Hall featured in Grist story on Los Angeles River
Few weeks ago, Jessica Hall, a Los Angeles landscape architect who also co-authors the excellent L.A. Creek Freak blog, showed me around some of the little-known wetlands of the old Dominguez Slough, hidden in the South Bay cities of Torrance, Gardena, and Carson.
We visited sites like the Gardena Willows Wetland Preserve, a nine-acre wedge of thickly grown greenery sandwiched between a shopping center parking lot and a tract home development. From there, Hall showed me a couple other pieces of the old Slough — one that ran through the middle of a trailer park, and another that flowed in a marshy ditch between a golf course and an airfield for the Goodyear Blimp.
These patches of untended wildness were scraps of real estate left over from larger developments, but they still provide places where marsh plants like tule grass and willow trees can unobtrusively filter polluted water and provide wildlife habitat.
