Sprol

The Taylor Yard in 1925, courtesy of The River Project. Click the photograph and then scroll down to see what it looks like today as modeled in Google Earth.

What will its Future Reflect?

Taylor Yard is a beaten up place, marked by the phases of Los Angeles history. This 200 acre site, just north of downtown along the L.A. River, is reported to be the place where the City of Angels got its name. According to The River Project, Father Crespi, diarist for the Portola Expedition, gushed for over 1,000 words on August 2, 1769 about this “green, lush valley,” with its “very full flowing, wide river,” and “riot of color” in the surrounding hills. The expedition feasted on the plentiful game and fish and named the river and valley for “Nuestra Señora La Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula,” or the Queen of the Angels.

The Taylor Yard today, via Google Earth

After almost 200 years as part of the Rancho San Raphael, which stayed with the Verdugo family after California was annexed by United States in 1850, the land was subdivided in 1881. The area then hosted farms, residences and summer cottages for a few decades before the natural splendor that wowed LA’s founders was buried definitively by the Southern Pacific Railroad in the 1920’s. Southern Pacific used the site as a freight-switching facility and employed about 75% of the workforce in the surrounding communities.

In the late 1930’s, the river’s naturally dynamic banks were imprisoned in concrete as part of a massive flood-control project, and Taylor Yard consolidated its central role in the city’s development as a modern industrial center.

As the local industrial economy declined, the landscape it made sank into abandonment and decay. In the 1960’s, Southern Pacific began re-routing trains away from downtown and Taylor Yard. In 1985, the site lost its function as a freight switching facility, along with several hundred jobs.

Such a shabby site seems an unlikely prize to fight over. But fought over it is. In 1999, when City Council approved a developer’s proposal for an industrial and retail development that would have put 650,000 square feet of industrial warehouses on the site and next to a residential area, the community fought back. An alliance of nearly 40 community, business, faith-based, environmental and social justice organizations successfully challenged the city’s approval of the project in court, and the developer opted to sell the land to the state.

The competition over the future of Taylor Yard reflects two competing visions of the site. One vision is grounded in the site’s current conditions – well-trampled, largely abandoned – and leads to proposals for utilitarian developments. The other vision calls upon the natural wonder the site once was to support demands to make the site serve the recreation, health and spiritual needs of its community the way it once served the community’s need for jobs.

In the first vision, there is little about the site that needs to be protected; in the second, the redemption of the neighborhood, the river and the city is at stake. As Arthur Golding, Chair of the L.A. River Task force of the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects, writes, “The Los Angeles River today is a relic of the physical, economic and intellectual landscape of the 1930’s.” He goes on to declare that, “to rethink the river is to discover a unique opportunity to define urban places, join neighborhoods and communities together, and reconnect us to our landscape and our history.”

In 2000 the second vision gained ground when the State of California allocated $45 million to purchase a portion of the site for a new state park. The groundbreaking for the 40-acre park was held in January 2005. The park will house soccer fields, a running track and other sports facilities, in addition to 20 acres of natural parkland, picnic tables, an amphitheater and bike paths. While scaled back from earlier plans, the groundbreaking nonetheless represents concrete progress towards a green, living Taylor Yard that nourishes nearby communities instead of dragging them down.

When the California High Speed Rail Authority (CHRSA) recently announced that the preferred route for a new high-speed train between L.A. and San Francisco would border the site – a proposal no doubt based on the site’s current conditions – outraged editorials reflected widespread community investment in the new, redemptive vision of Taylor Yard. As stated in an opinion column by the Los Angeles Downtown News, “There is simply too much potential for a great community resource to have it compromised by a high speed train.”

The CHRSA bowed to public pressure and, on August 3, 2005, announced that, “instead of selecting a specific alignment, a wide corridor has been identified for further study between Burbank and Los Angeles Union Station.”

The fact that the redemptive vision for Taylor Yard had enough traction to get the CHRSA to reclassify the site as part of an area for future study, rather than the preferred route for the high speed train, indicates a revolutionary departure from the usual thinking about environmental and community impacts from major projects. Normally, such thinking centers around how much harm a project is expected to cause. It’s a new thing to base activism, and subsequently public decision-making, on the improvements a project could prevent.

It’s a new and hopeful thing. And it’s not limited to Taylor Yard. Similar work has been going on for even longer to create a park in “the Cornfield,” another derelict industrial site about two miles downriver from Taylor Yard. Both projects are part of a broader initiative to “bring back” the L.A. River and remake the surrounding neighborhoods. The Center for Law in the Public Interest, one of the groups behind the “Heritage Parkscape” initiative to link cultural and historic resources around the heart of the city, articulates the challenge directly: “In park-poor Los Angeles, it is necessary to bring natural space to the people, and take people to the natural space.”

It is far from certain to what degree the new vision will prevail at Taylor Yard and in the city as a whole. Utilitarian needs for jobs and infrastructure remain, and not everyone is bought into the new vision. Regardless of the outcome of any individual struggle, however, the fight for Taylor Yard and other sites along the L.A. River provides a model for other campaigns to move beyond “preservation” to work for livable – and living – communities, even in places where they’ve already been lost.