New Wings : Workers Are Painstakingly Restoring Cable Cars and Station of L.A.’s Famed Angel’s Flight

Jose Contreras scrapes away tiny flecks of paint from a worn piece of wood, an unassuming piece of Los Angeles history in his hands.

Behind him, in the back yard of a workshop in San Fernando, lie more bits of wood and chunks of concrete, the skeleton of the city’s historic Angel’s Flight cable cars.

Contreras, his boss and a co-worker were the surgeons at work Wednesday, carefully restoring the framework of one of the city’s most significant public transportation monuments. It is a meticulous process in the long-awaited $4-million restoration of the celebrated funicular railway, defunct for nearly 30 years.

“This is history in the making” said Martha Diaz Aszkenazy, president of Pueblo Contracting Services, the firm hired by the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency to oversee the reconstruction.

“To us, Angel’s Flight is really an important project,” Aszkenazy said. “I mean, we are restoring a major historical site in L.A.”

Angel’s Flight was a major Downtown railway in the early 1900s, ferrying passengers between the business district and Bunker Hill, then a fashionable residential neighborhood. The system was dismantled in 1969 to make way for an urban renewal project. It is scheduled to resume its 315-foot climb by mid-1996, linking riders from the Red Line’s 4th Street subway station to California Plaza.

Pueblo Contracting, a 2-year-old joint venture between Keller Construction and Trooper Enterprises, another construction firm, started on the project in March. First, workers surveyed the site at 4th and Hill streets and carefully cleaned the orange and black paint from the concrete and wood pieces of the old train station before moving them to the San Fernando workshop.

The three rows of tracks and the two original cars--named Olivet and Sinai--are being repaired at central Los Angeles locations because of their delicate condition and large size, said Severyn Aszkenazy, Martha Aszkenazy’s husband and partner.

The company’s San Fernando site has been transformed into a “boneyard,” Martha Aszkenazy said, because that is where the dismantled pieces of the railway’s concrete archway and wooden station house have been laid out for reconfiguration. Each piece is marked with its exact location in the structure, like pieces of a prized jigsaw puzzle or a prehistoric skeleton.

“This is kind of like our own archeological site,” she said.

The project is particularly tricky because the restoration team must make the railway structure seismically sound while retaining 60% of the original material in the repairs to preserve Angel’s Flight’s status as a historic landmark. So, for example, slices of the original concrete archway will be applied as veneer to a new concrete frame.

Restoring the wooden station house is also a painstaking process because splintered pieces--reinforced over the years with wads of newspaper and nails here and there--must first be glued together, then undergo several cleanings before they can be repainted.

“It’s a real patient job,” said Bruce Hartman, owner of Pagoda Construction in Sylmar, the subcontractor involved in the woodworking repairs. “It requires going over one piece of wood about six or seven times to make sure it’s clean and sturdy.”

But there also are pleasant surprises. Under the layers of paint on the station house’s decorative corbels, Hartman and his workers found intricate details etched by hand in the wood. Another time, the workers discovered newspapers from 1910 filling gaps between pieces of wood.

“We went at this project looking at it like the Statue of Liberty is to New York, maybe Angel’s Flight could be to L.A.,” Martha Aszkenazy said. “It’s not quite as grand, but it’s still a beloved monument.”