HISTORY Lily Jane Tsong looks at the source of the San Rafael Creek.
WHERE THE WATER
Flowed
STORIES OF NORTHEAST LA AND THE SAN GABRIEL VALLEY area. “Myriad Unnamed Streams” is a series of historical vignettes by local environmentalist Jane Tsong to show where the water once flowed throughout the Northeast, at watercalifornia.org/projects/janetsong.html Tsong explains what happened to the free-flowing water as the decades rolled by. The totality of her research makes us look again at our familiar landscape and realize that there is no lack of precipitation that falls on the region; rather, the way we have developed the landscape to shed water (rather than store water in the soil) has created a situation of water scarcity where none existed before. Tsong is an artist who took an
interest in the waters of Los Angeles after her family first moved to West Los Angeles in 1997. “We heard rumors of a freshwater spring by the high school sports field next door,” she explains. “When I visited the site, I was mystified by how the water flowed naturally through a well-groomed miniature landscape, before unceremoniously disappearing into a drainage grating.” She later learned that this was the historically significant Kuruvungna Springs, which has since been revived by the Tongva people. After she moved to Highland Park in 2003, she discovered Northeast LA and the San Gabriel Valley also had many stories of local springs and past streams.
“I was surprised,” Tsong says. “After all, weren’t we told that this is a desert and that all our water came from afar?” Finding that most of these springs and seeps and streams were never named, and largely unknown today (if they still exist), she researched these diverse water stories. Along with archival research, she interviewed people from 2006 to 2008, and eventually catalogued her information on a website media book called “Water, CA.” “I presented this as a tour that one could actually take by bicycle,” Tsong says with a smile. “At the very least, you can pull out a large map, click on the website, and rediscover some of the hidden water history of
Photo by Louisa van Leer
W
henever it rains here, some of the analysts, while wringing their hands, say most of the rain that’s falling just flows to the ocean. And though Los Angeles and surrounding cities get about three-quarters of their water from more than 300 miles away, such wasn’t always the case. Once, the entire Northeast LA and the San Gabriel Valley — though described as “coastal desert plain” — was a land where streams and rivers flowed and where water could be readily obtained. The story of why so much water now goes to the ocean is not a simple story, but to get a full understanding, it’s helpful to turn back the clock 150 years or so and look at the many water stories of the
BY CHRISTOPHER NYERGES
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