Prototype Issue
LA County’s Green Gems of the Emerald Necklace
By Belinda Arredondo
(page 1 of 1)How the neglected working people of East San Gabriel Valley rose up to create a potential park masterpiece.
Too often, or so I judge, scholars and journalists have portrayed sprawling LA as a place without a center, without meaningful history, constantly morphing into one image after another. Yet the county of cities is breaking new ground with a method of environmental design that fuses L.A.’s history with urban greenery.
Standing in the rubbish-laden Rio Hondo Park above the dry concrete Rio Hondo River in El Monte, urban planning student Nathan Baire points to a series of black and white images and to one in particular – a photograph of two young women spending an afternoon in the rivers once gushing waters. Below the photo, a testimonial by former resident Filo Hernandez captures life in the historical barrios of El Monte that nestled by the Rio Hondo in the early 1900s.
The photo and personal testimonial are a segment of a larger historical visual project that will soon be on display at a cleaned-up and developing Rio Hondo Park. Forty years ago, the park area was known as Hicks Camp, home to migrant dwellers who worked in El Monte’s agricultural and industrial sectors. This “barrio” [neighborhood] , mostly inhabited by Mexican immigrants, spearheaded crucial local developments, including the berry strike of 1933 and the racial desegregation of local schools. Despite the small barrio’s influence on El Monte (and on other migrant laborers living in the greater LA area), Hicks Camp was paved over to make room for housing developments and a local park. Years later, the luscious Rio Hondo was also paved in with concrete slabs to prevent seasonal flooding.
“El Monte is often depicted as any other western American town. An old pioneer settlement whose population inflated around agricultural labor and industrial development,” Baire says. “Latinos have really taken the brunt of it. Most of their history and their influence is undermined, vanished.”
Fortunately, Rio Hondo Park is one of the many parks being revitalized as part of a larger project, the Emerald Necklace. The Emerald Necklace is an ambitious plan for a string of parks and greenways touching 17 LA County/San Gabriel Valley cities and 500,000 residents along the Rio Hondo and San Gabriel Rivers, including Azusa, Duarte, Irwindale, Baldwin Hills, Monrovia, Rosemead, Temple City, El Monte and South El Monte. Much like Boston’s Emerald Necklace, from which the vision of the project originates, the greenway is intended to unite these disjointed cities with a number of pedestrian and recreational trails that loop around the region. Leading environmental organizations involved in the project, including Recreation and Mountains Conservancy, Amigos De Los Rios and the Sierra Club, envision California’s Emerald Necklace as a network of world-class urban parks similar to those found in London, Paris and New York that allow the public a space to connect and enjoy nature.
“The Emerald Necklace is where the city begins and ends its borders. It links the cities on the edge of the San Gabriel Rivers into a dialogue,” says Claire Robinson, founder and executive director of Amigos de los Rios. “One doesn’t have a great sense of the city in Los Angeles. You have to have a great sense of the city – the shape and feeling of a city – to take pride in it, to want to improve it.”
For the communities east of the San Gabriel Valley Rivers, the Emerald Necklace is not simply an aesthetic opportunity. It’s a vital component highlighting the disproportionate number of parks in low-income and minority communities in LA County. According to the Trust for Public Land, LA County is one of the most park-poor areas in the nation, with 67% of children without access to a park. Notably, 65% of the residents in the east San Gabriel Valley region are plagued with obesity, asthma, Type II diabetes, and hypertension, with lack of green space believed to play a role in the disorders along with close proximity to active and inactive industrial sites.
To address these issues, environmental non-profit Amigos de los Rios coordinated an outreach campaign that generated park advocacy and community support for the Emerald Necklace. Rather than architects and landscape designers developing the greening project, community members in El Monte were led through workshops to create the vision for their future parks. Children and their mothers decorated a chain link fence around one of the park gems, with hand-colored paper butterflies, flowers and trees as symbols of hope for their expectation for the park. “El Monte is an incredibly diverse city; we have people from all over the world,” Robinson comments. “Folks here have an incredible knowledge of agriculture, crafts, artisan knowledge, much more sophisticated than the urban knowledge that we [generally] have [in LA]. What we wanted to do is tap into that wealth of knowledge and incorporate it in our parks.”
People in LA County need parks, and this particular community proved it by demanding just that. When the El Monte City Council received the bundles of handwritten letters and pictures from parents and children, they realized the Emerald Necklace was a unique opportunity. Like many communities in East Los Angeles, the city of El Monte hadn’t seen a new park in over 40 years; it was long overdue for a little greenery.
As a result of the outreach campaigns, parks across the city of El Monte are receiving their very own jewels as part of the Emerald Necklace. The revitalized Rio Hondo Park will boast five miles of pedestrian and equestrian trails by connecting existing and new parks. The park also comes equipped with a recycling water system and a series of swales combined with porous pavement that together capture and filter rain water before it makes its way into the river. Moreover, the visual project, displayed along the parks walkways, will serve to recognize and preserve the diverse communities of El Monte and their influence on Los Angeles.
At a time when the environmental movement in LA is split between the traditional conservation approach and the environmental justice approach, the Emerald Necklace merges both movements. “Natural history and cultural history are inextricable,” says Robinson, “We don’t see those two as separate and distinct; we have the science but we’re also deeply committed to history and families.”
Discussion