Please Happy

This was first published on Intersections: The South L.A. Report.

Rosa Gutierrez is the mother of 10 children. But, she might as well be the mother of the entire East 107th Street block. She helps organize, facilitate, motivate and inspire all the residents who live across from the iconic Watts Towers. She lives at the end of the block and works at The Watts House Project, brainchild of Los Angeles artist Edgar Arceneaux.

In its own words, The Watts House Project is “an ongoing, collaborative artwork in the shape of a neighborhood redevelopment.”

Arceneaux says that the houses on this city street can, themselves, be used as a metaphor for the project.

“Even though houses … appear to be separate, they’re totally completely connected together,” he says. “The same electrical systems connect them together, the same plumbing connects them together, the same streets and sidewalks connect them together, but then also like the fabric of the community, these interrelationships that go back, these experiences that go back. That thing … shows that to improve one house is to improve the entire neighborhood.”

Together with a team of employees, volunteers and residents (kids included), Gutierrez and Arceneaux have installed fences and landscaping, planted veggies, screened films, hosted parties and are planning to renovate several empty houses with the intention of opening a neighborhood-run café.

The project is funded through a combination of support from foundations, art museums and donations. And, while it has yet to be duplicated, The Watts House Project is modeled after artist Rick Lowe’s Project Row Houses in Houston.

Post carriage ride picture taking. Chadds Ford, PA.

*
Part I.

The assignment in my architecture class (The Natural Landscape) this week was to go out into the world: “Go out and document physical evidence of natural forces and how those forces have impacted human-made objects.”

I went to the L.A. River. I looked for visual patterns. Throughout the day, as Jake and I tried to find evidence of the recent storms, we started noticing how the green has pushed its way up through the concrete. How the water patterns flow in beautiful chaotic lines, despite being channeled into a concrete trough, and how even the L.A. river can look pristine during the magic hour just before sunset.

Here’s a slideshow of some of the photos I shot yesterday. The ending is a nod to some of the solutions I discuss later in this post – driveway drains and non-grassy landscaping, for instance.

Water Nature Pavement from Lauren M. Whaley on Vimeo.

Here’s a map of the places we visited. We wanted to go to parts of the river that were fully in the city. And we did. We stopped on the side of the road when we saw clogged storm drains or green sprouts growing in unlikely places. We stopped when we saw fence openings that would take us down to the river. We walked across overpasses and hiked down to underpasses.

View Larger Map

A. 2 p.m. Chinatown. North Main Street and the L.A. River. No trespassing. No access to the river. Viewed from above.

B. 2:16 p.m. North Main and Avenue 20. Photographed a lone tree in a parking lot, trash in a storm drain, ladies waiting for the bus next to a non-grassy landscaped lot.

C. 2:45 p.m. L.A. River at Oros Street. Steelhead and Egret Park/ Highway 5/110 interchange. Photographed debris caught by the plants, retaining walls as seen from the river, a company with trees in individual pots. Thought about water, nature and concrete.

D. 3:45 p.m. San Fernando and Figueroa. Walked down to the river under an overpass. A few sleeping spots tucked away on the slabs. Muddy. Got our feet wet. Deeper river than it had been the first time I walked down in November. Wanted to jump into the trough. How deep is it? Loved the light down there. Got a whiff of actual water smell. Wondered if anyone had put on a public dance party on the concrete river bottom.

E. 4:42 p.m. Highland and Beverly. Other plans brought us to Hancock Park to finish our day (Jake is helping tear up his aunt’s lawn to put in a greywater irrigation system and drought-resistant plants). He had noticed the upheaved sidewalks. Wanted to show me the power of the tree roots. Very impressive. Note how humans have chopped the roots to save the sidewalks.

Part II.

The second part of the assignment was to make suggestions for “improvement to the physical and emergency response infrastructure of Los Angeles.”

I say, respond before the emergency.

I want to use the water that rushes down the concrete river once a year when the monsoon comes. “That is cleansing at least a year’s worth of unwashed, grimy, filthy streets,” an architect friend said last night. “Get it out of here.”

She told me she once saw a shopping cart stuck in a tree down by the river. “It’s just gross,” she said.

With that sentiment goes my idea of harnessing (harvesting?) the water from the L.A. River during flash floods.

Wouldn’t it be awesome to take the water that is going into the ocean and use if for something? Like toilet water? I would love to stop pooping into clear potable water and start pooping into grey water. Is this possible?

Or, we could capture the water before it even enters the river. Either put in permeable driveways into every residence and street corner in L.A. or encourage people to set up their own water catchment systems. Isn’t this trend big in Tucson? Why not here?

Another suggestion would be to make permeable roofs (do these exist?) that percolate the water through a building – again, using it as grey water – and the refuse goes back into the ground, into the water table. There has to be a way to do this.

It’s a super difficult design requirement to build in a city that is picture perfect every single day but about five, when it pours and floods and mudslides and earthquakes and burns…. How do you design for that? Do architects and engineers always have to make the worst case scenario structure?

And, what role do we play in the creation of the worst case scenario? (Isn’t a lot of this flooding due to the concrete world we’ve created? There’s nowhere to go).

Another question I had while trolling the river bottom yesterday was what to do with all the stuff the trees catch. In some ways, the trees in the river bottom are serving their purpose. They’ve caught plastic bags and toys and wrappers. They used stuff now hangs on the flood-swept trees like Christmas ornaments, or even worse, like a parasitic fungi. We could have a neighborhood cleanup and recycle the stuff, melt it down. We could have a city-wide effort to use that stuff in roads or clothes or the next plastic playground. We could outlaw plastic bags. Or plastic altogether.

The assignment’s flaw, which correlates to our thinking in general, is that we’re supposed to improve “the response.” How about we seek to improve the causation, the mechanism? How about we get neighborhoods to meet and come together to build – or retrofit – permeable driveways. How about we make a citizen’s referendum to stop producing plastic bags and to start reusing the millions we have and picking up the ones that end up in the water? How about the city makes a contest to see who can come up with a river plan to use that water. Can we use the water to water lawns? Can we use it to flush our refuse? Can we route it back to the water treatment plant? Can we start by analyzing what’s in it? What we’re sending to the oceans and what we can start reducing?

“You really shouldn’t surf after it rains here,” a fellow journalism student told me. “It’s nasty.”

So, we all know that. And we wait on the shore with our boards, watching the shopping carts and plastic bags roll in, not to mention the grosser stuff, the unseen toxins. And we wait and wax our boards watch. And then, magically, the ocean rejuvenates itself. Someone cleans up the beach. And we go surfing again. Forgetting what just happened.

We need to start doing something. Earlier than the emergency response. How about now.

After my recent Buddhist retreat at Plum Village, I spent two days decompressing in rainy, windy Paris.

Every moment was magical.

My last night, I traipsed from Notre Dame to the Musée D’Orsay to the Eiffel Tower, and arrived just in time to see it sparkle for a few minutes at nightfall.

It lights up every evening from sunset until 1 a.m. and simultaneously has lighthouse spotlights beaming from the top. And, every hour on the hour, it sparkles with 20,000 bulbs, installed in 1999 to celebrate the new millennium.

Snapped these two pictures of small towers sparkling below the big one.

More posts to come about all the magical and mundane moments from my three weeks abroad and how I glimpsed Thich Nhat Hanh’s teaching of enjoying every single minute of our short time on earth. These ranged from the sparkling Eiffel tower to random conversations with oil drillers in line for Nutella-filled crêpes to the full moon illuminating Notre Dame to a man peeing on the wall next to my seat in the train station.

It’s all about being fully present for every in breath, every out breath, every mouthful of food, every trip to the toilet, every Thanks but No Thanks exchanges with street vendors trying to sell me an iron-sized version of a 1,063 foot iron tower.

While in Asia, I learned to let go. You don’t have to see everything in one visit. It took four months to stop feeling guilty about not seeing all the sights and sites!

With that in mind, on my first of two days in Berlin, I (only) visited the highly secured (I got patted down and metal dectectored) Neue Synagoge, then wandered into a monolithic bookstore, then marched back toward the synagogue to a photography show I had noticed earlier curated by a notable politico/photography/film/fashion icon, then took the subway to the Brandenburg Gate, and thought of Reagan, stared at the adjacent American Embassy and thought of Barack Hussein Obama then got completely lost in the glittering shopping district.

Then, I saw part of The Wall, which stands next to a mall and a snow slide, then walked in the cold with my hood up, head down to the Topography of Terror, which was too dark to see. No guidebooks, no itinerary. Just a subway map, a down jacket and several cups of espresso. Bonus: two different people asked me for directions in German. While I was of no use to them whatsoever, it felt nice to be mistaken for a local. Here are some pics from today, shot with my teeny Leica.

Comments

Humans are crazy creatures. We can fall in love, climb 29,029 foot high mountains and painstakingly – over eight weeks – arrange 4.3 million rectangular-shaped blocks the size of thumbs in long, curving, elaborate lines and then knock them down.

Today, more than 85 people from 13 countries watched as their year-in-the-planning Domino Day 2008 broke world records (including highest Domino mountain).

The beauty is in the destruction.