Riding Into the Future on Rails

He was the rare Los Angeles native, an old guy who’s lived here all his 67 years. She was a woman who had come out from the Pennsylvania hills in World War II to build B-29s. “A Rosie the Riveter,” said Ann Sinclair, now 73 and a great-grandmother. “I worked in Plant 7, Lockheed. I made wings.”

We had been thrown together on a Blue Line train, and as it rolled north from Long Beach toward downtown, they talked about the Red Cars, O Cars, Watts Cars, about trains and trolleys and 1,000 miles of track that once connected this city in a way freeways never could.

“It was fun,” she said. “People were friendly. I remember telling my 7-year-old to ride downtown alone and meet me after work. Could you imagine doing that today?”

“You could go anywhere on those cars,” said the man, Jack Moorhead. “Balboa. Santa Ana. Pasadena. San Bernardino. Everywhere.”

“Do you remember,” she asked him, “how the bells would clang at the intersections?”

“Do you remember,” he answered, “the wooden seats?”

It was funny how it happened. I had boarded the Blue Line on Wednesday to sample the city’s future, and instead bumped into two pieces of its past. Moorhead had an open, friendly face and wore a faded Iowa cap. Sinclair had a hearing aid stuck in one ear and a backwards Mickey Mouse watch strapped on her wrist. He was headed to a doctor’s appointment. She was on her way to the dentist.

“At our age,” she said, “all you do anymore is go to the doctor.”

They both recalled the day the dismantling of the city’s once great transit system was complete. “April 9, 1962,” Moorhead said. Sinclair remembered her husband, now dead, had taken their young son on a last ride on a Red Car--”so he would remember what had been lost.”

Historians might believe they have debunked the great Los Angeles freeway conspiracy theory, the notion that greedy moguls set out to wean the city off mass transit and into automobiles. But these two cannot be counted among the converts.

“They had all that right-of-way,” Moorhead said, “and they sold it, and now they are having to buy it back. That’s foolishness.”

“It was so obvious,” Sinclair said. “They wanted everyone on buses so they could sell gasoline.”

She remembered the first day she had seen workers in the Hollywood Hills, cutting the passes, and later, how the freeways had slowly changed the city.

“It moved out a lot of homes,” she said. “It saved travel time; you could get around faster, but it pushed people farther out to the suburbs and it got harder to know your way around.”

“And do you remember,” Moorhead interjected, “how in the ‘40s all of the sudden that word popped you had never heard before, that word smog ?”

Finally, and seemingly all at once, mass transit is upon us. The Blue Line is running. The Red Line tunnels have reached MacArthur Park. The Green Line car contract dominates the news. In the next five years, many of the system’s major pieces--subways, trolleys, commuter trains, bus links--will be in place. It won’t end smog, and it won’t eliminate congestion. It might, if we’re lucky, enable us to keep up with the growth.

What it will do, I suspect, is alter the city’s personality. Many of us have only known Los Angeles as the Freeway City, a city of cars and car people, of car culture. It defines our lifestyles, makes us urban isolationists who travel with the windows rolled up and the radio turned on, for company. We might bang, with dire results, into other cars, but rarely do we bump into other people.

A friend of mine was out from New York last week on his first visit to Los Angeles. After he pumped me about what it’s like to live amid freeways, I pumped him about subways. “The subway,” he said, “is the great urban Mixmaster. It brings all classes, races and ethnic groups into the city. There are no pretensions. People sweat together, read the paper together, talk.”

Rolling out to Long Beach, that hadn’t been the case on the Blue Line. The few passengers sat apart and stared silently out the windows, watching the back yards of whole neighborhoods pass by. On the return, though, the car was fuller, the crowd friendlier. A father was taking his son on his first ride, explaining everything. A foursome of retirees laughed and talked. A man in a suit punched a calculator, and Sinclair and Moorhead kept reminiscing.

“I remember,” she said, “going to see Aimee Semple McPherson preach and wondering, ‘How red can that woman’s face get?’ ”

“Do you remember the Pike?”

“Yes, the ice cream cones.”

“The salt water taffy . . . “

It beat the radio by a long shot.