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All Are Aboard to Fix Up Old Trolley Stop

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Jim Gulbranson remembers the clicketyclack of the old Red Cars operated by the Pacific Electric Railway.

The trusty trolley traveled to all points in Los Angeles, and Gulbranson fondly recalls riding it to get to school, its cars slightly sashaying from left to right on the tracks.

Now, as a testament to that long-gone transit system, he and other preservationists are thrilled that the last remaining streetcar depot, which sits on a dusty North Hollywood lot across from the other red cars--the new Metro Rail Red Line subway--is finally on its way to preservation.

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Community Redevelopment Agency officials said Friday that an architectural firm specializing in historic structures has been hired and more than $1 million in local and federal funding has been secured for the restoration.

The Hollywood architect, M2A, will develop rehabilitation plans for the boarded-up wooden structure which was built in 1896 as a Southern Pacific train depot.

A Dec. 13 community meeting at 6 p.m. at El Portal Theater will help determine the future use of the renovated station. Some area residents want a museum, others envision it as headquarters for the Chamber of Commerce, and a few have suggested a restaurant be included.

“This is the last of the Mohicans,” said Guy Weddington McCreary, a local historian and chairman of a local Chamber of Commerce transportation committee. “Most of them have burned down. This is the last great station.”

Most casual observers today, however, might be unaware of the station’s proud past.

After serving as a train depot for many years, it later was used by the Pacific Electric Railway as a stop for its streetcars.

McCreary is the great-grandson of Wilson C. Weddington, who in 1911 helped drive the gold spike that marked the arrival of the Red Car rail service to the Valley.

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In the early 1900s, North Hollywood was the center of activity in the Valley, McCreary said, and the Red Car stop on Lankershim and Chandler boulevards was a key station.

After the Red Cars stopped running in the Valley in 1952, the depot was leased in 1959 to Hendricks Builders Supply. In 1991, the MTA bought the property from Southern Pacific and continued to lease the old redwood building to Hendricks until 1993.

Preservationists are especially pleased they were able to convince the MTA to set aside a small portion of the dusty Lankershim Boulevard parcel to recreate a landscaped gateway to the station. Photographs taken in 1919 show a small palm-shaded square that served as an entrance to the depot.

When the MTA recently decided it needed to pave over the parcel where the depot sits to add temporary parking for the subway across the street, community members rallied to create the pocket park.

The transit agency will start construction by Christmas on the new temporary lot, which will add about 218 parking places for subway users who have been frustrated by the full lot across the street.

MTA officials were persuaded that recreating a garden was more important than paving over history and only about 10 new parking spots would be lost.

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By 2003, another form of transportation will begin service near the depot. A rapid busway, most likely using the 65-foot-long articulated buses that look like caterpillars, will run along Chandler Boulevard. The MTA has said the busway will speed passengers from Warner Center to the North Hollywood subway station.

In the meantime, the depot may begin renovation as early as April, said Lillian Burkenheim, a CRA project manager.

Gulbranson, 58, a curator with the San Fernando Valley Historical Society, pointed out the rusty remnants of the Red Car rail tracks. Someday, he dreams, an old Red Car could be placed on those tracks as part of a museum.

He’s ridden the new Red Line subway, which he says is “fast and quiet and whisks you underground.” But visitors to a historic Red Car exhibit, across the street from the subway, could take a trip back in time to an era when a train ride was much slower, and more scenic.

“We would see the orange, lemon, olive and walnut groves,” Gulbranson remembered of his boyhood treks on the Red Car.

“It would be reliving something that should never have left us,” added McCreary. “It’s back to the future.”

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