Will Freeway Be Road to Riches? : Transit: Cities hope Century’s opening will bring new business their way. El Segundo, though, fears it may bring crime.

Most people equate freeway traffic with nightmares.

But many officials in South Bay cities along the route of the new Century Freeway, which opens this week, see the traffic it will bring as a possible dream come true.

After more than 30 years of blueprints, real estate booms and busts, and heated court suits and heavy construction, towns as varied as Inglewood and El Segundo will begin to see if their hopes, and in some cases their fears, will be validated with the opening of what is officially known as the Glenn Anderson Freeway.

While people in Inglewood, Hawthorne and Gardena see the freeway bringing an economic boom to their towns, El Segundo residents are eyeing the opening with trepidation. They wonder if Interstate 105 and the light rail line that will eventually run down its median will bring an increase in crime.

Nowhere is the opening of the new artery hailed as heartily as in Inglewood, a city that could drown in red ink if its tax revenues do not balloon soon.

Mayor Edward Vincent said in a statement that in his three terms as mayor of Inglewood it is difficult to think of anything that has been “a more meaningful event happening at a more appropriate time” than the opening of the freeway.

Now billing itself as the city “Where California Comes to Play,” Inglewood is home to the Great Western Forum and Hollywood Park racetrack, which makes visitors an important component in the city’s fiscal health.

Last November city voters approved a ballot measure for Hollywood Park to have a card club, which is under construction even though it has not yet been licensed by the state. City officials say they might reap as much as $10 million annually in new tax revenues if the club is successful.

What Inglewood wants from the freeway is traffic, and lots of it.

The city is heavily dependent on visitors for tax revenues. About 3% of the city’s general fund comes from the tax on bets made at the track and 1.7% of the general fund come from ticket sales at the track and the Forum. But revenues, particularly at the track, have fallen because of the recession and last year’s riots.

The new freeway, officials and business people have reasoned, will increase visitor traffic by making people feel safer.

“We recognize that people may be reluctant to travel in unfamiliar areas and if you can bring them closer to the location without having to drive so many side streets, they feel safer,” said Rick Baedeker, marketing director for Hollywood Park. “More practically, it’s going to cut down the driving time.”

Currently, those coming into the city from the east and south must exit from the Harbor Freeway and drive about five miles on surface streets to the Forum and the track, which sit side by side in the heart of the city.

Two freeway interchanges, one at Crenshaw Boulevard and the other at Prairie Avenue and Hawthorne Boulevard, are at major traffic arteries into the heart of the city and are seen as key to bringing in visitors.

The city’s five largest business draws--the track, the Forum, Daniel Freeman and Centinela hospitals and the Inglewood Park cemetery--all lie along what is known as the Prairie Avenue traffic corridor. Visitors will be only blocks away from any of the five once they get off the freeway.

To spruce up what it is calling one of its freeway gateways, Inglewood has over the past year incorporated several pockets of county land along Prairie, and is in the process of combining them into a redevelopment area.

For small business owners along the freeway, the future is anybody’s guess, according to one of them, Carl Silkey, who lives in Lawndale but owns a carwash in Inglewood at the intersection of Prairie and 113th Street.

“The way conditions are, I can’t see anything happening right away,” Silkey said of the economy. “But who am I to say?”

There was a time, he said, when 14 cars would be lined up at his facility, with their owners waiting to wash them. Now, he says, hours go by and the bays stand empty; people these days don’t have money to spend on washing cars.

Like Inglewood, Hawthorne expects the freeway opening to turn around an aging city where the economy has fallen on hard times.

The city believes that the freeway and the rapid transit stations along it will make Hawthorne’s northern border highly attractive to developers, City Manager James Mitsch said.

“We have had a longstanding involvement with the Century Freeway,” Mitsch said. “We basically think it’s going to be a good thing for the city.”

In January, Mitsch and other officials unveiled a proposal by a group of developers to build a sports complex right off the Century in the city’s north end, provided the developers can lure a major sports team to the football stadium that will serve as the centerpiece. So far the idea is only on paper.

Another group of developers last year unsuccessfully tried to persuade voters to put a card club near the Prairie-Hawthorne interchange.

Mitsch is so confident, however, that the Century will bring new prosperity that he is even talking about car dealerships returning to Hawthorne Boulevard.

Gardena also is eyeing the opening of the Century with heightened economic aspirations, although it already has easy access in several places to the Harbor Freeway.

“We see it as a real great way to infuse our industrial area,” City Manager Kenneth Landau said.

The city’s northern border has been hit hard by defense cutbacks.

Small defense plants that serviced larger ones such as Rockwell International and TRW in El Segundo have scaled back or gone out of business, Landau said.

Century Freeway interchanges at Vermont Avenue and Crenshaw Boulevard, Landau said, will make the north end of the city much more accessible.

In El Segundo, at the freeway’s western terminus, feelings about the thoroughfare are so mixed that Mayor Carl Jacobson declined to talk about the possible impact on his city.

As originally envisioned by its planners, the freeway was to transport thousands of workers from the east side of the Los Angeles basin to El Segundo, which is home to several of the largest defense contractors in the nation.

Decades later, people are worried about crime in El Segundo, a city of 15,000 which boasts a Main Street that would rival anything in Mayberry.

“I think I have mixed emotions right now (about the freeway),” said Councilman J. B. Wise. “I think we see it as certainly a relief to some of the traffic problems that face us. There is probably a little apprehension, if you will, about what affect it will have on crime.”

He says, however, that freeway access might also make El Segundo a more attractive place for developers, which the city needs to fill the empty buildings left by defense contractors.