Forgotten Places: Devil's Gate Dam
The gray wall of the Devil’s Gate Dam is a silent witness to long histories of water engineering, rocket science, and the practice of occult magic.
The northernmost point of the Arroyo Seco is where you can find the Devil’s Gate, which was the name for a narrow channel between two outcrops of rock in Pasadena. Christian settlers purportedly saw the profile of Satan himself in the jutting formations. Engineers saw a great location for a check dam. Rocket scientists with occult sensibilities foresaw the future of rocketry.
The year 1914 was when the future of Los Angeles as an entrepôt of the Pacific Rim came into focus. The U.S. had recently finished the Panama Canal and linked the Pacific to the Atlantic World. In anticipation of growing trade with Europe, Los Angeles business leaders lobbied the federal government to build the City an artificial harbor at San Pedro, near the mouth of the Los Angeles River. This project took years and opened to tremendous fanfare. But in 1914, severe winter storms caused floods that carried so much silt down the river from the foothills that the new harbor was rendered inoperable and had to be dredged. To prevent recurring floods from ever again damaging the Port of Los Angeles, check dams were placed at three key egresses for runoff and debris flows from the San Gabriel Mountains into the Los Angeles Basin. The first and largest of these dams was at the Devil’s Gate and opened in 1920. The flood control infrastructure gave Pasadena such confidence that a year later, the City commissioned the Rose Bowl in the floodplain due south of Devil’s Gate. For decades, the Rose Bowl was to rank as the largest stadium in the U.S. But this confidence was put to a test after the 1934 Brown Mountain Fire. The next winter’s storms sent soil from the foothills, stripped of vegetation, cascading down into the Devil’s Gate Reservoir. It was filled to capacity. The public immediately had to have workers empty the catch basin, at tremendous cost, to be ready for floods to come. Otherwise, the next debris flow would crest the dam, wash away the Rose Bowl, and once again fill the Port of Los Angeles - today the busiest facility of its sort in the Western Hemisphere - with silt.
In the 1930s, Devil’s Gate Reservoir became a meeting place for several rocket scientists at the California Institute of Technology. Informally, the physicists had been meeting with a hobbyist, Jack Parsons, who lived in a mansion down the Arroyo on Millionaires Row. Parsons seemed to think of himself as a sorcerer, and of technology like rockets as his magical props for the Twentieth Century. The reservoir probably lured him and his friends to come experiment with their inventions not only because it was a relatively secret, empty place but also because of the invocation of the devil in its name. Long after being expelled from the group for occult beliefs and dangerous behavior, Parsons was to die in an explosion involving a potion of fuels that he was using to call to earth a goddess named Babalon. A deity in the Thelemic pantheon, Babalon shared key attributes with the biblical book of Revelations’ “Whore of Babylon.” In the meantime, Parsons’ old friends had acquired the permission of the U.S. Army to found a facility called Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the Devil’s Gate Reservoir’s northern edge. This military installation produced intercontinental ballistic missiles: the MGM-5 Corporal and MGM-29 Sergeant. During the Cold War, they were armed with nuclear warheads and deployed to U.S.-occupied South Korea and West Germany, adjacent to the East Bloc and “Red” China. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory then became a civilian NASA facility in 1958 and has since specialized in the science of interplanetary exploration. The name Devil’s Gate remains the rare reminder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s origins in occult magic.
Legacies of these twin histories of rocketry and water engineering endure in debates about the maintenance of Devil’s Gate. For years after the Second World War, scientists dumped chemicals into the soils of the reservoir, and testing led to the listing of Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a Superfund site in the 1990s. The groundwater is contaminated with high perchlorate levels, which have been shown to have an inhibiting impact on the thyroid. Exposure can cause increases in blood pressure for adults and decreases in intelligence for fetuses and children. The Devil’s Gate Dam now helps contain these chemicals from uncontrolled flow into the Los Angeles Basin. The Dam still prevents debris flows, for now. Again, this function was reduced after 2009’s Station Fire, which led to the filling of the catch basin during the next winter’s storms. The public arranged for the emptying of all this earth, but an environmentalist group and neighboring homeowners in La Canada Flintridge intervened. First, the Audubon Society sued over the scale of the project and forced the county to reserve 14 acres of woodland for birds and their birder fans. Despite these setbacks, the county estimates Devil’s Gate Dam will be fully functional by the end of 2022. Meanwhile, ravers have pioneered another use for this space. During the pandemic, they organized an impromptu dance party for Halloween 2021: “…dance in the moonlight, open the portal, unleash hell!” Jack Parsons was resurrected at the Devil’s Gate.