The sight of a concreted Los Angeles River is so common these days that we don’t really give any thought to perhaps once upon a time it was an actual river with a natural river bed. In fact, it was like that until March of 1938 when LA experienced rains so heavy that the LA River flooded, which resulted in 144 deaths and thousands of homes being destroyed. Not long after that, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began channeling the river with concrete. In this then-and-now image I’ve put together, we can see an almost dry stretch of the river in Studio City circa 1937 and how that same stretch looked in 2015. It might look ugly but it does the job—and gave speed demons a place to illegally race their cars.
The sight of a concreted Los Angeles River is so common these days that we don’t really give any thought to perhaps once upon a time it was an actual river with a natural river bed. In fact, it was like that until March of 1938 when LA experienced rains so heavy that the LA River flooded, which resulted in 144 deaths and thousands of homes being destroyed. Not long after that, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began channeling the river with concrete. In this then-and-now image I’ve put together, we can see an almost dry stretch of the river in Studio City circa 1937 and how that same stretch looked in 2015. It might look ugly but it does the job—and gave speed demons a place to illegally race their cars.
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