Los Angeles Celebrates Lewis MacAdams

Los Angeles Times heralds a few exciting projects on the horizon focused on honoring poet and environmental activist Lewis MacAdams's contributions to the landscape of the city. First and foremost, MacAdams is hard at work on an oral history with help from historian Michael Block: "Each weekday morning Block uses an audio-recording machine, archival photos and documents to retrace MacAdams’ influence in making river restoration a credible issue for Southern California nature lovers and policymakers from former Mayor Tom Bradley to Mayor Eric Garcetti." From there: 

The memoir will be called “Poetry and Politics.” In another part of the city, in a nondescript San Pedro warehouse, another project celebrating the poet-environmentalist’s legacy nears completion.

Sculptor Eugene Daub is finishing a 7-foot-tall monument featuring MacAdams in stark relief over river flora and fauna including frogs, herons and fish. It will be unveiled Saturday at a celebration near the river’s edge at Marsh Park in Elysian Valley.

Daub’s previous works include a bronze statue in Washington, D.C., of Rosa Parks, whose arrest in 1955 for refusing to yield her seat to a white passenger led to a boycott of the Montgomery, Ala., bus system and helped spark the civil rights movement.

Bronze, Daub decided, was not quite the right material for a statue depicting MacAdams.

“Almost everything I do is in bronze,” he said. “But in this case, concrete seemed appropriate since Lewis has campaigned so hard for its removal from the L.A. River channel.”

Michael Atkins, a spokesman for Friends of the Los Angeles River, likes to say the monument is “concrete staring down concrete, and I’d put my money on Lewis’ stony face outlasting that conveyor belt for urban runoff.”

Read more at Los Angeles Times.