Tunnels Deemed Dangerous, Dank, Dirty

Los Angeles residents have complained increasingly that pedestrian tunnels, built as walkways underneath freeways and busy streets, have become smelly, dangerous lairs for criminals, graffiti artists and vagrants, city public works officials say.

“At nighttime it’s impossible and in the daytime it’s pretty serious,” Jeannette Bell, 66, said of a tunnel under the San Diego Freeway at LeMay Street in Van Nuys. Her daughter and granddaughter had close calls with attackers in or near the tunnel in recent years, she said. “I’d rather walk two blocks out of my way than go in there.”

Because many people feel the same way, the city in recent years has sealed off more and more of Los Angeles’ 221 tunnels, 110 of which are pedestrian tunnels. Forty-two of those city tunnels are in the San Fernando Valley, according to the public works department.

Public works officials recommended that the city close the LeMay Street tunnel after receiving a petition last year from about 60 residents, spokesman Steve Nagai said. But the closure is on hold while the city determines the costs and decides whether the necessary funds are available, he said.

Bell said that, several years ago, a man pulled her 5-year-old granddaughter into the tunnel and removed her pants but apparently did not further molest her. The child’s mother, who lives across the street from the tunnel, once was approached in her garden by a man who came out of the tunnel and tried to attack her, Bell said, but the woman “screamed holy murder and the guy ran.”

In the coming months, public works officials plan to erect fences around three more such tunnels in Northeast Los Angeles. They include the debris-filled walkway underneath Fletcher Drive near Atwater Street. The others are on Figueroa Street at Arroyo Glen Street in Highland Park and at Glendale Boulevard near Atwater Avenue in Atwater. The closings come after more than a year of petitioning by neighbors.

Two years ago, the city fenced off a tunnel under the Ventura Freeway at Denny Street in North Hollywood after 29 residents complained, Nagai said. The leader of that petition drive, Lily La Cava, said that, although conditions have improved since the fence was installed, problems remain.

Before the fence was erected, the problem was gangs of youths who “would explode firecrackers in there or some kind of bomb, which would reverberate late at night,” La Cava said. “They would break glass in there, they would black out the lights, they would use it as a public toilet, and there was a mugging up there.

“Right now the unsightliness is disturbing. We do have pride of neighborhood. There are graffiti all over the outside of the tunnel,” she said.

“It’s not a pretty sight even with the temporary closure,” La Cava said. “I’ve called time and again and asked why it hasn’t been permanently sealed.”

The city is reviewing that request, but funding again is the problem, Nagai said, adding that his department can’t keep up with requests to close tunnels. Permanent closure requires City Council approval and leaves less money for maintenance, Nagai said. “The city has limited money and doesn’t like it spent on boarding up tunnels,” he said.

Usually the underground walkways are sealed off by locking a chain-link fence around each end, at a cost of about $13,000, or almost twice what it cost to construct one 60 years ago.

Sealing a tunnel permanently with concrete costs $48,000, Nagai said. About 20 of the city’s 110 pedestrian tunnels are now sealed with concrete.

Maintenance Funds Used

Nagai said the department must dip into a $300,000 annual “Bridge and Tunnel Maintenance Account” to seal tunnels. Other options include asking the City Council to appropriate money from two other accounts, but those requests move at a glacier-like pace, he said.

In many of the tunnels, graffiti cover the walls. The remains of discarded meals and excrement smear the floors. Empty beer bottles are scattered around.

In some places the city has installed mirrors so would-be users can determine whether anyone is lying in wait. Still, the underground crosswalks are mostly dark, dank and rank, despite weak electric lights that shine inside 24 hours a day.

It is Charlie L. Pitts’ job to fix those lights, which he said often are vandalized. Pitts is one of two electricians assigned by the public works department’s Bureau of Street Lighting to repair lights in pedestrian tunnels.

On a recent visit to a tunnel under the Golden State Freeway at Filmore Street in Pacoima, Pitts and colleague Frank Docter found all 18 of the light fixtures damaged. Besides the broken glass and the stench of urine, the tunnel’s walls were burned as if someone had doused them with gasoline and set them afire, he said.

It was the repairmen’s third visit to the tunnel in three months, Pitts said.

“One or two hours after the crews leave, the tunnels look just like they did before they were inspected,” said Morton H. Rosen, a public works engineer in charge of tunnel and bridge inspection in the city.

Shelter for Some

Vagrants have been known to use the tunnels as shelter, and some have discovered how to tap into the lights’ power source to plug in hot plates, Pitts said.

Most of those problems occur in downtown Los Angeles, but Pitts said that, in some San Fernando Valley tunnels, “I’ve seen evidence, such as mattresses and couches. I’ve seen people not really living there, but people coming through with a kind of curious look, as if we were interrupting their living quarters.”

Most tunnels were built in the 1920s and the 1930s with more than $1 million from bond issues approved by Los Angeles voters, according to published reports. A predecessor to the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, the Evening Herald, led the tunnel-building campaign to “save the lives of children.”

The city’s tunnels include some for horses, vehicles and miscellaneous users. There are conveyor tunnels, prisoner tunnels and private tunnels, said public works engineer Rosen. One system of tunnels burrows under UCLA, its walls covered with fraternity and sorority names, some dating back to the 1940s. A tunnel under El Pueblo de Los Angeles State Historic Park near Olvera Street was rumored to have been used by early Chinese residents to escape the Chinese Massacre of 1890. Another is an abandoned passageway last used more than 30 years ago by the Pacific Electric Red Car subway system.

Policy Adopted in 1968

Public works officials adopted a policy for pedestrian tunnel closures in 1968, after the Los Angeles Board of Education voiced concerns that some were unsafe, filthy places harboring criminal activity.

The Denny Street tunnel in North Hollywood was relatively safe when Lily La Cava moved to the neighborhood in 1964, she said. “It was nice,” she said. “I used to walk through it all the time to get to Riverside Drive.”

The tunnel started going bad eight or nine years ago, she said.

“I hated to see it close,” La Cava said. “But I decided I’ve got to do something about it or I’ve got to move.”

In the LeMay Street neighborhood in Van Nuys, sentiment is not unanimous for closing the tunnel there.

“It does smell down there, but every time I go there I’ve never seen anybody hanging around, “ said Jon Thompson, 25, who uses the tunnel as a jogging path. “It’s just nice to cut through instead of walking all the way around Victory.”

Times staff writer Gabe Fuentes contributed to this story.