Nostalgia on Fast Track

The old Pacific Electric Red Car trolleys moved like ghost trains through Lance Bird’s memory as he searched for a design for new light rail line stations.

“I recall the flash of red as the last of the trolleys rattled by at a grade crossing, while motorists fumed at the inconvenience,” he said. “I remember the mournful cry of the Red Cars’ air horns. . . . And I remember the distinctive Red Car logo, a circle with wings painted on the front of the trolley, that seemed to fly ahead free as an eagle.”

Although the last Red Car rolled into retirement in 1953, such images were very much with architect Bird, 50, as he sat down to help design the eight new stations of light-rail line that now are under construction.

Due to open this summer, the 20-mile Long Beach-Los Angeles “Blue Line” will tie into the Metro Rail subway system at 7th and Flower streets and with a “Green Line” now being built to link Norwalk and El Segundo.

Eight of the Blue Line’s 22 stations are in Long Beach, from Willow Street south to the central business district. The other stops cross the boundaries of several communities, including Compton and Watts in Los Angeles, and sections of unincorporated Los Angeles County, areas in Willowbrook, Florence and Walnut Park.

Architect Bird’s La Canada Design Group Inc. collaborated with James Goodell and Associates to design the eight stations for the City of Long Beach and the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission.

The eight Long Beach stations derive their style from the popular 1930s Streamline Moderne architecture common in the city’s older sections.

The stations are narrow and long to match the 189-foot length of the modern, two-car trains in the county’s new light-rail systems. The platforms are roofed with curving, Streamline Moderne-inspired white painted steel canopies.

“The way the canopies mimic the Pacific Electric logo came about unconsciously,” Bird said. “It was only after I saw them being built that the similarity struck me. I guess the Red Car logo must be lodged deep in my childhood memories as a prime Los Angeles image.”

The clean, curved lines of the Streamline Moderne style continues in all station details, such as the blue steel benches and balustrades, the split columns that support the canopies and the reconstituted granite tile floors. Ramps allow wheelchairs to roll up onto the platforms; ribbed surfaces warn people with poor eyesight that they are close to the platform edge.

Every aspect of the station is designed to keep maintenance to a minimum and reduce security problems. All sight-lines are open, easily visible to the sheriff’s deputies who will police the light-rail line as it runs through some of the more troubled sections of South Central Los Angeles and northern Long Beach. At night, the stations will be brilliantly lit by recessed spots designed to discourage furtive graffiti artists.

As a matter of civic pride, the City of Long Beach decided to give its stations a style distinct from the rest of the Blue Line. To give it that style, the city agreed to spend $100,000 more per station than the $190,000 for each structure in the county budget.

The decision to follow the Streamline Moderne style was made collectively by members of various city agencies, said architect James Goodell, co-author of the Long Beach stations with Bird’s La Canada Design Group.

“We wanted the eight stops that end in the loop that circles downtown to tell riders that they were now definitely in our city,” said Ed Loftesnes, light rail project manager for Long Beach Public Works.

While most of the old Red Car trolley stations have been demolished, the most architecturally distinguished Pacific Electric station still stands on Main Street on the west corner of Cabrillo Avenue and Torrance Boulevard in the City of Torrance.

Designed in 1912 by famed pre-Modernist architect Eric Gill, the Torrance Station is a simplified version of the Mission Revival Style marked by a row of streamlined Doric columns supporting a white stucco gable.

The red-tiled roof and copper central dome that completed the Gill design was removed some time after the station closed, when the South Bay section of the Pacific Electric line ceased operation in the 1950s.

At the same time he designed the station, Gill created the nearby, concrete, six-arched railroad bridge over Torrance Boulevard. It still serves as an urban gateway into Torrance from the east.

Locally known as The Depot, the Torrance Station is being converted into a shopping complex. The tiled roof and copper dome have been restored to Gill’s original design; the railroad bridge has been strengthened to prolong its working life.

The pleasures of riding the old Pacific Electric system, founded in 1901 by Henry Huntington, nephew of Collis P. Huntington, president of the Southern Pacific Railroad, were lyrically described by Lynn Bowman in her 1974 book, “Los Angeles: Epic of a City.”

“The lines passed bright splashes of orange groves and the somber greens of walnut and olive groves. . . . (Trolleys) passed an orange grove at Hollywood and Vine . . . (where) motion picture cowboys swaggered.”

The Red Cars followed the shore from Santa Monica to Balboa and through the Cahuenga Pass to the San Fernando Valley and east to San Bernardino as far as Arrowhead Springs. “Neither hills nor view were ever shrouded in smog,” Bowman writes, and the occasional morning haze was soon burned away by the sun.

Today, the sunny groves and market gardens that once bordered the trolley line between Long Beach and Los Angeles have given way to miles of suburban streets and semi-industrial districts in the hot and smoggy trough of the Los Angeles Basin.

“Although the design of our stations harks back to a seemingly more gracious era, we’ve tried in the architecture to reflect the tougher and more urban realities of the present,” Bird said. “This balance between nostalgia and contemporary function is symbolic of the Blue Line’s aim to revive the rail connection between Long Beach and Los Angeles, and between the old, pre-Freeway Age and the new era of public rapid transit.”