Signal Tribune Newspaper

BY NICK DIAMANTIDES
Staff Writer

In the 1800s, the land area now known as Long Beach contained natural features that seem hard to imagine in the present day. The area had several free-flowing creeks, two meandering rivers that changed their courses periodically, marshlands along the coastal plains, thick groves of willow trees, and lots of wide open space. All of that was eventually buried under the residential, industrial and commercial development that now covers almost every square inch of the city.
At last Thursday’s Wrigley Area Neighborhood Alliance (WANA) monthly meeting, Larry Rich, sustainability coordinator for the City of Long Beach, described how the area once looked and why it had changed.
Rich noted that understanding the city’s past geographical features was key to formulating a strategy for making Long Beach a sustainable city. Rich had served as a city planner for about a decade but a few months ago was appointed to his current position. “I am one of the three staff people that is administering the new sustainable city commission,” he said. The commission meets on the fourth Thursday of each month at Long Beach City Hall Council Chambers.
According to Rich, the commission’s goal is to come up with ways to clean up water and air pollution and to develop ways to make activities of the public and private sectors more environmentally friendly. “It’s all about the things we can do to green the city so that we can maintain a decent quality of life into the future,” he said. “My presentation tonight is a historic presentation meant to impart a sense of place because part of sustainability is knowing about the history of your city.”
Rich used a computer program known as Geographic Information Systems to project maps of the past and present onto a screen, enabling him to describe what neighborhoods and commercial districts now occupy the sites where the creeks used to flow and the willows used to rustle with the wind. “This is an attempt to describe Long Beach as a whole, how it developed over time and why things are where they are today,” Rich said. During his presentation he used maps from the 1800s and the current era. “When we think about reintroducing nature into the city, it is helpful to understand what was here before,” he explained.
The Long Beach shoreline used to be a simple crescent, but in the early 1900s marshlands were filled in and land areas were extended into the ocean to develop the port of Long Beach and the Alamitos Bay marina, Rich noted. The L.A. and San Gabriel Rivers, which had marshlands at their mouths, were seen as obstacles to real estate development, according to Rich. “Originally these rivers wandered all over the entire Los Angeles basin,” he said. “The mouths of the rivers were the places where new land was being built.”
He said that because the rivers often changed courses, building homes and businesses in their flood plains was a risky business. In addition, because they were continually depositing sediment, developers of the port and the marina wanted to divert and control them. Eventually both rivers were encased in concrete channels extending from the ocean to the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. The city’s creeks were likewise either simply filled in with dirt or encased in concrete channels that enabled real estate development along the areas that were once their banks.
Native American villages once occupied the areas adjacent to the estuaries along the mouths of the rivers, but those were displaced by Spanish settlers. Later, Rich explained, all the land in what is now L.A. and Orange counties was divided into land grants encompassing hundreds of square miles that were given to certain favored individuals by the king of Spain and then divided into smaller but still huge tracts of land passed on to the heirs of the original Spanish landowners. The smaller tracts in what is now Long Beach became Ranchos Los Cerritos and Los Alamitos, which were eventually bought by members of the Bixby family.
Starting in the late 1800s, the Bixbys began selling sections of the ranchos, developed as small farms and later residential neighborhoods and business districts.
In the 1880s, Long Beach was called the American Colony and was primarily made up of 20-acre farm plots and a small residential area known as Wilmore City. Later, as more and more people purchased land and built homes and businesses, the natural features of the area began to disappear one by one, Rich said.
He explained that Willow Street was so named because it once had miles of willow groves growing on both sides of a creek that flowed there. Spring Street got its name from the artesian springs located in various locations adjacent to it. He noted that one of the oldest roads in the city is Anaheim Street, which connected the ports of San Pedro and Wilmington to the Anaheim Colony (Now the City of Anaheim) where German immigrants maintained vineyards. “Anaheim Street dates to the 1850s,” he said.
The area once contained a fairly large lake, which was later greatly reduced in size and became part of Lakewood County Club, Rich noted. A slough and several seasonal creeks also disappeared from the region’s geography as oil wells, refineries, railroads, highways, factories and residential neighborhoods took over the areas where nature once thrived.

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