COLUMN ONE : 50 Years of Moving History : The Pasadena Freeway, a first in the West, approaches its golden anniversary as a marvel of its age--and with a better safety record than many of its modern counterparts.

Drive it the way you would dance. Curve, glide, turn; clutch, shift, accelerate. In the morning, it moves through alternate flickerings of shadow and light, cast by the lift and dip of the hills alongside. In the evening, it hurries through the black shade of green trees.

Whatever other symbols have come to represent Los Angeles, the freeway is its most fitting. The movies are older, the climate is none of our doing, but the freeways are our gift and our endless joke; they make the place run or not run. The first of them, the mother and father of Western freeways, will turn 50 on Dec. 30--the golden anniversary of the Pasadena Freeway.

In an age of technical marvels, it was a marvel of the age, a sunken six-lane parkway that snaked and bent along the riverbed of the green and pleasant Arroyo Seco, from the august banlieues of Pasadena to the nubby buildings of downtown. Over the miles their grandsires had needed a day to conquer on foot and horse, 1940 drivers could transit in the time it took to smoke a cigarette. Some committee, in a flush of civic lyricism, named it the Arroyo Seco Parkway. Locals called it “that ditch.”

This first of freeways, like the rest that would come, put form to fantasy. To drive a freeway became “a special way of being alive,” wrote urban critic Reyner Banham, “a state of heightened awareness that some locals find mystical.” To drive a freeway was to move “as a riverman runs a river,” wrote Joan Didion, “every day more attuned to its currents, its deceptions.”

Rivers they are, great concrete rivers that in 50 years have carried our commerce and concerns farther afield than had been envisioned, farther indeed than many now wish they had. Freeways now divide our days as they divide the city.

To the grim-eyed, hurried 1990s, the Pasadena Freeway has the look of a museum piece, dated as a zoot suit, narrow, awkward, pokey, perilous to the driver who does not know its quiddities and tricks. Along its 8.2 miles, from lower Pasadena past the Art Deco tunnels that once arched over Figueroa Street, it has no shoulders, almost no turnout bays and permits no big trucks. Its curves are thrill-ride sharp, its lanes a foot narrower than the current standard. People pull into their driveways faster than some of the Pasadena’s exit ramps can accommodate.

“There’s a level of discomfort on the part of the motorist,” says Keith Gilbert, the Automobile Club’s manager of highway engineering, “but basically it’s such a beautiful historic road, and learning to cope with it has made it an important part of the Los Angeles’ infrastructure.”

The Pasadena Freeway ranks as the 12th busiest among Caltrans’ 26 regional freeways. At a point near the Golden State Freeway, where it first carried 27,000 cars a day, 127,000 now pass. On workday mornings, at each entrance ramp along its length, 10,000 cars join the inbound stream, to be siphoned off again each night. The stop signs and the hairpin ramps make it as self-metering as a modern freeway, without aid of red and green signals; its path through parklands is aesthetically and environmentally aware, if not altogether sensitive; a ban on trucks helps make it safer than some newer, more frantic lengths of urban freeway.

In sum, it still moves.

“The problem is the on- and off-ramps. ... Those of us who use the freeway during morning hours I think are experienced enough to know how to merge. . . . I tell my friends, ‘Don’t be in that outside lane, it’s dangerous.’ I have many friends who say they don’t like it all--too many curves.”

Sally Stanton Rubsamen was 17 in 1940, a high school senior plucked from a gym class to be later crowned Tournament of Roses queen.

She lives in Pasadena, drives every day to her paralegal job downtown, along the length of what her son and daughter still call “mama’s freeway.” If she speaks of the Pasadena Freeway with crisp and analytical propriety, she is entitled. She is the one who officially opened it, she and the governor of California, tugging opposite ends of a red silk ribbon on a December morning she remembers chiefly for the throngs of people and the “rough policeman” warning a man--her father--not to touch the queen.

“It works fairly well for being a small old freeway, but you probably have fewer strangers driving the Pasadena Freeway than you do most of the other freeways. If you’ve driven that thing 100 times or a thousand times, you get used to all the quirks and curves and drive it a whole lot better than some guy who’s never been on it before.”

Nick Jones, Caltrans associate transportation engineer, is among those who believe that the Pasadena Freeway, for all its antique shortcomings, remains a pretty well-mannered piece of road, if sometimes balky.

When first proposed, the publicity of the day promised Pasadena to downtown in 10 minutes, a breeze of a journey past the fusty trolley lines that rattled alongside for a ways. The parkway designers intended drivers to enjoy the view at 45 m.p.h. Today, the trolleys gone, rush-hour motorists can enjoy the view at even greater leisure, like dead stops.

“We didn’t know much about freeways in those days. In fact, the Pasadena Freeway, what we now call a freeway, was conceived originally as being a leisurely scenic route. Speed and volume were not considered as being the main purposes of it. You were supposed to enjoy the park and view, and leisurely and safely go from L . A . to Pasadena.”

Al Himelhoch worked on the Pasadena and virtually every freeway in Los Angeles, starting in 1936 as head chainman on a survey crew and retiring in 1974 as Caltrans deputy district engineer.

Himelhoch recalled that at the time the Pasadena Freeway defined “the cutting edge of transportation development--a “learning laboratory,” said one engineer, for how to build more.

An arroyo road had been talked about since it was surveyed in 1895; one man tried to start a bicycle trail, but nothing came of it. It took legislation to allow the designing of such a highway, with no intersections, no right of access from adjacent property. They didn’t even know what to call it: “stopless motorway” was one suggestion.

One or two parkways had already been built in the east; the beginnings of the autobahn were crossing Germany, broad enough to accommodate tanks, which they soon would. But an urban roadway--there was no state of the art; they had to invent it as they went along.

This, by the numbers, is what they built in 33 months:

Size Lanes at least a foot narrower than those mandated since. Originally, the two outside lanes were paved with white cement, and the two inside ones with black, on the curious theory that different-colored pavement would keep people from lane hopping. Emergency turnout bays were added in the 1950s, but nothing ever came of the notion that all six lanes be converted to one-way for morning and evening rush hours . . . nor of the idea to install coin-operated gas pumps for stalled cars.

Ramps Better suited to circus clown acts than modern cars. Unlike newer freeways, it has virtually no merging lanes on or off. The stop signs at the bottom of on-ramps were put there as a safety measure. Today, as traffic rushes by at shooting-gallery speed, you choose your moment and floor it.

Curves That slight lift and tilt you feel instinctively when you take a curve, a sense that the road is banked to meet the centrifugal lean of the car--that’s called “super elevation.” The Pasadena Freeway was super elevated, but for 45 m.p.h. speeds, not 60. Hence the panicky feeling at taking those curves too fast. “We didn’t understand freeways as high-speed high-volume facilities, so the fact it had relatively tight curvature wasn’t considered that important in those days,” Himelhoch says. “It’s a matter of comfort, at least that’s the word we use.” Because of those curves, says California Highway Patrol Sgt. Michael Moses, “every so often you get somebody not real familiar with the freeway, and they realize, ‘Well, I’m too hot into this.’ . . . It gets tighter as you get into it, and you’ve got to constantly reduce your speed or you wash out.”

Median About four feet wide, the median in 1940 was pleasingly landscaped with shrubs, to screen out the glare of opposing headlights and “so nobody would have a head-on collision,” the designers noted with naive assurance. Naturally, the early smash ups were gory head-on affairs, cars leaping across that scant four feet. Most medians today are as much as 30 feet wide.

Trucks Almost alone among freeways, no trucks more than three tons are allowed, though out-of-state truckers who see only a freeway line on the map sometimes get stuck on it. For a time in the early 1950s, the freeway was opened to trucks after a truck driver appealed his conviction. But the weight restriction was reinstituted, and has held up. So--mostly because of the truck ban- has the pavement.

Regulars Because it begins on a Pasadena street, and is not fully a part of the great tributary flow of freeways, it lacks much through traffic, says Jerry Baxter, district director for Caltrans. “You take the Santa Ana, Golden State, Ventura--there’s a lot of interstate traffic on those. The Pasadena is mostly local people.”

Safety With local drivers perhaps intimidated by the road’s limitations into behaving themselves, the Pasadena Freeway does a bit better than its old roadbed might suggest. Its accident rate, says Caltrans, is 1.84--meaning 1.84 reportable accidents for every million vehicle miles traveled. That is higher than, say, the Long Beach Freeway, but lower than stretches of Interstate 5. In workaday terms, says Caltrans’ Gary Bork, chief of the traffic operations branch: “I would say someone could travel the total length of that Pasadena Freeway every (work)day for 61 years and shouldn’t expect to be in an accident” of reportable size. Compare that to an average of 8 or 10 years of accident-free driving on city streets.

Speed With all those Le Mans curves curling out in front of your hood ornament, there are times on the drive to work, says commuter Blanca Dalziel, that “I sort of pretend I’m a race car driver. Not going 100 miles an hour but. . . .” We’re conditioned to it--when the signs say “freeway,” the pulse says 65. But the Pasadena tends to enforce itself. When “some guy doing 65, 70” careens by, says Moses, and an officer gives chase, “we don’t have to wait for him to see us. He has to slow down because one of the locals is up there ahead slowing him down.” In a World War II “Drive for Victory” gas-saving campaign, squads of volunteer enforcers patrolled the lanes, holding traffic to a patriotic 40.

Price About $5 million for the upper six miles, opened in 1940. A total of $12 million by the time the final 2.2-mile link to the four-level interchange was done in 1953, before the name was changed to Pasadena Freeway, and the Ramona Freeway renamed the San Bernardino. Says Baxter: “We’ve gone from about a million dollars a mile to a hundred million”--the unfinished Century Freeway. The Pasadena will stay the bargain it always was; to straighten it out, to widen its lanes out into parkland on either side, would require difficult engineering, ill-advised politics and impossible expense.

“You always wonder ‘what if?”’

Baxter has worked at Caltrans since the great master plan of the 1950s was drawn. Once, he went home to Missouri, but farm-to-market roads held no challenge for him after freeways, and back he came.

In his office is the vast map of freeways built and unbuilt, a vision of 1,200 miles cross-hatching the area--the Industrial Freeway, the Beverly Hills Freeway and one or two whose names he has forgotten. About half were built, most in the great years of the 1950s and ‘60s, before gas shortages and inflation.

There, on the wall, is the stub of the Pasadena, the first, and the Century Freeway, maybe the last for a long time.

“If we had built more Pasadena Freeways to a lower (speed) standard and snaked them through the community and had less community impact in terms of land acquisition . . . . If you get hardheaded about freeways, which I suspect we probably did, and you say every freeway’s got to be 8 to 10 lanes and every freeway’s got to be designed for 70 miles an hour, there’s no room for compromise. And it seems to me there’s room for compromise. And maybe in some areas you say ‘Why don’t we design a four-lane, why don’t we design one that has 50 m . p . h . speeds?’

“ Everything doesn’t have to be the same.”