At La Cienega Boulevard, Joy Still Has No On-Ramp

Attention, Santa Monica Freeway commuters. We interrupt your honking and cheering with a word from Dorene Desenberg and her Westside neighborhood.

While you are once again whipping in and out of traffic as if the dog days of the detour had never intruded upon your solo commute, it would be worthwhile to note that the freeway’s “reopening” was a bit of an exaggeration in some parts of L.A.

“There’s been all this hullabaloo about the freeway being opened, but for me, there’s nothing different from the last three months,” groused Desenberg, who discovered last week that the on-ramp that ordinarily would get her on the freeway to Downtown will remain closed until late June for repairs.

The problem is La Cienega Boulevard. Eastbound motorists still can’t exit onto northbound La Cienega, and southbound drivers on La Cienega still have to find another on-ramp to the freeway’s eastbound lanes.

“Here I was all set to write letters to my sister in Northern California and my friends, quoting Peter, Paul and Mary--’All my trials, Lord, soon be over,’ ” said Desenberg, a paralegal who lives near the La Cienega freeway exit. Instead, she said, the new, improved Santa Monica Freeway has meant only that her usual surface-street detour is a little less congested.

“When the article came out that the 10 was going to reopen, I even went over to Kinko’s and made copies for all my family and friends,” she mourned. “Now I’ve just tossed them in the trash.

“I have nothing to gloat about.”

According to Caltrans, La Cienega access to and from the I-10 will be limited for at least the next three months because workers are only now beginning to repair the on- and off-ramps and the stretch of access road that connected them to the freeway.

Tyrone Taylor, resident engineer for the rebuilding of the Santa Monica, said the problem stems from the interim traffic routing Caltrans did after the Jan. 17 earthquake, when the freeway access roads at La Cienega were drafted into service as a car-pool lane.

The section of road, Taylor said, “was damaged heavily during the quake, but we were able to shore it up” sufficiently to keep westbound traffic moving while the rest of the freeway was being repaired.

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Now that the freeway is fixed, he said, engineers can turn their attention to the La Cienega ramps, which will be demolished and replaced.

The project is the only section of the quake-damaged freeway that remains closed.

But for the poor and not-so-poor souls who have relied on La Cienega to get them to and from the freeway, that’s slim comfort indeed. One of the Westside’s most heavily traveled streets, the boulevard is home, among other things, to the Beverly Center and Restaurant Row.

In fact, Taylor said, not long after last Tuesday’s ribbon-cutting ceremony that marked the grand reopening of the freeway, he took his crew to lunch at Lawry’s, the boulevard’s landmark prime rib joint.

People who work at Lawry’s “were real happy that the freeway was open, but they wanted to know, ‘What about La Cienega?’ ” Taylor laughed.

Dorene Desenberg is less than amused.

For the last 15 years, she said, she has lived in the same apartment, one mile north of the I-10, and she and her Toyota pickup have grown accustomed to being freeway-close to most of Los Angeles.

Now, she said, she has to take a detour just to get to her local Fedco.

“The only people who are benefiting on this are the people who are heading to Santa Monica or Downtown,” she said.

The whole business reminds her of the grand opening of the Golden State Freeway decades ago, when motorists found themselves blessed with a glorious thoroughfare but cursed with a shortage of gas stations.

“It’s like, great, you’ve got this new freeway--but you can’t drive on it,” she sighed.