AT A GLANCE
Why go?
Tucked just across the Los Angeles River from downtown, the Los Angeles River Center and Gardens feels like a walled garden discovered by accident. Behind ivy-covered walls and an arched wrought-iron gate, mission-style buildings enclose courtyards of fountains, roses and shade trees—an unexpected pocket of calm in the Cypress Park industrial flats. More than a pretty venue, it is a working headquarters for the groups leading the river's revival, and a quiet starting point for exploring one of Los Angeles's most fascinating waterways.↗↗
The Center sits near the confluence of the Los Angeles River and the Arroyo Seco, close to Elysian Park, on the former site of Lawry's California Center. Today its gardens, a self-guided river exhibit hall, and the small River Garden Park at its northern tip make it a place to learn about the river, picnic on the lawn, rest and repair a bicycle, or set out on foot toward the soft-bottomed Glendale Narrows.↗↗
A Saved Spanish-Style Compound
The grounds look as though they have stood for centuries, but the story behind them is a surprisingly modern one of civic rescue. This was once Lawry's California Center, an early corporate campus in Spanish revival style whose buildings date to the 1950s and 1970s and whose famous restaurant once drew hundreds of thousands of visitors a year. When the restaurant closed in the 1990s, the site was slated for demolition to make way for a hardware store; community advocates and local elected officials instead won a deal to preserve its best portions, which were purchased by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority.
