Here Comes The Flood: Some History of Flooding in the Arroyo Seco, 1861-1914, Part Two

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

As the 1880s dawned in greater Los Angeles, there were three years of lower rainfall than what was considered normal—official records began in 1877—as 10 to 13 inches fell between 1880 and 1883. The winter of 1883-1884, however, saw precipitation of more than three times the previous year, with the total of above 38 inches remaining the highest recorded in the nearly century-and-a-half since that tally began (the 2004-2005 total was under an inch less and we had good totals the last two years, though this was a dry year at just 8 inches.)

Continuing our look at some early history of flooding in the Arroyo Seco area northeast of downtown and featuring photos taken by Charles Fletcher Lummis of a deluge that were identified in 1945 as being from 1912-1913 but are very likely to be from early 1914 when severe floods hit the area, it bears noting that damage in the Arroyo for most of the 19th century was limited simply because of the lack of development.

That began to change, however, when in April 1883, as the region was emerging out of a long period of economic doldrums, the partnership of Albert Judson and George W. Morgan led to the creation of the Highland Park tract out of the Ramirez Homestead (this was probably land on the Rancho San Rafael owned by former teenage newspaper publisher and then lawyer, Francisco P. Ramirez).

This followed, in an area where Glassell Park is now to the southwest, the development by Morgan of the Highland View tract adjacent to the Arroyo and the Los Angeles River, a confluence subject to much flooding, as well. When the great Boom of the 1880s emerged after a direct transcontinental railroad link to greater Los Angeles was finished in late 1885, a raft of new towns in the area included Garvanza, northeast of Highland Park.

Speaking of railroads, the Southern Pacific’s line north from the Angel City went along the Los Angeles River and crossed near that confluence. Then, the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Valley Railroad was established, also in 1883, though it took a few years for the line to be completed to Pasadena. There were also stage lines that went to the Crown City, then several years old, and north into the San Fernando Valley.

All of this development, of course, meant the likelihood of much greater property damage in the event of flooding in the Arroyo, which, along with Big Tujunga Wash, was a major feeder of water to the river with the volume of water from both coming from the San Gabriel Mountains. Though it was a dry year, the Los Angeles Herald of 17 March 1882 reported that “the Arroyo Seco was so full of water [the] night before last that the Pasadena stage was unable to cross.” The coach had to return to town and wait for the next day “when it succeeded in getting through the unwonted flood.”

The 24 July 1883 edition of the Herald reminded readers of the long-recognized need for flood control in the city, stating,

It is a matter within the recollection of thousands of Angeleños that, in the last great flood [presumably, the Noah’s Flood of 1861-1862], the waters of the Los Angeles river poured down Alameda street. After that critical experience there was an agitation for the building of a bulkhead to make its recurrence impossible, but it soon died out, on the principle of out of site out of mind. No one who has ever crossed the Arroyo Seco need be told that tremendous volumes of water have at times filled its banks . . .

What that meant, whether for people on the San Fernando road, a vital thoroughfare to get into the eastern San Fernando Valley and points north or downstream was what the paper colorfully stated as the possibility that “the people in low-lying portions of the city might awake some night to find themselves floating down towards Wilmington” where the river emptied into the Pacific.

The Herald called for a bulkhead or levee in the vicinity of Elysian Park down to the covered bridge (yes, one existed here) over the river to Boyle Heights, but warned, with no small degree of prescience, that “our city fathers will be probably wait till the next great flood has worked its sweet will, and they will then do what ought to be done now, or what ought, indeed, to have been done years ago.”

With the February 1884 deluge, amid coverage of the widespread destruction wrought within the region by storms, the Herald of the 19th observed that, two days prior, “long before noon the prodigious swell of the waters from the Arroyo Seco made it very probable that most of the bridges would fall a sacrifice to the fury of the torrent.” Among the casualties of the great flood, the paper continued, was a man in the Arroyo area:

At an early hour on Sunday morning [the 17th] Mr. George J. Stoltz, a dairyman near the Arroyo Seco, in attempting to ford the river at the junction of the Arroyo Seco, was drowned, as were both his horses, while his wagon and milk cans floated down stream.

The 6 March edition of the Herald briefly noted that “the Arroyo Seco, near its junction with the Los Angeles river, was not fordable yesterday. The current was very rapid and wild, from the boulders that had been rolled down from the storm or uncovered by the sand.” In its edition six days later, the paper ran a feature titled “The Raging Arroyo” in which it commented on a plan for “the Arroyo boulevard,” likely what is now Figueroa Street.

The piece mentioned that a fifty-foot long bridge was intended to cross the watercourse, but this was lambasted as an “absurd calculation” and it added that, when the engineer who designed the span “saw the Arroyo Seco sending down a stream at 500 feet wide at the rate of ten miles per hour, he probably had evidence sufficient to induce him to change his mind.” The Herald then warned,

The Arroyo is a very dangerous stream. Although the rains have ceased and the waters have subsided to moderate proportions, still the stream is in a dangerous condition. Yesterday, a Mexican [why the ethnicity mattered is a question as Stoltz was not described as white] with three women and a child, in a one-horse wagon attempted to drive across the Arroyo Seco, near its junction with the Los Angeles river . . . The current was very swift and the horse, becoming alarmed, reared and fell, breaking a shaft and falling in the stream where he drowned in less than a minute. [A woman tried to save the horse, but failed, though the carcass was retrieved for its hide.] The rest of the party were pitched into the muddy waters, but all escaped with their lives. Some parties from the shore helped get them to land and pull out the wagon.

Amid the devastation, the Herald of 28 February renewed a call for work that would involve “a safe levee” as well as “a great highway for the people to travel on” (what would the paper have thought about Interstate 5, much less the Arroyo Seco Parkway or State Route 110?), aside from a better water supply. It suggested the installation of “a sloping levee of stone . . . and a channel 300 feet wide and as nearly straight as possible, [that] would carry off all the water of the Los Angeles river, and the current so confined would flow so swiftly as to keep itself free of all debris.”

This sounds a great deal like the concrete channelization that was implemented for the Los Angeles River starting more than a half-century later after the horrific 1938 flood and which continued for some twenty years afterward, though nothing was specified as to the material used for the proposed channel. The “sloping levee of stone” is also a notable reference. The article concluded that,

The danger from the river now arises from its wideness, and not from its narrowness. It is too wide, so that the current has not sufficient force to keep itself clear, and leaves its debris often in the middle of the stream, while the current goes off through the soft soil of [adjacent] orchards and gardens, instead of carrying away the gravel and boulders which the Arroyo Seco has hurled into the channel.

Two years later, another flood ravaged the region in and around the Arroyo, following a dry year of about 9 inches. The 1885-1886 season recorded north of 22 inches and the 20 January 1886 issue of the Herald included coverage of railroad bridge damage, so that, with the Southern Pacific line, a span “over the Los Angeles river was badly broken and a quarter mile of track washed out along bluffs [at the base of the Elysian Hills] opposite the mouth of the Arroyo Seco, which stream came down heavily into the river and deflected its course so that it washed fiercely against the railroad bank and carried it all away, leaving the ties and rails suspended in the air at various points.”

With the new Los Angeles and San Gabriel Valley road, though it was remarked the track damage was minimal, “at the lower bridge, across the Arroyo Seco, the embankment at one end of the structure was washed for about 25 feet, and the approach to the north end of the bridge over the Los Angeles river was also washed out.” The locomotive and cars were in Pasadena and the company was to repair the two damaged sections as well as “where the little passenger depot stood.”

In an editorial titled “A Destructive Flood and Its Lessons,” the Herald of the same day remarked that “for the second time in a few years Los Angeles has experienced the disasters of a flood.” Three inches fell in a day and much more in the mountains that fed the Arroyo and the piece continued that,

The Los Angeles river soon swelled to a flood, and the Arroyo Seco poured into it a tumultuous stream that even exceeded the volume of the river proper . . . [with levels of that or even greater than that of 1884 and with bridges failing] The Arroyo Seco dashed over towards the bluff at the foot of which the Southern Pacific track is located and tore up the roadbed for a distance of fully half a mile. Swelling in momentum on its course towards the ocean it swept way the depot of the San Gabriel Valley railway, dashing the edifice against the East Los Angeles [Lincoln Heights] bridge and carrying away considerable portions of it, including a street car.

The Herald of the 21st then offered a remarkable futuristic forecast of what would happen to Los Angeles in 1900, namely its total destruction, if something was not done to provide adequate flood control. In something of a forebear to such disaster flicks as 1974’s Earthquake, the piece put readers in place of someone observing the devastation of the Angel City at the close of the 19th century and advised “take a map of the city of Pasadena and her surroundings, including the Arroyo Seco and the Los Angeles river.”

Scanning the document, it would be readily observed that the latter, heading into the San Fernando Valley, included “the heads of [the] water torrents [which] are 45 miles from where Los Angeles stood,” these including the Big and Little Tujunga washes, while “further east still the Arroyo Seco heads up in the mountains a little more than half as far [some 25 miles] from the site of the ruined town,” that is, Los Angeles.

Noting that “the safety of the city was often due to this geographical fact” of how the river was fed from streams, like the Arroyo, gathering the waters from the San Gabriel range, the account went on that,

In those days where the country is now thick set with orchards, vineyards and stately eucalyptus forests [and when livestock raising was the backbone of the regional economy], were all bare plains and the waters ran with no impediment down the slopes like wild horses to the streams below. These streams rose six to ten feet, breasting down the cañons with the force of a western cyclone.

It is important, of course, to note how important the changes in the landscape were wrought by the transition from animal grazing to intensive agriculture, including the widespread use of irrigation canals and ditches—for instance, the rerouting of the San Gabriel River in the winter of 1867-1868 was largely facilitated by the flow following a ditch built by ex-Governor Pío Pico and the river’s seizing of the channel of Coyote Creek out of what became northwest Orange County to create a new course to the Pacific.

We’ll halt the flow of this narrative here and reserve more of the history of flooding and the Arroyo Seco for a part three, so please rejoin us then.