According to this article:

[L.A.] city officials are looking into revitalizing major stretches of the [L.A. River] - which, after all, was once a real river - into a world-class waterfront. The idea is to return some lost soul to the city's most neglected individual neighborhoods. It's also hoped that a vibrant waterway could provide an identity makeover to a city stuck with the image of being merely a cement-and-steel, desert boomtown...

The centerpiece of plans to reclaim some of that loss would be a 1-mile-long lake in the shadow of the downtown skyline, just a stone's throw from Dodger Stadium. The body of water would be the hub of a new waterfront with parks, trees, ball fields, houses, and retail stores where industrial warehouses stand now...

[The plan is to create] inflatable rubber dams at two ends of downtown - creating a semi-permanent 1-mile-long lake...

Time out. Isn't that downstream from the SuperFund site at the switchyards in Frogtown/Elysian Valley? It does rain here, right? And, the L.A. River is a drainage channel, right? Like, for the seepage from the SuperFund site.

Plus, has anyone taken a close look at all the junk in the L.A. River? Since I bike there occasionally, I get a fairly good look at it. Some of the "trees" in the river look like more like post-apocolyptic XMas trees they've got so much junk hanging on them. Not to mention the shopping carts. Who'd want to fish for anything in that water?

(The map of the river shown in the article is wrong as well. It shows the "headwaters" of the river starting somewhere in the Tujunga area of the San Gabriels, whereas I believe the river officially starts in Chatsworth).

I got this link from this blog.