Freewaytopia How Freeways Shaped Los Angeles by Paul Haddad Book Read Online And Epub File Download
Overview: Freewaytopia: How Freeways Shaped Los Angeles explores how social, economic, political, and cultural demands created the web of freeways whose very form―futuristic, majestic, and progressive―perfectly exemplifies the City of Angels.
From the Arroyo Seco Parkway, which began construction during the Great Depression, to the Century Freeway, completed in 1993, author Paul Haddad provides an entertaining and thought-provoking history of the 527 miles of roadways that comprise the Los Angeles freeway system.
Each of Los Angeles’s twelve freeways receives its own chapter, and these are supplemented by “Off-Ramps”―sidebars that dish out pithy factoids about Botts’ Dots, SigAlerts, and all matter of freeway lexicon, such as why Southern Californians are the only people in the country who place the word “the” in front of their interstates, as in “the 5,” or “the 101.”
Freewaytopia How Freeways Shaped Los Angeles by Paul Haddad Book Read Online Chapter One
THE ARROYO SECO PARKWAY
1938–1953
State Route 110
Imagine stepping into a time machine that whisks you back to early 1940s Los Angeles. You climb into your Cadillac custom convertible—top-down, of course—and you and your squeeze rumble out of your Eastside bungalow for a Sunday drive. The sky’s a smog-free cobalt blue, palm trees are lolling in the breeze, and the radio is thrumming with Tommy Dorsey. Chocolate phosphates would be good about now. You hop on Figueroa for the twenty-minute drive over to Fair Oaks Pharmacy in South Pasadena.
But what’s this? It’s that new “stopless motorway” you’ve heard about! How did they make it stopless?
You give it a whirl. It’s beautiful. Lots of Beaux-Arts bridges and straightaways mixed with gentle curves. The wind nips your face as your speedometer touches new heights. What a rush! You pull up outside the soda fountain in eight minutes. You’ve seen the future. You vow never to drive on surface streets again.
It’s appropriate that Los Angeles’s love affair with freeways began with the loveliest of them all—the Arroyo Seco Parkway (aka the Pasadena Freeway, as it was known from 1954 to 2010). But you weren’t the only one who experienced their first freeway crush. So did a million and a half other Angelenos. And like any love affair that endures, familiarity breeds contempt. Sure, you changed, but so did your beloved freeway system. Traffic got between you. Finally, after decades of growing old together, you vow never to drive on a freeway again.
L.A. motorists’ conflicted relationship with freeways is rooted in their dependency. It’s simply hard to get around Los Angeles without them. But as a living relic that predates the nuclear age, L.A.’s oldest freeway gets a pass. Hating the Arroyo Seco Parkway is like hating your grandma. She is of a different epoch. Angelenos don’t just accept her anachronisms; they’ve come to treasure them. In the last few decades, the Arroyo Seco has nabbed as many accolades as Katharine Hepburn did Oscars, recognized as a California Historic Parkway, National Civil Engineering Landmark, National Scenic Byway, and National Register of Historic Places. All this, and somehow the freeway only seems to get better with age.
For that, we can hate her.
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The first proposed vehicular corridor from Pasadena to Downtown wasn’t a highway, parkway, or motorway. In fact, it had nothing to do with cars. It was a bikeway.
Fifty years before the Arroyo Seco Parkway opened, the modern-day bicycle was invented. These “safety bicycles” had air-filled tube tires and equal-sized wheels, which was far more practical than those penny-farthings with colossal front wheels you see in old pictures (usually with intrepid mustachioed men atop them). Men, women, and even children took to these new bikes, launching the Great Bicycle Craze of the 1890s.
Looking to rake in on this rage sweeping the country, an intrepid, mustachioed businessman named Horace Dobbins envisioned an elevated bicycle route along the Arroyo Seco riverbed. Horace secured six miles of right-of-way for his California Cycleway, running from the Green Hotel (now Castle Green) in Pasadena to Avenue 54 in Highland Park. Alas, only one and a quarter miles of his wooden cycleway ever got built. Pasadenians soured on the ten-cent toll just as the bike fad was fading. Though his venture failed, Dobbins’s right-of-way did establish a route for the future Arroyo Seco Parkway.
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Horace Dobbins’s California Cycleway around 1900, looking north toward Pasadena. Bicyclists appreciated its smooth surface and unobstructed elevated lane; however, many were put off by its tolls and having to lug heavy bikes up fifty feet of stairs.
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Inventor Joseph Fawkes’s experimental monorail—dubbed the Aerial Swallow—whisked along passengers from 1910 to 1912. But it never got farther than his own private orchard, and subsequently collected rust after Pacific Electric extended a railroad line to Burbank.
As the cycleway was being dismantled in the early 1900s, Germany opened the world’s first mass-transit suspended railway in Wuppertal, still in use today. This early monorail inspired stateside inventors, who claimed to have the answers to L.A.’s increasingly clogged streets. In 1907, Joseph W. Fawkes pitched a sixty-miles-per-hour monorail running from Burbank to Los Angeles. A few years later, Fletcher J. Felts tried to sell investors on a Pasadena-to-Downtown aerial line that could hold up to 100 passengers per pod. These contraptions never stood a chance, but clearly Fawkes and Felts were onto something. For the next hundred years, monorails would continue to intrigue us as a primary or supplemental mode of transportation alongside freeways. Expect them to pop up several more times in this book.
Meanwhile, Horace Dobbins took one more crack at an Arroyo Seco route. Back in his day, the Santa Fe Railroad took up to forty-five minutes to wend through the canyon (a trestle from 1896, now bearing MTA’s light rail line, still spans the freeway). Dobbins’s newly formed Pasadena Rapid Transit Company imagined an express train that could make the nine-mile trip from Pasadena to L.A. in twelve minutes—a direct path along his rights-of-way through a series of elevated tracks, tunnels, and open cuts into the hillside. But Pasadena citizens voted down a bond that would have authorized its construction in 1919. Once again, Dobbins had whiffed. If he had been paying closer attention, he’d have seen that trends were changing.
At the dawn of the Roaring Twenties, trains and streetcars were so 1910s. The County of Los Angeles had added 400,000 people in each of the previous two decades, reaching just under 1 million by 1920. As the city’s tentacles spread outward, automobiles became essential, whisking Angelenos to places where creaky trolleys couldn’t. Early on, of course, Henry Huntington’s Pacific Electric Red Cars contributed to L.A.’s sprawl. From Sierra Madre to Redondo Beach, the transportation and real estate mogul lured prospective homeowners by shrewdly laying down tracks to his newly created subdivisions—only to become a “victim” of his own success. Thanks to an oil boom and newfound affordability, car ownership skyrocketed. By the mid-1920s, there were 200,000 cars a day swarming Downtown, leading to one of L.A.’s most enduring features: the traffic jam. Meanwhile, Pasadena tallied 27,500 registered cars, one for every 2.4 citizens—the highest per-capita ownership rate in the world. Trolleys went from quaint to annoying to perilous, impeding the free flow of autos. Something had to give.
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Northeast view of the Arroyo Seco before construction of the parkway. Note the foundations in the lower-middle, where a Pacific Electric railway bridge was removed to clear a path. A small sign near the flood control channel reads: “PWA Federal Works Agency Public Works Administration.”
Enter the brain trust of Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., Harland Bartholomew, and Charles H. Cheney. In 1924, the city planners mapped out a vision for Los Angeles in their seventy-page Major Traffic Street Plan. Included in their study was a proposal for a parkway through the Arroyo Seco, which would “create the feeling of openness that comes only with plenty of width and by an ample enframement of trees, shrubs, and other plantations.” This wasn’t the first time someone had suggested a scenic motorway from Pasadena to Los Angeles along the “bed of the stream.” At the turn of the century, both the city of Pasadena and L.A.’s Municipal Art Commission fully subscribed to the City Beautiful movement, an ideal rooted in inspiring urban projects to promote mental and physical well-being. On November 4, 1924, voters approved legislation to build a parkway along the arroyo.
A MODEL FOR THE FUTURE
But what exactly was a parkway? That depended on who was doing the talking. Olmsted and company defined it as a functional high-speed road that elicited “a great deal of incidental creation and pleasure.” In this way, it was not all that different from the parkways being built in New York—divided-lane, limited-access superhighways with an emphasis on pleasure-driving.
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Other picturesque roads were also proposed in the early 1900s. The journal California Outlook pushed for a series of byways linking most of L.A.’s lake parks. One plan called for a Silver Lake Parkway connecting Silver Lake with Echo Park Lake, Westlake (now MacArthur) Park, Elysian Park, and Griffith Park. In 1914, Los Angeles mayor Henry Rose nixed the parkways after right-of-way acquisitions proved problematic.
Gradually, the term became interchangeable with “freeway.” Contrary to popular belief, a freeway is not a roadway free of tolls. The term is used to describe any restricted-access highway in which abutting property owners have no rights to impede the free movement of cars passing through (I know, dull, right?). Over time, freeway planners started to emphasize speed over ornamentation and mental welfare. Of course, the Arroyo Seco would have all of the above—thus, the swappable terms—although newspapers and mapmakers would continue to apply the “parkway” designation to other nascent freeways, regardless of their aesthetics.
Financing for this parkway/freeway—or “stopless motorway” as some still awkwardly called it—was established in 1923 when the state tacked on its first gas tax. (Initially, this tax was two cents a gallon. That’s right, the next time you curse California’s high gas prices, you can blame the Motor Vehicle Fuel License Tax Act.) Washington also kicked in capital. During the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration—part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal program—bankrolled the Figueroa Street (future freeway) viaduct over San Fernando Road and the Los Angeles River. And just as the Army Corps of Engineers cemented L.A.’s municipal waterways in the ’30s, federal agencies pumped $7 million into shoring up the Arroyo Seco. Despite its name, which translates to “dry stream,” the seasonal channel was prone to deadly flash floods. Without the government taming its banks, an Arroyo Seco Parkway would not be viable.
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On the left, construction of the southernmost Figueroa Street Tunnel, circa 1936. The ornate tunnels were converted to the Arroyo Seco’s northbound lanes when the freeway opened in late 1943.
Fortunately for head engineer Lyall Pardee and his team, the route’s proximity to the riverbed skirted dense neighborhoods. But in what would become a familiar pattern, progress meant uprooting some unfortunate souls. L.A. commissioners simply handed over 380 acres of city land near the Los Angeles River—the initial southern terminus—which included 125 buildings. Because they were not located in the more desirable woodsy area of the arroyo, officials felt they were not of considerable value.
Farther south, between the L.A. River and Sunset Boulevard, engineers scoped out a future expansion of the freeway through the well-established Elysian Park. Eighty-nine lots were condemned, affecting dozens of apartment units, some housing extended families of fifteen to twenty tenants. They were given twenty days to move after their buildings were acquired. If they didn’t like it, well, too bad; under new legislation, the state granted the Division of Highways the authority to purchase and demolish properties along a freeway’s path. And so began a pattern that would continue for decades where, as Pastor Stephen “Cue” Jn-Marie of Los Angeles’s Row Church related, “the linkages between highway construction and the removal of Black and brown folks was a frequent theme for those who stood to profit in state and federal road-building programs.”
Those whose homes were spared did not necessarily breathe a sigh of relief. Pasadena and South Pasadena were among the wealthiest enclaves in the nation, with lots of old-money families skeptical of projects for the public good, especially if the WPA was involved. They circulated petitions opposing the parkway, citing its inevitable dead-end streets, air and noise pollution, and general disruption caused by new construction. Mostly they worried about depreciating property values from motorists bypassing local businesses. Officials assured them that the opposite would happen. Based on similarly constructed motorways on the East Coast, citizens should expect increased land values and business tax revenues, as well as improved access to their neighborhoods. But would gains in revenue offset losses in property taxes from razed homes? Variations of this debate between locals and highway officials would flare up with each new project over the next half-century.
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Two ancient bridges spanning the parkway are the 750-foot long steel Santa Fe trestle (now a Metro line), built in 1896, and the York Avenue arch bridge, which was originally a wooden trolley viaduct. It was converted to concrete in 1912.
Nonetheless, enthusiasm for the Arroyo Seco Parkway ran high. Despite a nationwide depression, it represented the unlimited promise of Los Angeles, a chance to step out of the long shadow of its northern rival, San Francisco (which had completed the Golden Gate Bridge in 1933), with a signature engineering triumph of its own. Angelenos had already glimpsed the future with the Ramona Freeway, itself a sneak-peek of the Arroyo Seco Parkway.
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Before WWII, when a knock on your door by the military meant a death notification, few things struck more fear than a visit from a right-of-way agent. Frank Balfour was one of the state’s first, forming a union and becoming somewhat of a legend. His beat was Southern California, where, swooping down from Sacramento, he was referred to as the wind from the north.” He retired as chief of the Right-of-Way Department in 1960, having blown through neighborhoods abutting every L.A. metro freeway up to that time.
Opened in 1935, the Ramona stretched four miles east of Downtown along today’s I-10, transforming Ramona Boulevard into a roadway with all the hallmarks of a freeway: separate grades, sloped embankments, and bridges replacing cross-traffic. But the Ramona traversed an industrial strip. The Arroyo Seco would add beauty to the mix and be built from scratch. “There isn’t anything like it in the country!” enthused Justus Craemer, an engineer from the Department of Public Works.
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Freeway crusaders were equally vocal, distributing leaflets entitled “FREEWAY TRUTH” that extolled their economic benefits. These groups pushed for a northern extension that would eventually become the Foothill Freeway (I-210), but their proposal was roundly rejected by voters in 1937. By the way, the Arroyo Seco Parkway will never reach the 210 Freeway, because it does not meet federal interstate standards. This is why the 710 (which is an interstate) was always the preferred route to close the infamous freeway gap to the 210.
As the parkway neared completion, Craemer invited members of the press on drive-alongs to pump up the public. One such passenger was the Los Angeles Times’ Ed Ainsworth, who hosted a column called “Along El Camino Real.” In an entry from March 29, 1936, Ainsworth turned Wordsworth, waxing poetic about what he saw. “The road scoots up the channel like a scared jackrabbit … a beautiful drive between oaks and sycamores most of the way,” he said. “A marvel of ingenuity … the model for the future.” Lanes and ramps were banked to counteract the centrifugal forces of fast-moving vehicles. Ainsworth particularly liked the planting of shrubs along the center median to shield oncoming headlights, and the lack of intersections that “eliminate all the monkey business of stop signs, turns, and traffic jams.” It was a no-brainer to place more parkways throughout the region. “If they don’t grab the wings this super-road provides they ought to go back to riding in a surrey.”
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Signage for the Ramona Freeway at a junction southeast of Downtown Los Angeles. Two miles opened to traffic in 1935, emanating eastbound from Aliso Street. Its route tracked portions of US 99 (now I-5) and US 60 and US 70 (now I-10), which became the San Bernardino Freeway. At that point, the nearby Pomona Freeway claimed the “60” designation as a State Route.
Starting in December 1938, two years before the official dedication, officials began to open small sections of the Arroyo Seco to motorists. As a real-time petri dish, engineers could now see what was working … and what wasn’t. The good news: traffic volume was higher than expected. The bad news: the parkway, built to safely accommodate 27,000 cars per day, was already outdated. To help the situation, shoulders were converted into travel lanes. (Of course, this eliminated shoulders entirely … a void that continues to this day.) And those beautifully manicured shrubs along the median? They quickly became weeds, growing into the roadway.
The lanes were another quirk. To (subconsciously?) discourage drivers from straying into other lanes, engineers used two different shades of concrete, alternating the colors. Thus, each three-lane direction had black concrete lanes on the left and right and a white concrete lane down the middle. Lane coloring was never proven to reduce accidents, and the practice was nixed for future freeway surfaces. Even the Arroyo Seco went all gray in short order.
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Early lanes of the parkway resembled an Oreo cookie—a white inner lane sandwiched by two dark ones—in an attempt to dissuade lane-switching. A far bigger problem was the lack of a center guardrail in exchange for ornamental shrubs—a custom that lasted well into the 1960s on some freeways.
LET THERE BE TRAFFIC
“It takes courage to do a thing for the first time.” The proclamation was made by Governor Culbert Olson on December 30, 1940, during the official coronation of the Arroyo Seco Parkway. The “first” was the first urban limited-access, grade-separated roadway in the United States—an honest-to-goodness freeway, minus the annoying tolls of Moses’s parkways.
In some clever marketing, the freeway’s debut was moved up to capitalize on all the media already in town for Pasadena’s annual Rose Parade and Rose Bowl. Los Angeles was no stranger to splashy openings, of course. One month earlier, two dozen klieg lights lit up the night sky around the Carthay Circle Theatre for the red-carpet premiere of The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin’s much-anticipated first talkie. But excitement for L.A.’s revolutionary roadway was even greater. It directly affected people’s lives. Officials from Los Angeles and Pasadena felt it their duty to put on a show that met the moment.
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One idea that never got off the ground: coin-operated gas pumps. Planners imagined a series of them alongside the freeway, easily accessible for stalled cars and motorists with a quarter or two in their pockets. Much of the money would have gone toward freeway maintenance. Later, more modern roadside gas stations did take off on East Coast expressways and turnpikes.
The day began with a ceremony at Los Angeles City Hall, from which a caravan of VIPs motored to the freeway’s entrance at the Figueroa Street viaduct. Clearly there were some first-day jitters. Cruising along at the speed limit of forty-five miles per hour, the procession somehow managed to get into three fender benders. Eventually, they made it to the freeway’s end at Glenarm Street in Pasadena, where 1,500 spectators gave them a hero’s welcome. Joined by county, state, and federal politicos, Governor Olson kicked things off by introducing 1941’s Queen of the Tournament of Roses—Sally Stanton, a seventeen-year-old, apple-cheeked darling wrapped in a ring of roses and a fur-collared coat.
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Throngs of the freeway-curious take in the dedication of the Arroyo Seco Parkway on December 30, 1940. Governor Culbert L. Olson praised not only its utilitarian value, but also its beautiful features that “delight the eye of the artist.”
Though she didn’t realize it at the time, Stanton was a pioneer. No dedication over the following decades was worth its weight unless it had a beauty queen (or several of them) flanked by a contingent of older white male officials to christen a new freeway. At one point, a policeman admonished an unknown man for touching the Queen. Turns out, he was her father.
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Everything’s coming up roses for Rose Queen Sally Stanton and her assemblage at the ribbon-cutting. They include, two men to her right, Highway Commissioner Amerigo Bozzani and, to her immediate left, Governor Culbert L. Olson, as well as assorted highway patrolmen.
The pageantry rolled out like an elaborately staged play. Balloons, flag-raisings, military bands, and color guards struck up a celebratory tone. The Goodyear Blimp circled the sky, capturing images for the state’s promotional film, California Highways. And then, a turn toward solemnity. Chief Tahachwee, in full American Indian headdress garb, blessed the freeway on behalf of his Kawei forefathers who used to roam the land. This had become routine for the chief. During the soft opening in 1938, he had transferred his tribe’s interest to the state’s highway department with a ritual that included a drum circle and the sharing of peace pipes. Cringeworthy as it seems now, these showy acts of inclusiveness played into audiences’ romanticized views of simple savages in an ever-changing world while also assuaging white guilt.
Properly sanctified, the freeway was now ready for its ribbon-cutting. Sally Stanton was granted the honors. In a photograph blazoned across newspapers, she struggles to snip the red silk ribbon with giant scissors. After Governor Olson pulled on the ribbon to make it tauter, the Rose Queen finally succeeded. Olson then waved at highway patrol chief E. Raymond Cato, who led the first civilian motorists down the southbound ramp onto the black-and-white stripes of the Arroyo Seco Parkway—a six-mile journey that could be made, as one publication marveled, in the time it takes to smoke a cigarette.
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Southern Californians have cycled through various names for the state’s native peoples. The “Kawei” lexicon for tribe members in the Pasadena and South Pasadena regions was phased out long ago. Today they are recognized as a group of Tongva Native Americans known locally as the Hahamongna—also the name of the former settlement-turned-parkland near the confluence of the 210 and 134 Freeways.
The entire project came in at the bargain-basement price of $5,050,000. Only 10 percent went toward rights-of-way acquisitions, an extremely low percentage compared to future freeways as the Southland got more built up. The governor watched the traffic disappear toward the City of Angels as if seeing a kid off to college. “This is, to say the least, most extraordinary,” he said. “The dream has been a long time dreaming.”
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Sally Stanton and Governor Olson. Stanton would go on to participate in various Arroyo Seco ribbon-cuttings over the next fifty years.
The parkway’s debut got surprisingly scant attention outside of California; it was, at best, a sidebar to the bigger story of Stanford’s win over Nebraska in the Rose Bowl. But it did impress C. E. McBride of the Kansas City Star, who correctly predicted that the freeway “is more than likely to be copied in one way or another by all our great cities as the ever-increasing traffic problems come up for solution.” He particularly admired the freeway’s remove from urban degeneration: “Not a store, not a hotdog stand, not a gaudy billboard along the way.” Indeed, the Arroyo Seco is consistently cited as the genesis for future freeways in America and a model for urban interstates.
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In a familiar charade, Chief Tahachwee shares a peace pipe with Director of Public Works Frank W. Clark at the December 30, 1940 ceremony. Off-camera, the beating of tribal drums signified the formal transfer of property rights from the Kawei Indians to the state of California.
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Jutting off to the right, the two-way North Figueroa Street Bridge would be integrated into the 110’s northbound lanes; the lanes curving left became the ramp to I-5. Before the parkway was extended southward, this chaotic intersection with Riverside Drive—now bridged by the southbound lanes—was among the city’s most dangerous.
Engineers had little time to savor their triumph. The egress of screaming southbound traffic onto surface streets resulted in multiple pile-ups at the intersection of Figueroa Street and Riverside Drive. The solution was a 2.2-mile southerly extension to Downtown Los Angeles. America’s involvement in World War II actually hastened this stretch. Due to the roadway’s potential to “rapidly transport soldiers and equipment,” the War Department arranged for immediate federal financing. On the downside, other freeway plans throughout the region were indefinitely mothballed as labor and raw materials were funneled into the war effort.
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An early cross-section sketch of the Four Level commissioned by the Department of Public Works. It rendered the Hollywood-Santa Ana Freeway on the top level and the Arroyo Seco-Harbor Freeway on the third level. (The route numbers are their old state designations.) The other two levels contain transition ramps.
Fortuitously, gas taxes and L.A.’s treasury paid for the rest of the Arroyo Seco’s $4 million spur. Its four Art Deco-flavored tunnels through Elysian Park were already built in the 1930s. Initially a conduit for two-way traffic on Figueroa, they were converted to northbound freeway lanes. Engineers considered tunnels for the southbound lanes as well, but opted for an open-cut approach through the hillside instead, saving $1 million. A second bridge over the L.A. River and a grade separation with Riverside Drive were also built.
On December 30, 1943—once again, just before New Year’s to accommodate the crush of cars to Pasadena—the southern leg of the parkway opened to the public. It stopped near College Street, about a half-mile north of Downtown’s future Four Level Interchange. There was a different “feel” about this segment of the Arroyo Seco. According to the Historic American Engineering Record, “the urgency of the extension’s construction and the dearth of ‘beautification’ associated with it relative to the initial development … helped transform this part of the Arroyo Seco ‘Parkway’ into something that would later more closely resemble the freeways of the Los Angeles metropolitan freeway system.” It represented, in essence, the passing of the parkway, both in practice and in parlance. In a few short years, the original Arroyo Seco Parkway would come to resemble, as L.A. Times columnist Patt Morrison later mused, “a museum piece, dated as a zoot suit, narrow, awkward, pokey.”
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Bird’s eye view of the Arroyo Seco Parkway cutting through Elysian Park, including two of the four tunnels for northbound traffic. The exposed southbound lanes are on the left.
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The California Highway Commission—referenced a lot in this book—is now called the California Transportation Commission. Either way, commission members are appointed by the governor and oversee the funding and general management of California’s highway system. Think of them as the boss of the engineers who work at the Division of Highway (and later, Caltrans).
The contrast became even starker upon the inauguration of the so-called Four Level in 1949. Recommended by engineer W. H. Irish, it was the first interchange in the world with four stacked roadways (detailed more in the Hollywood Freeway chapter). It would not attain full operating capacity until September 22, 1953, when the Arroyo Seco Freeway (as it was alternately called) finally plugged into its web of thirty-two lanes. Accordingly, this date marked the Arroyo Seco’s official completion. Final length: 8.2 miles. More importantly, it now provided a seamless transition to the Harbor Freeway through Downtown, as well as ramps to the Hollywood and Santa Ana Freeways.
For the sake of clarity, one year later the California Highway Commission changed the names of several finished and unfinished freeways to reflect their destinations. The Ramona became the San Bernardino, the Sepulveda became the San Diego, and the Los Angeles River (Freeway) became the Long Beach. This is also when the Arroyo Seco Parkway became the Pasadena Free-way—a moniker it would carry for over half a century. The whitewashing of the past was now complete.
Of course, tapping into L.A.’s expansive freeway grid exposed the shortcomings of the Pasadena Freeway’s original six-mile country ramble. To keep up with the Joneses, the freeway’s max speed was raised from forty-five to fifty-five miles per hour. Lanes were widened to twelve feet. Though there were still no shoulders, fifty emergency turnouts—modest pockets every few hundred feet—were added. One peculiarity that persists to this day are the freeway’s shockingly short access ramps. Endearing as they are, they were already sorely antiquated by the mid-’50s, leading to several fatal accidents. Because they couldn’t be lengthened, engineers added stop signs to the on-ramps, forcing motorists to achieve freeway speeds with virtually no runway and zero momentum.
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One thing that has fortunately survived after all these years is the “City of South Pasadena” sign, made out of stones and positioned on the south-facing berm of the Arroyo Drive Bridge. Dating to the 1930s, the sign’s flat rocks were extracted from the Arroyo Seco’s watershed.
As for its plant-lined, rolled-curb median, it was toothless in stopping motorists from careening into opposing traffic. After several grisly wrecks, the Pasadena, like other freeways, eventually converted to real barriers.
ARTWORK ZONE AHEAD
Perhaps because it was the first freeway, the Arroyo Seco/Pasadena Freeway gets outsize attention every time it reaches a major anniversary. Each milestone offers an opportunity to measure this engineering case study against the passage of time. Its twentieth anniversary—celebrated on December 30, 1960, on the Sunset Boulevard overpass—was a strange brew of nostalgia and space-age aspirations. Former Rose Queen Sally Stanton was brought back to cut another ribbon and present a plaque. Now married with kids, she would go on to have a rewarding career as a mathematician at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, though she would always be known as the First Lady of ribbon-cuttings. She continued to grace anniversaries with her presence, including the freeway’s fiftieth.
State bureaucrats used the twenty-year anniversary event to herald the road’s safety and efficiency. According to Harrison R. Baker—a former member of the California Highway Commission—350 million vehicles had traveled the freeway between 1940 and 1960. Though it handled “three times the number of cars at twice the average speed” as surface streets, its accident rate was “five times as favorable.” He estimated that the freeway had saved $54 million in costs related to gasoline, maintenance, time savings, and accident reduction. He also claimed that one life per year was saved for every mile of freeway built, a figure that highway officials liked to float.
The next twenty years would be even more critical. A roadway equipped to handle a daily flow of 27,000 cars was now clogged with 70,000 and rising fast. How would state officials keep the aging matron from complete obsolescence? Baker sparked a conversation that carried well into the mid-1960s, an “anything goes” era that envisioned freeways over the ocean and as fifteen-mile tunnels. In 1965, the Pasadena-Independent outlined some of the more outlandish proposals, most of them centered on renting “space rights” over the Pasadena Freeway. Because it was largely a sunken route, one could imagine all sorts of uses for covering its six lanes—parkland, parking lots, housing tracts, landing pads for helicopters, even runways for small planes. Interestingly, none of these ideas to “put a lid on it” addressed the central issue—traffic—and seemed better suited to The Jetsons, which just may be where they came from.
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These stats were produced by the California Highway Commission and appeared in the Jan./Feb. 1960 edition of California Highways and Public Works. Traffic studies from the publication were often disseminated to the public to tout the benefits and relative safety of freeways vis-Ã -vis surface streets.
Meanwhile, the mid-’60s recalibration of route numbers across California included the Pasadena Freeway. Since its opening, portions of the route went by various labels, including U.S. 66, U.S. 99, U.S. 6, and U.S. 11. In 1964, the state reassigned Route 66 (yes, that Route 66) to the Pasadena/South Pas portion of the freeway. It then transferred State Route 11 from Figueroa Street (now tagged with Route 66 Alternate) to the strip south of the Figueroa viaduct. Just to add to the confusion, guidebooks of that period often designated the entire length of the Harbor and Pasadena Freeways as SR-11, a numerical appellation that would remain fixed until 1981. When the Harbor was classified as a federal interstate, it switched to I-110. To keep the numbering consistent from San Pedro to Pasadena, the Pasadena Freeway—still a state route—became SR-110. The number 110 began to appear on green freeway signs, outlined by the familiar spade symbol, and for twenty years, no one was confused about it.
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This “ghost ramp” is the original Fair Oaks Avenue off-ramp off the southbound lanes. The ramp was virtually hidden around a blind curve and caused safety concerns; the Fair Oaks off-ramp was subsequently relocated half-a-mile north, before the curve.
Then, on the morning of August 5, 2001, a California Department of Transportation worker—decked out in a company-issued orange vest and white helmet—clambered onto the catwalk of a freeway sign. His assignment: to alleviate confusion pertaining to the northbound 110’s overhead freeway sign near Downtown’s 4th Street. The problem wasn’t what was on the sign; it was what wasn’t.
The sign directed motorists to Pasadena via the 110 Freeway, with three arrows pointing to the three left lanes. The Caltrans employee, working alone, affixed two metallic plates above the far-left arrow: an Interstate 5 shield and, above that, the word “NORTH.” Driving through one day, I remember noticing the change and thinking how thoughtful it was that Caltrans finally added “5 North” to let people know they needed to take the 110 to get to the 5 North cutoff.
Fast-forward nine months, when a local newspaper published a scoop that had even Caltrans scratching their heads. The sign installer did not work for the agency and was not authorized to carry out any such job. In fact, he was an imposter. A trespasser. A guerrilla artist. As video from that day later revealed, he could be seen driving up to the freeway in a truck whose door sign cleverly advertised “Aesthetic De Construction.”
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The altered freeway sign that bore artist Richard Ankrom’s call to “guerrilla public service.” The “North 5” plates stood for nine years before Caltrans unveiled an updated sign that preserved Ankrom’s contribution.
His name was Richard Ankrom. The sandy-haired, lantern-jawed artist was inspired to amend the sign based on his own disorienting experience navigating this stretch of freeway through Downtown. He saw his stunt as a public service. Like a skilled jewel thief, Ankrom had planned his sleight-of-hand for months. He carefully studied the Caltrans road signs—specs, color palettes, types of sheet metal—then manufactured and painted the signs himself. A small video crew documented his caper. Finally one of the crew members, unable to keep the secret any longer, leaked the truth to the Downtown News. The story went national, showing up on Today and Good Morning America, and Ankrom was hailed a freeway folk hero.
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Horace Dobbins never did finish his California Cycleway from Pasadena to DTLA. But in 1995—about one hundred years later—an avid bicyclist named Dennis Crowley vowed to finish it for him. After the Metropolitan Transportation Authority rejected his plan for a designated bike path, Crowley hit up private investors to come up with the estimated $10 million needed. He even got then-mayor Richard Riordan interested. The plan fizzled, but expect another push to revive the Cycleway in 2095.
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The Arroyo Seco Parkway’s “modern” segment, west of the 5 Freeway, facing the Downtown skyline. A classic L.A. snapshot, encompassing multiple eras of progress and the coexistence of urban and natural environments.
How did Caltrans respond? After inspecting Ankrom’s handiwork, they deemed it up to safety standards and allowed his sign to stand, with no charges filed. What else could they do? They had been duped themselves. In fact, Ankrom’s addition was validated in 2010 when, as part of routine maintenance, Caltrans replaced the sign with a more reflective one that prominently included “5 North” alongside “110 Pasadena” on the green field. As for Ankrom, he continued to commit stealthy acts of public-service art, always waiting seven years before confessing to any mischief. As he told ABC7 News, “I have to wait for the statute of limitations so I don’t go to jail.”
WHAT’S OLD IS NEW
At the start of the 2010s, everyday life was suddenly suffused with nostalgia. Recession-reeling Americans found comfort in artisanal gin, retro shows like Mad Men, and anything with Betty White, who popped up in Super Bowl ads and SNL. Vinyl records continued their improbable comeback, and The Walking Dead—a visceral throwback to George A. Romero’s zombie movies—exploded into our living rooms.
Improbably, the Arroyo Seco Parkway also came back from the dead, part of a re-brand by Caltrans that kicked the Pasadena Freeway to the curb after fifty-six years. Preservationists rejoiced at the freeway’s reversion to its original name, which really sank in when all the signs were swapped out in the summer of 2010. Our desire to reconnect with the past is often more instinctual than logical, and the 110 was no different. For most of my lifetime, the Pasadena Freeway was maligned. But the Arroyo Seco Parkway? That sounded like a return to romance.
If Caltrans made one mistake, it was that they simultaneously announced a $17 million overhaul to make the freeway safer. Suddenly, motorists realized they were attached to all the things that were changing. Letter-writers to the L.A. Times decried plans for “more attractive walls” (what was wrong with the old ugly ones?), replica lampposts (they aren’t authentic enough), and concrete center dividers (bring back the steel and wood ones!). “The Arroyo Seco Parkways is a real gem,” said Paul Daniel Marriott, the author of Saving Historic Roads. “I don’t think people fully appreciate that yet and I think they’ll regret the damage that’s being caused.” Even replacing the original slanted curb along the median drew howls of protest, though others didn’t see what all the fuss was about. “The name should stay the same,” a younger motorist told the Times. “We know freeways by their numbers. Our parents were the ones who knew them by name.”
Fortunately, most Angelenos recognize the uniqueness of L.A.’s first freeway—the only freeway in the United States that fulfills the “scenic, natural, historic, cultural, archeological, and recreational qualities” of a National Scenic Byway. Despite the Arroyo Seco Parkway’s years, it has weathered old age well. Engineers attribute its good bones to decades without trucks (banned for safety reasons) and the fact that it ends in a residential neighborhood, which discourages through traffic. Indeed, the average number of daily cars seems to have leveled out at around 125,000.
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June 18, 2003: More than 2,000 pedestrians and 3,500 cyclists take over the empty SR-110 Freeway during Arroyo Fest.
In 2020, plans were to eliminate traffic entirely—at least for a day. An organization called Active San Gabriel Valley got permission to shut down the freeway to vehicles to stage Arroyo Fest—a sequel to the first wildly successful festival in 2003. As with that event, thousands of people, mostly millennials, embraced the rare opportunity to pound the parkway on foot and admire the road’s fanciful features up close. The COVID-19 pandemic postponed it, but as appreciation for urban landmarks grows, you can be sure it will be back.
That same year, my hard-to-impress sixteen-year-old daughter’s first experience behind the wheel on the Arroyo Seco Parkway prompted unexpected glee. “It’s so cute,” she said. “It’s like driving on a miniature freeway.” Her embrace of its quirks recalled the rush of adrenaline I first felt as a newly licensed sixteen-year-old leaving games at Dodger Stadium by the former Figueroa tunnels. The whole ritual of negotiating a torrent of traffic from the Solano Avenue on-ramp—from a dead stop, between two freeway tunnels, with virtually no runway—was like blasting off an aircraft carrier. I’m not as fearless as I was then, but the thrill of the old road is always there in ways rarely found on other roadways, perhaps akin to what early motorists discovered themselves while sampling L.A.’s first freeway.
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