Building a Parkway in the Arroyo Seco

Something about the Pasadena Freeway comforts a driver, once the hazards of getting up to speed and sliding into a lane are overcome. Maybe it’s the gentle roll as the roadway bends to follow the terrain, or the realization that those are trees and parks, not billboards, catching your eye.

Sure, the ambitions of its designers, who made the freeway the state of the art for its time, have been surpassed by new techniques for moving Southern California’s traffic at the high speeds and heavy loads that today’s fax culture demands. Yes, the Pasadena is elderly now.

The median planters that once marked the center of the six-lane roadway and established its original name, the Arroyo Seco Parkway, have long since given way to battered steel on wooden posts and those ubiquitous yellow crash barriers. But this was the pioneer, and future freeway builders looked to its innovations, the entry and exit ramps, so tight in those days that they were dubbed compressed cloverleafs. They certainly were a convenience in what was already a sprawling area; they and the descendants of the parkway would become Southern California icons.

When the Midwesterners, who followed the Spaniards who came after the Indians, looked out upon the Arroyo Seco, they saw nothing but problems. Out of the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, the broad and brushy watercourse ran wild through areas of Pasadena, South Pasadena and Highland Park to join the Los Angeles River near Elysian Park.

The Arroyo Seco, “dry wash” in English, was a rough place, shaded by cottonwoods, littered with boulders and a disaster at flood times. Its main admirers were painters of nature, the plein-air school.

Surely the early families had no thoughts that the arroyo might provide an overland route to the bustling city of Los Angeles. Flash floods were frequent and dangerous, sweeping away great chunks of canyon wall, bits of failed dams and various man-made structures. When rains raged in the San Gabriels, anyone and anything in the arroyo was in danger.

Smart folks in the San Gabriel Valley traveled to their new jobs in burgeoning, turn-of-the-century Los Angeles by working their way south along Figueroa Street, west of the arroyo, or via Huntington Drive and Henry Huntington’s Big Red Cars.

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But the needs of transport knocked early at Los Angeles’ doors; the use of cars grew exponentially during the 1920s and 1930s. Immigration and the end of the Depression fueled commerce and industry, and demand increased for a quick, direct route between Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley. The time had come for the Arroyo Seco Parkway, opening the era of freeways, the cultural symbol of Southern California.

The 8.3-mile parkway, built at a cost of $5.7 million, would share the route of the arroyo with the concrete channel designed to carry storm runoffs south. It opened with great civic ceremony Dec. 30, 1940, with orations by Gov. Culbert L. Olson and Los Angeles Mayor Fletcher Bowron. Pasadena celebrated the great event two days later with its 51st annual Rose Parade, and the American Society of Civil Engineers subsequently deemed the parkway the prototype for modern urban freeways.

The Cahuenga (Hollywood) freeway soon followed, and introduced another Southern California phenomenon: the traffic crunch. Big trucks were allowed on the Hollywood route and other freeways to come, but banned then and now from the Pasadena.

Less than a year later, world war came to America, and as Southern California’s aircraft plants geared up to produce for the war effort, the parkway would play its own, offbeat role in civil defense.

At night, cars moved slowly under blackout conditions. Headlights were dimmed with various devices to prevent detection by enemy aircraft. In an open area beside the parkway, a dummy airfield was erected, with logs simulating planes in hopes that any marauding aircraft would dump their bombs there instead of on the aircraft plants, many of which were draped in camouflage netting for concealment.

Spin forward 60 years. Los Angeles County alone has 1,200 miles of freeway. Seven million cars are registered in Los Angeles, Orange and Ventura counties.

Reassuringly, perhaps, some things don’t change; the Hollywood Freeway is still a traffic mess.