70 Years Before Sinkholes, L.A. Had a Subway

Seventy years ago--before there was an MTA, before there were federal grants, billion-dollar contracts, political infighting, charges, countercharges, investigations and sinkholes of various sorts--Los Angeles actually had a subway.

In November 1925, after 17 months of construction at a cost of $5 million, the city that was already becoming famous for its car culture enthusiastically greeted the opening of the privately owned Pacific Electric Railroad’s first underground leg. Thousands of Angelenos crowded the modern station beneath the block bounded by downtown’s 4th, 5th, Olive and Hill streets to watch as one of the system’s famous Red Car trolleys was christened with a Prohibition-era bottle of ginger ale.

The tiny underground route, which was called both the Hollywood Subway and the Belmont Tunnel, cut fully 15 minutes off the Red Car’s travel time. It extended for about a mile, 65 feet beneath Bunker and Crown hills, before surfacing at the intersection of Beverly and Glendale boulevards. From there, the trolley swayed west in the open air.

One year after the opening, the saw-toothed, five-wing, 12-story Pacific Electric Subway Terminal was completed on the site above the station, and proclaimed the highest commercial office structure west of the Mississippi River.

The underground station below became a busy center with rushing passengers, newsstands and a lunch counter. Upstairs, pink Tennessee marble, fluted columns, and a bronze reproduction of Rodin’s “The Thinker” were a few of the splendors that adorned the building.

The man responsible for the trolley system that sent 600 trains carrying 400,000 passengers through the Los Angeles Terminal each day was Henry Huntington.

Huntington, best known today for the library and gardens that bear his name, started Pacific Electric in 1901, mainly to make his vast real estate holdings accessible to buyers. In 1910, he sold the system to Southern Pacific, which eventually linked 1,164 miles of track to more than 50 Southern California communities in the world’s largest electrical transit system. At the same time, Huntington bought Los Angeles Railway Co., whose Yellow Cars served the city itself.

But as Los Angeles decentralized and residents and businesses began moving to the suburbs, people’s dependence on automobiles increased. By the late 1930s, railway service began to deteriorate. Commuters became irate over overcrowding, high fares, aging equipment and frequent accidents.

By 1949, about two-thirds of the rail lines were gone, replaced by buses and automobiles. On June 19, 1955, the last scheduled Red Car trolley rattled out of the desolate stillness of the cavernous train shed under downtown. Less than a decade later, on March 31, 1963, the Yellow Car made its final run.

The system’s physical remains were converted to a variety of purposes. For example, the green, tree-studded center strip on Brentwood’s San Vicente Boulevard and the grassy median on Huntington Drive through San Marino and Arcadia were once Red Car right of ways.

For a while during the 1950s and 1960s, the subway tunnel was used to store 329,700 pounds of crackers intended to keep 69,940 people alive for 14 days in the event of a nuclear war. The crackers were transferred to Utah after the tunnel sprang a leak during the heavy 1969 rains. Later, the tunnel was used to store automobiles confiscated in narcotics arrests.

Like many colorful downtown sites, the abandoned subway has also done duty as a movie set. In the 1970s, the Belmont Tunnel had a role in “MacArthur,” starring Gregory Peck. With a bit of help, it was transformed into the Malinta Tunnel on Corregidor Island, where 10,000 Filipinos and Americans made a last-ditch stand against the Imperial Japanese forces.

Over time, however, the new downtown has nibbled away at the old--even when it’s underground. Construction of the Bonaventure Hotel and Arco Towers broke the Belmont Tunnel in two. The northern remnant extends from the old Beverly-Glendale entrance--now fenced off and defaced with graffiti--to a spot just below Figueroa Street near 4th Street.

The Subway Terminal Building itself was declared a historical cultural landmark in 1977, and received a $3-million face-lift 10 years ago. Today, however, the building is locked and in foreclosure, a victim of the downturn in commercial real estate. Beneath its empty corridors, a single block of melancholy tunnel burrows from Olive Street to Grand Avenue. The tracks were removed long ago, and where millions of Angelenos once bustled on countless errands, water drips from the ceiling and small stalactites grow from cracks in the concrete.