The cats first appeared on Memorial Day 1960 in the Glendale Narrows section of the Los Angeles River. Inspired by the triangular shaped hinges of the storm drains, a Burbank housewife with her three children painted cat faces onto the iron covers of a row of five culverts in an act she described as “facing, not defacing” government property. For years, the cats could be glimpsed from the northbound Golden State Freeway, inspiring East L.A. street artist Leo Limón to paint his own versions starting in the 1970s. Limón calls the L.A. River “the People’s River,” and he has continued creating cats across the cemented waterway’s 52-mile channel.
Some of my earliest memories of L.A.’s landscape are views from a school bus window. From first to fourth grade in the late-1970s/early 1980s, I traveled daily between the San Fernando Valley and East Los Angeles as part of an elementary school desegregation program my father had helped organize. My 27-mile commute followed the path of the river across what architectural historian Reyner Banham described as L.A.’s Plains of Id, the sprawling, characterless, cemented neighborhoods that fill the spaces between the city’s mountains and coastline.
The river cats were a pop of creativity that disrupted my afterschool meditations on this numbing sprawl, piercing the monotony of the bus ride. I remember distinctly wondering about their origin and inspiration, and I knew, even at that young age, that the cats were unsanctioned artistic incursions in the built environment. Like all great works of art, the river cats infiltrated my consciousness, gave me pause (no pun intended), and raised questions about art’s role in the world that I continue to address in my classes at LMU today.
Much of my thinking about Los Angeles has been shaped by my traveling through its spaces — my body in motion, and the city fragmented. The river cats, like so many other sites throughout the region, transform ordinary spaces into the extraordinary. This is why the cats are so important to me. Staring out those bus windows through mind-numbing traffic, they ignited my excitement for the unheroic, quotidian aspects of L.A., and I strive to practice an art history that memorializes the unmemorable and overlooked. Architect Robert Venturi theorized that cities are built by the people living in them. In the late 1930s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers cemented the L.A. River to prevent its frequent flooding, leaving behind the brutalist, concrete flood control channels I followed to and from elementary school. Over time, the river has been reclaimed by Angelenos like Leo Limón and so many others. I’ve come to realize that great art blurs the boundaries of our everyday lives, and it can be found, if you’re open to it, in so many unremarkable places of this city, by unbeknownst viewers, and at the most unexpected times.
