Photograph by the Los Angeles Times, July 23, 1939

He looks out from the bridge as if he is gazing toward the future. Not
that this is what the photographer intended. Like The Times "Scout
Car," a new 1939 Oldsmobile, the unidentified fellow in the suit and
two-toned shoes was added as visual interest to an otherwise static
shot of Southern California’s first six-lane "superhighway" being built
from Los Angeles to Pasadena.

But what did our friend see when he looked away from the camera and
faced Orange Grove Avenue? The future of transportation? The
ultimate solution to the region’s intractable problems with congested
streets? Did he, or anyone, ever envision long lines of cars backed up
on the Orange Grove off-ramp at the evening rush hour? How about
freeway signs, shrouded in an attempt to protect them from graffiti?

Photograph by the Los Angeles Times

The year after that picture was taken, 1940 Rose Queen Sally Stanton,
aided by Gov. Culbert L. Olson, cut a ribbon just east of Fair Oaks in
South Pasadena, opening six "glass-smooth miles" of the Arroyo Seco
Parkway from the Figueroa tunnels to Glenarm Avenue. The era of the
Southern California freeway had begun.

Photograph by the Los Angeles Times

Cheryl Walker at the 1938 groundbreaking for the Arroyo Seco Parkway.

But our story doesn’t
begin with our friend on the bridge, nor with the Dec. 30, 1940,
ribbon-cutting. Nor does it open two years earlier, when 1938 Rose
Queen Cheryl Walker started a tractor at Sterling Place and Arroyo
Boulevard in South Pasadena to move the first mound of dirt for the
"speedway between Pasadena and Los Angeles."

As The Times noted
in March 1938, the groundbreaking was the culmination of a 20-year
effort. Indeed, even a little research reveals plans for a landscaped
route along the Arroyo Seco as early as 1907.

With the 70th anniversary of the groundbreaking a few months away,
and a large folder of Times archival photos on my desk, I’ve decided to
use the Pasadena Freeway as an instrument to examine the larger
question of traffic and transportation in the Los Angeles region. Is
traffic a new problem that can be easily fixed with a few more buses or
a couple of toll roads? Or, like the line from "Alice in Wonderland,"
has it taken all the running we can manage to stay in the same place
over the last century?

Like most Southern Californians, I have a personal relationship with
this subject. The Pasadena Freeway is literally my backyard and my
house was moved from Sterling Place to make way for the project. (And
yes, although I personally oppose the 710 extension, I’ll make every
attempt to write about it impartially).

More than that, with the exception of a few years when I lived in the
San Fernando Valley, I’ve used the Pasadena Freeway nearly every day
since 1988. As I tell my fellow commuters, driving a freeway is like
running a river; you learn where the rapids are and where you are
likely to get caught in an eddy. After seeing dozens of three-car
pileups in the same sharp curve, I have learned to slow down and say a
little prayer for people who speed on by.

Today, despite years of tinkering, the freeway is as outdated as our
friend’s two-toned shoes and his 1939 Oldsmobile, which had a
230-cubic-inch, six-cylinder engine, a 120-inch wheelbase and weighed a
bit more than 3,000 pounds. The builders could have never imagined a
dressed-out Hummer H2 with a 133-inch wheelbase and a 393-horsepower
V-8 that weighs as much as pair of 1939 Oldsmobiles. And yet the
highway continues to serve its intended function: moving cars between
Pasadena and downtown Los Angeles.

One might say that the freeway was conceived the first time someone
mounted a horse and rode to town. I don’t plan to go back quite that
far. Nor do I intend this to be a linear history of the Pasadena
Freeway. For that, I’ll post Patt Morrison’s marvelous 1990 nondupe on
the freeway’s 50th anniversary. Instead, over the next few months I’ll
be revisiting some of the locations in the old photos to see what
lessons we have learned–and perhaps what lessons have eluded us. (Note the absence of a center guardrail in the 1939 photo. A bloody lesson to be sure).

Photograph by Larry Harnisch / Los Angeles Times

And like the Pasadena Freeway, this will be built in chunks and strung
together, then modified as I see what works and what doesn’t.

Hope you enjoy the ride.

Email me