The Los Angeles River was never a storybook river of the kind that, like the Hudson or the Seine, we associate with great cities. It was an arid, Janus-faced watercourse — most of the time hardly more than a shallow, burbling brook, which ran underground in places and occasionally turned bone-dry. But with heavy rains, it was prone to flooding, occasionally gaining the full, deadly force of the Mississippi or the Colorado and violently overreaching its low banks.
That violence, as the geographer Blake Gumprecht recounts in his history of the river, was due, in part, to its extreme topography. You might not think of the river’s course as steep, because it emerges in the San Fernando Valley. But over 51 miles, beginning behind the football field of a high school in Canoga Park and ending at the ocean in Long Beach, the Los Angeles River descends more than the Mississippi does over its entire 2,000-plus-mile stretch — meaning it gathers tremendous speed and power when the waters run high.
Read more at the New York Times.