Frank Gehry swims upstream on LA River megaproject

Starchitect battles housing advocates, environmentalists — and everyone else

Frank Gehry in front of one of his designs last year in France (Getty images)
Frank Gehry in front of one of his designs last year in France (Getty images)

One evening in late 2016, California State Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon had an early dinner scheduled with Frank Gehry. Rendon and his wife, nonprofit executive Annie Lam, were close with the starchitect and his wife, Berta. They often dined together, and that night planned to meet at 6 at a restaurant in trendy Northeast L.A. — a small, dark, “hipster kind of place where all the waiters had tattoos and beards,” Rendon recalled. 

Shortly before 6, Gehry let Rendon know he had to push the dinner back a couple of hours. When he arrived, it wasn’t Berta accompanying him but Meaghan Lloyd, his longtime chief of staff. 

This is really weird,” Rendon thought. “What the hell is going on?” 

What was going on was that Rendon, a Democrat who represents southeast L.A. County and ranks among the state’s most powerful politicians, had been conscripted into a spontaneous, frenetic early project meeting with one of the world’s most famous architects. 

In the days and even hours leading up to the dinner, Gehry, a longtime Santa Monica resident, had been consumed by a grand idea. Over two and a half hours and several rounds of tequila, he laid it out for Rendon: a series of trails and platform parks, constructed above the 51-mile, usually bone-dry Los Angeles River, that would reincarnate the notoriously ugly landmark as a magnificent public green space. 

I thought it was a beautiful idea,” Rendon said. And then, when his elected-official brain kicked in: “Holy shit, what’s this going to cost?” On the car ride home, Rendon was still processing. “I started by asking the guy to build a community center, right? And then all of a sudden he’s talking about covering the river. It’s just like, ‘Wow, this got out of hand.’” 

Nearly six years later, the project is at a crossroads. Gehry has spent countless hours refining plans and meeting with various county agencies and subcommittees. Early last year, the county released a draft master plan for the river that included the elevated park system and a $150 million cultural center,  also designed by Gehry. In June, the county approved a final master plan.  

The proposal aims to provide a signature public resource for traditionally neglected and working-class southeast L.A. County and emphasizes future affordable housing plans. But while Gehry’s designs have inspired plenty of excitement, they’ve also provoked backlash. Environmental groups that initially supported the project sued in July, arguing that they were cut out of the process and that the river, rather than being capped by human-engineered green space, should be reverted to actual nature. And community advocates have sounded the alarm about gentrification. 

A fully realized Gehry vision is many years away. But if it does come to pass, it would not only reimagine one of the West Coast’s most underused natural features but also impact Greater L.A. in a far broader sense, with implications for everything from civic identity and public health to the housing market and multifamily development.

What we’ve always done in parts of the county adjacent to the river is to turn our backs on the river — most of the homes have their backs to the river, the public spaces tend to have their backs to the river,” added Rendon, who’s become one of the project’s biggest champions. “It turns all of that around. I think the river itself becomes a focal point … it’s transformative in every way imaginable.”  

Frankly speaking

Gehry, whose firm did not respond to interview requests, will turn 94 in February. He has commanded the global stage for decades with international projects such as the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain and Panama City’s Biomuseo as well as local gems such as the Norton Residence in Venice Beach. But, if anything, he’s become only more productive in the twilight of his career. 

To the thrill of local officials and the small cohort of residents who attend weekly planning sessions, the nonagenarian’s slight frame and tousled white hair have been showing up at meetings about a $350 million mixed-use project that’s slated to reshape Santa Monica. In Downtown L.A., a pair of twin Gehry-designed luxury residential towers opened across from his Walt Disney Concert Hall in July. In Miami Beach, where Gehry spent some of his childhood, he’s working on a major redevelopment of the famed Deauville Hotel; in his native Toronto, he recently unveiled renderings of two downtown residential skyscrapers that would be among the city’s tallest buildings. 

What would I do?” he retorted last year when the New York Times asked if he might consider slowing down. “I enjoy this stuff.” 

The L.A. River project presents a different sort of challenge. 

The current “river” that contemporary Angelenos know and mostly ignore traces back to the 1930s. As the city’s population exploded, the region was also devastated by floods. The federal government commissioned the Army Corps of Engineers to channel the river, and for the next 20 years they did, turning what had been a natural and occasionally flood-prone waterway into, in the words of a recent lawsuit, “a 51-mile sewerage and stormwater conveyance channel to send floodwaters and wastewater discharges into the Pacific Ocean as fast as possible.”

 At least it’s quiet, noted Eric Sussman, a real estate professor at UCLA who sees the river as essentially a nonfactor in the local residential market. “Would you rather live right off the 405?”

Gehry — who, as his project’s critics point out, is not a landscape architect — settled on the elevated park system as a solution to the land-use problem created by the Army Corps decades ago: If the current form of most of the waterway — colorless, bleak, uninviting — cannot realistically be changed, why not overhaul the space by building on top of it? 

We studied the river upside and down and found that less than 2 percent of the time it runs very fast and is very dangerous,” he told the L.A. Times last year. “So, we thought if we can’t get rid of the concrete, maybe we can cover it.” 

Sign Up for the undefined Newsletter

His plan has been compared to the High Line, the acclaimed New York City pedestrian park that repurposed a mile and a half of elevated railroad track along Manhattan’s West Side. But the L.A. River plan is much grander: a fully connected greenway — running the entire channel from Canoga Park in the western San Fernando Valley to San Pedro Bay, where it drains into the Pacific — that doubles as the spine of a vast network of pedestrian, bike and equestrian trails. 

While some components of the county-approved framework, such as a Headwaters Pavilion in Canoga Park and the $150 million Southeast Los Angeles Cultural Center, a collection of galleries, plazas and performance spaces, could rise within a few years, the larger transformation could end up costing more than $20 billion and take decades to complete. 

It’s a vision that would affect several hundred square miles of the watershed, with potentially more than 100 infrastructure projects interspersed throughout a newly connected and accessible corridor. 

The L.A. River has had several big transformations over the years,” Gehry said in May, when the county released its final master plan. “So, let’s get going and let the L.A. River benefit millions of Californians.” 

Green gentrification

Gehry’s associates see the project as a chance for the architect to add a capstone to an already legendary career — even if he isn’t around to see it finished. 

He’s done almost everything you can possibly do as an architect,” said Bill Witte, head of Related Companies’ California arm, which partnered with Gehry on the Grand LA, the luxury  residential towers that opened in Downtown L.A. this year. “But if something successful would emerge from this — and it looks like it might — it’s an incredible legacy.”  

Since getting involved more than seven years ago with Mayor Eric Garcetti’s encouragement, Gehry has not been paid for his efforts. He has emphasized his desire to give something back to the region, with the focus on southeast L.A. County meant to tackle deep social and racial inequities. 

Rendon recounted an early meeting in Gehry’s Santa Monica studio where the politician, looking at a large aerial map of the river, pointed out a particular street in his district. Gehry quickly corrected him — the architect had virtually memorized the grid.

That was the depth to which he’d already been involved,” Rendon said.

But the enthusiasm hasn’t quelled the project’s powerful skeptics, some of whom were involved with river revitalization efforts long before Gehry and see him as an interloper whose involvement has blinded star-struck officials. 

The intentions are good,” socio-environmental researchers Jon Christensen and Becky Nicolaides wrote in an L.A. Times op-ed last year. “The potential for a tragic backfire is huge.” 

Their concerns centered on “green gentrification” — the chance that the fancy park project could end up displacing the very residents it’s intended to benefit. “We could pour millions of public dollars into a plan that looks impressive,” they added, “but drives out its target audience — communities that have found it hard just to survive in recent decades.”  

Meanwhile, a coalition of community and environmental groups argues that creating green space by building on the concrete channel is the wrong approach. The plan, these groups argue, should focus on removing concrete to renaturalize the watershed as much as possible. 

Gehry’s idea “seems to have bought in on, frankly, giving up on the river and doubling down on the mistakes of the past,” Bruce Reznik, executive director of L.A. Waterkeeper, told LAist this year. 

The gentrification concerns, experts say, are valid: The completion of the High Line did, in fact, spur a development boom in West Chelsea that sent home prices in the area soaring. Parts of historically affordable southeast L.A. County, such as Maywood, have seen a surge in home prices, which are likely to only increase further as other infrastructure projects, including an extension of Metro Rail service, near completion. Elsewhere in the county, some developers, most notably CIM Group, have been on aggressive buying sprees in low-income neighborhoods. 

But sources said that, at least for now, Gehry’s park vision — a plan that  includes a land bank intended to stave off real estate investors and whose completion feels very far off — is simply not on most builders’ radars. 

There’s going to be a lot of risk,” said Ryan Leaderman, a land-use attorney at Holland & Knight who pointed to both the pending litigation and potential zoning complications, especially because the project touches numerous jurisdictions. “No one’s going to lend money on something so speculative.”