New Pleas Heard for Wilshire Subway Route

Alarmed that the Metro Orange Line will sidestep Miracle Mile office towers and the county art museum, an ad-hoc group of architects, homeowners and museum officials urged mass-transit planners Wednesday to reconsider a decision to build the subway under Pico Boulevard.

The majority of speakers at a hearing on the environmental impacts of the project said they prefer returning to an earlier route under Wilshire Boulevard, the Westside’s heavily congested main street. The Wilshire route would serve the most people and ease the most traffic, they said.

Opponents, including two influential congressmen and Hancock Park homeowner groups, scored the Wilshire route as dangerous and counterproductive, and warned that shifting from the Pico alignment could scuttle the project.

At issue is the western extension of the Orange Line subway, itself a spur of the Los Angeles-to-North Hollywood Red Line. The first segment of the Red Line, between MacArthur Park and Union Station, is scheduled to open next year.

The Red Line will continue through Hollywood in 1998 and out to the San Fernando Valley by 2001.

The Orange Line originally was designed to continue west under Wilshire from MacArthur Park toward Westwood. That plan was killed after a spectacular fire shot out of the methane-laden earth of an old Fairfax district oil field in 1985, destroying a discount clothing store. City and federal officials swiftly forbade subway builders to dig under Wilshire Boulevard.

The subway route was shunted out of a city-designated methane “risk zone,” down Crenshaw Boulevard to Pico and west to San Vicente Boulevard. Planners envisioned the subway rejoining Wilshire on the far side of the official risk zone, near Beverly Hills.

That circuitous route, however, would move the subway a mile south of two major potential destinations--the cluster of museums near the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and hundreds of thousands of square feet of office space stacked in new high-rise towers in the Miracle Mile district.

And, critics contended Wednesday, tests show that soil under the new route has the same low level of methane--which Metro engineers said is low enough to permit safe construction and operation. The initial city study did not show this because it apparently did not look at the land along Pico.

“I don’t think we should be bound by an arbitrary line drawn by the city after an incomplete study,” said Los Angeles architect Katherine Diamond, one of several architects and planners to testify in favor of the Wilshire alignment. “We must remember that mass transit must serve density and must serve destination points.”

Robert F. Maguire III, a Westside developer and president of the art museum Board of Trustees, said in a letter that the Pico route would cost 53% more than the Wilshire route but attract 48% fewer passengers. The Pico route also would fail to eliminate the need for as many buses from Wilshire, diminishing its impact on congestion and adding to operating costs.

Los Angeles County Transportation Commission staff said the Pico route has its own benefits, including making the subway more accessible to neighborhoods south of Wilshire, and they warned that efforts to resurrect the Wilshire alignment could postpone the entire project for years--or kill it.

Bevan Dufty, the commission’s Washington political director, said the Pico route was named in legislation authorizing millions of dollars in federal grants for the project. Changing the route would require a new environmental review of 15 to 20 months and would require special legislation to amend an omnibus federal transportation act.