler Beach -- is the very best part of Grand Park (formerly Civic Park), a new 12-acre strip of public space that cascades down Bunker Hill from the Music Center to the steps of City Hall. Although sections have been functional since July, the fully-operational park officially opens this Saturday, creating a nice outdoor area in the center of the city and bringing some much-needed amenities like a dog run to the neighborhood. It's definitely not "our Central Park," as some have hyped (maybe Bryant Park?), but Grand Park accomplishes a lot, and with very little to work with in this small, park-starved sliver of downtown.

More »

Sean J. O'Connell

Fountains can be found almost everywhere in downtown Los Angeles. The Department of Water and Power fortress has a sizable moat with eight sparkling, backlit blasts. The pool in front of the Central Library has a lizard skeleton coming up for air. Even the Bunker Hill steps have a trickle of water mocking those attempting to wheeze their way up its six flights.

But one of the best spritzing displays in downtown, the Arthur J. Will Memorial Fountain, had up until this past weekend been largely unknown. Now it is a centerpoint of the newly revamped Grand Park, drawing a healthy dose of children, tourists and thirsty dogs to its thin layer of water. But few have considered what it will take to keep that water crystal clear from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day.

More »

David Brezinski/United States Fish and Wildlife Service

An acorn woodpecker. I love these guys. If you've ever seen a Woody Woodpecker cartoon, you'll know why.

Bird-watching. A word that is synonymous with you don't really know because you've already lost interest just thinking about it for one second. Lucky for you this post isn't about bird-watching; it's about birding. I said MOTHERFUCKIN' BIRDING, YOU GUYS!

Sorry. I got a little overzealous trying to dispel your misconceptions about the activity of looking at birds through binoculars and keeping nerdy little lists of where and when you saw those birds. You used to hear it called "bird-watching." Now it's "birding," and the people who do it call themselves "birders" because, well, I think they're aware they have a little public relations issue. See, I'm guessing when you think about "bird-watching," you probably picture these folks:

More »

Alissa Walker

When I got a message from a friend that a car had plowed into Sunset Triangle, I ran the few blocks from my house. No one was hurt; it had happened early in the morning when the plaza was empty. But the damage to the new pedestrian-only thoroughfare was extensive. Giant planters had toppled and rolled, their drought-tolerant succulents scattered across the asphalt -- asphalt that only two weeks before had been painted in blinding acid-green polka-dots to help signify that cars were not allowed.

The Silver Lake plaza opened on March 4, the first of many planned for the city as part of the program Streets for People. This particular plaza is a pilot project that will close a tiny strip of Griffith Park Boulevard, from its intersection with Sunset Boulevard to Edgecliffe Drive, for one year. Declaring this single Los Angeles block unfit for cars, even temporarily, is a sign of coming-of-age for our auto-bound city. But it's a decision that many Angelenos are not too happy about.

As I examined the squished plastic planters and scuffed through the piles of dirt, a range of scenarios ran through my mind. Did a driver simply not see the planters in the dark? Did they follow Google Maps' suggestion that this was indeed still a street? Or worse -- my eyes widened as I considered the suggestion -- could someone hate the plaza so much they'd pilot their car directly into it to prove a point?

More »

Studio One Eleven

When is a parking space not a parking space? When it's a park, of course. Last week, Southern California's first "parklet" opened quietly in Long Beach, recasting that space between the painted lines as -- yes -- a tiny rectangle of curb-adjacent public space.

It's not as suicidal as it sounds. In San Francisco, there are now 23 such parklets; the Chronicle's architectural critic John King recently reviewed 22 of them.

These are the spawn of Park(ing) Day, an initiative that since 2005 has led groups all over the world to convert metered parking spaces into public space for a day in September. In San Francisco it was deemed a winning concept year-round, and in 2010 the city opened its first semipermanent park-where-cars-used-to-park.

This concept has since rippled across the country, but Long Beach's new parklet is the first in Southern California, claims its designer, Studio One Eleven's Michael Bohn. "Someone tried to take credit in San Diego, but it's a curb extension," he says.

More »