Framing Scenes of the Freeway Battle

It was the movies, of course--the happenstance, bolt-of-lightning 35-mm glory that could ennoble manicurists and lumberjacks--that drew them out here in naive numbers.

And then the war attracted more with lavish paychecks earned rivet by rivet.

Yet before then, they came seeking something else, something as democratic as sunshine and as deep as a taproot. Decades later, a justice of the Supreme Court would speak of “the right to be left alone . . . the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized man.”

In the Eden incarnate that was the promise of Southern California, that right had rosebushes and four walls and a mortgage: a house, specifically an urban house, antithesis of the pigeonhole living of tenements and shared walls of row houses, and richer than the multimillionest-dollar co-op in a city that can’t buy silence or import sunlight.

The house could be put on a flag, the icon of the essential self of Southern California, as the Washington monument fixes the civic soul of the republic.

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The gospel according to Greene and Greene, or Kaufman and Broad, was spread like Augustine grass to the desert and the foothills and the coast mostly by that other icon, the freeway.

Once at work together, and now at cross purposes, are these two powerful egalitarian forces: the ends and the means, the home as a private cosmos, and the freeway to get to it.

The original bungalow neighborhood, a going concern back when the motorcar was still just a nuisance novelty, is South Pasadena and environs.

For more than 30 years, South Pasadena has waged war to stop from being un-Solomonically halved by a concrete tributary of the 710 Freeway, an extension signed into law in 1949 by a governor named Earl Warren.

The war has gone on so long that women attended the first public meetings in gloves and hats, so long that the grandchildren of the original combatants now do battle.

They have fought it like a siege, with anything that could be turned to weaponry: law, environment, cost, history. They enlisted penny-pinching groups on the right and tree-hugging groups on the left. They slung back remarks about upper-middle-class uppityness with official math showing that far more homes would be bulldozed in the settled Latino neighborhoods of El Sereno if the 710 were extended.

And now they fight with a paintbrush.

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Art changes perceptions. Put a frame around something--on canvas, in a camera lens--and people see it differently, think of it differently. Perhaps think of it, period, for the first time.

For all of the week just passed, the anti-freeway group Eminent Reclaim and the California Art Club invited to the planned freeway extension route some 100 Artists for Architecture, a paintbrush posse to put a frame around the R-1 charms of South Pasadena and El Sereno.

A Canada goose feather fluttered in Don Hildreth’s hatband as he laid on cadmium yellow to the “deep space” of the vista he was painting, an old railroad bed interlaced by trees. Seven thousand public trees and thousands more on private land would be bulldozed for the freeway; a few dozen yards from the outside lane, the lemon eucalyptus planted in South Pas in 1889 by John Muir would remain.

Hildreth lives in Silver Lake, but like most everyone else, absorbed in his own space, “I never gave it a lot of thought, to be honest, but now I see it, and I think, why ruin it?”

So much of California plein-air art is of landscapes and vistas vanished that seeing it is like paging through an album of memories and regrets. This paint-in is meant to show what is still here while it might yet be kept.

Through the summer, the paintings will be shown in shops and galleries around the freeway route, 8-by-10 canvases, mostly, framing the Greene and Greene footbridge under which Blue Line trains will soon run, the Foursquare and Italianate cottages built for the income of a railroad conductor, verandas made of brick from the brickyard of the long-dead Simons brothers who came west and built a utopian town for their workers, and one small house in a garden bower, a painting entitled “Escape from Town.”

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The cautionary tale of the Century Freeway is that a freeway can link far-flung neighborhoods even as it dismembers the most proximate ones.

When their huts got too shabby or wet, the first Angelenos, the Gabrielino Indians, simply burned them and moved on. Sometimes we still think like that; it is the freeway supporter’s answer--”If you don’t like it, move”--and the freeway opponent’s fatalism--”If I don’t like it when it’s done, I’ll move.”

Where?