L.A.’s E-Ticket Ride Counts Down for Takeoff

To date, the Angels Flight Railway Foundation has heard from about 4,000 people who said they were passengers in the last car on the last trip on the little railway before it went into mothballs in 1969. Never mind that the car held fewer than 50.

Foundation President John H. Welborne sees this outpouring of nostalgia as a good omen that Angels Flight, reopening Saturday, is, indeed, an idea whose time has come again.

The first passengers took flight Thursday on the newly restored 95-year-old funicular that traverses the steep incline between Hill Street and Bunker Hill. Those passengers? Snapple and Budweiser--cases and cases of each.

The beverages “were serving well,” Welborne reported. And the ballast tests--in which each of the two passenger cars carried a 9,000-pound load--went off swimmingly.

The Snapple, donated by Quaker Oats and airlifted from Illinois, is earmarked for the Fred Jordan Mission. The Bud? It was on loan from Ace Beverage Co.

Beer? Snapple? Well, Welborne explained, this unorthodox load was heavier by far than the weightiest human cargo that either car will carry once Angels Flight reopens. (Welborne did wonder, tongue slightly in cheek, if a beer cargo “was appropriate for Angels Flight.”)

Now, for the record, the one-minute, 298-foot funicular ride is not a dangerous mission. The tests are strictly precautionary. In 68 years of daily operation, until it was dismantled to make way for Bunker Hill redevelopment, Angels Flight had an almost flawless safety record.

“The only fatality,” Welborne said, “was a drunken sailor sometime in the ‘20s who climbed up on the track and went to sleep.”

And the 1996 Angels Flight boasts new underpinnings for its two little orange wooden cars, the Olivet and the Sinai. (“Better than a ’48 Woody,” said Welborne, beaming.) During restoration, workers found old ticket books wedged between seats; they were faithfully copied.

There are new trestles, faux-wood concrete railroad ties, and new steel tracks and high-tech cable. Plus, the railway is run by computer, much like a high-speed elevator.

The old 50-horsepower motor in the orange-and-black Disneyesque station house in the shadow of the California Plaza’s twin skyscrapers is a relic. There’s a new 100-horsepower motor to pull the cable connecting the cars. From the station house, the old downtown below--once the heart of the commercial district, now called somewhat euphemistically the “historic core”--seems a world apart from the glass towers on the hill.

That’s a primary reason for bringing back Angels Flight. The restoration isn’t just some $4.1-million flight of fancy for sentimental Angelenos, explained Dennis Luna, chairman of the nonprofit railway foundation. True, it’s a historic landmark, but, Luna said, it’s a link between the two downtowns, dispelling the idea that “you can’t get there from here.”

Getting there from here was essentially the thinking of engineer Col. J. W. Eddy, who conceived Angels Flight in 1901 to hoist wealthy folk living in hilltop mansions back up from the flatlands.

But Luna, an L.A. native, was also talking about generational connectedness. Like thousands of others, as a child he rode Angels Flight with his father. Now, those kids can take their kids.

And, like them, their kids will probably squeal with delight as the little cars pass hair-raisingly close to one another in mid-journey.

“That was our E-ride,” Luna said. From a left window seat, “It looked just like the cars were going to collide.”

Peggy Moore, vice chairwoman of the Community Redevelopment Agency and another L.A. native, recalled, “It was like playing chicken,” especially for those lucky enough to stand up front.

It’s been more than four years since the station house was removed from storage and reassembled piece by piece on-site, the ornamental Hill Street arch rescued from a salvage yard. A good bit of time for rebuilding, considering that in 1901 the railway went up in less than six months.

But there were a few glitches. First, the economic slump halted plans for a third California Plaza tower, putting the restoration in limbo. (If and when the tower is built, Angels Flight may be temporarily shut down.)

Another hurdle: Olive Street, original site of the station house, now runs under California Plaza, a result of the lopping off of Bunker Hill. Some of the earth went to Chavez Ravine, some into building freeways. As Welborne put it: “Angels Flight has stayed in the same place. Olive Street has disappeared. It’s up in Dodger Stadium.”

Actually, Angels Flight has moved half a block south. The Angelus Plaza senior apartments sit on the original site. And, because of the reconfiguring of Bunker Hill, the railway lost 17 feet in length. Engineers did some fancy footwork to keep the original 33-degree pitch so passengers will sit level in their seats.

Ironically, the lion’s share of restoration funds are tax revenues realized by the CRA from the Bunker Hill redevelopment that displaced the railway.

At 25 cents per fare, “It’s not going to sustain itself in the beginning,” Moore said. But the foundation, which owns Angels Flight, expects revenue from movie filming and sale of T-shirts and other souvenirs at its on-site museum.

Saturday’s reopening will be celebrated with a two-day fair on Hill Street between 3rd and 4th streets.

Everyone who always meant to ride Angels Flight gets a second chance. Said Welborne: “If someday they tore down the Empire State Building, think how many people would say, ‘I always wish I’d ridden that elevator to the top. . . .’ ”

Her Valentine’s Day Gift Was Hard to Miss

Some Valentines received chocolates, others flowers. Edna Weiss got a billboard.

On Valentine’s Day, Mickey Weiss drove his wife to Santa Monica Boulevard and Manning Avenue in Westwood, pointed to a 14-foot-by-48-foot billboard with four lifelike vultures perched atop it and said: “There’s your present, honey.” Floating from it were six heart-shaped balloons.

Weiss had spotted the original billboard in Pasadena a few days before and thought, “Sensational! It hits you right in the face” with those vultures up in one corner, a teenage smoker down in the other, all on a stark white backdrop.

Within hours, Weiss turned up at the sponsoring American Lung Assn. of L.A. County, where he was told that the billboard was about to be taken down and that there was no money to put it up elsewhere. Weiss, a Westside philanthropist, wrote a $12,000 check from the Edna & Mickey Weiss Charitable Foundation to extend for 90 days this campaign to curb teen-age smoking.

Thanks to Weiss, the billboard, created by Vince Aamodt, art director for Santa Monica-based ad agency Rubin Postaer & Associates, will move next month to Encino and in April to another Westside location.

The artist’s message, in his own words: “You are killing yourself.”

Even though nobody in Weiss’ family smokes, he knows that cigarettes kill. His father, a two-pack-a-day man, died of lung cancer. He sees his Valentine as “a good investment.”

* This weekly column chronicles the people and small moments that define life in Southern California. Reader suggestions are welcome.