The Arroyo Seco — the narrow, winding canyon stretching from the San Gabriel Mountains down through Pasadena and Highland Park — has always been more than a “dry creek.” It is a living corridor of culture, connection, and transformation. For thousands of years it has been shaped by the people who walk through it, build beside it, or fight for it. Its history is layered and complicated. 

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In the late 19th century, Pasadena blossomed as a winter retreat, and the rugged beauty of the Arroyo began attracting a new wave of artists, architects, and writers. Drawn to the light and natural forms of the canyon, they helped spark a distinctly Californian branch of the Arts and Crafts Movement.

Craftsman homes — made of local stone and timber — appeared along the canyon slopes. Artists and craftsmen like Lummis, Judson, Batchelder , and the Greene brothers lived and worked here. Artists painted the soft sunsets. The California Art Club and a vibrant circle of painters, printers, and artisans flourished. This was the birth of “Arroyo Culture,” a world where creativity and landscape were inseparable.

Many of these early homes still stand in the Lower Arroyo Seco today, forming one of the most significant collections of Craftsman architecture in the country.

The Arroyo continued to nurture creative life well beyond the early Arts & Crafts era. Among the families linked to the area were the Brownes — including Clyde Browne, a prominent printer and supporter of Arroyo artists, and later his son Jackson Browne, who spent part of his childhood in nearby Highland Park. Their connection symbolizes the canyon’s ongoing role as a cradle of artistic vision and social conscience in Southern California.

In recent years, the Arroyo has become a place where Los Angeles’ most urgent challenges play out visibly. Along the lower flood channel, unhoused residents have built makeshift shelters — some remarkably crafted, with porches, steps, even gardens. These structures express the same instinct for home-making that has existed in the canyon for generations. But they also reflect systemic failures around housing, services, and equity.

At the same time, the neighborhoods above the canyon — particularly Highland Park and parts of Pasadena — face rapid gentrification. Craftsman homes once considered modest now sell for record prices. Long-time residents are priced out. The ecological health of the creek remains under pressure from development, recreation, and urban infrastructure.

The Arroyo today is a place where beauty and struggle are intertwined.

Long before the cities we know today, the Arroyo was part of the Gabrieleno/Tongva homeland. Sycamore groves, pools of seasonal water, bluffs covered in live oak and toyon supported daily life: gathering acorns, net-fishing, traveling between villages along the river basin. Part of their yearly tradition included controlled fires which cleared the brush in the river basin and helped the acorns to harden, preserving them.

Alongside the artistic energy, the Arroyo became a foothold for early civic activism. One of its most fascinating figures was Cora Scott Pond Pope — suffragist, educator, and later a real-estate developer. In the early 1900s she helped shape the Mt. Angelus and Garvanza neighborhoods, naming streets and stairways after women reformers she admired. Her work reminds us that the Arroyo’s history has always included people re-imagining how a community could live together.

In 1911, after a horseback ride through the Arroyo Seco, Teddy Roosevelt declared that "this arroyo would make one of the greatest parks in the world."  But it was mercurial.  It flooded, causing immense damage. So, in 1930’s as part of the new deal public works projects, it was “channelized” - walled in with stone and concrete.  And in 1940, the Arroyo Seco Parkway — one of America’s earliest freeways — cut directly through the canyon, forever changing its relationship to the communities around it.

Yet even as modern “progress” altered the landscape, residents and preservationists fought back. Thanks to their efforts, roughly a thousand acres of the Arroyo today remain protected as parks, trails, and natural habitat — one of the region’s most expansive stretches of open space.

Across all these eras, one truth remains: the Arroyo Seco is alive.
It remembers the Tongva homeland.
It remembers the artists who built a culture around light and landscape.
It remembers the suffragists, the preservationists, the musicians, the families who left their mark on the canyon’s winding edges.
And it remembers those who come seeking refuge, even when they have nowhere else to go.

The Arroyo Seco is an evolving story of Southern California, carried forward by every person who walks its banks. My immersive sculptural artwork Arroyo Catchment is an attempt to share the complexity of this place.