Listen to the Stories of a Long and Winding Road
Metaphorically speaking, people play a bit fast and loose with the road. They talk about the call of the road, the song of the road, the road of life, which is all well and good, but no one ever mentions which road exactly, and that’s a mistake. Especially in Los Angeles.
The call of Larchmont Avenue is decidedly different from the call of Reseda Boulevard, and so many of our thoroughfares are shape shifters, changing personas as they wend through different lands, impossible to capture in a word, a phrase, a picture-postcard paragraph. Like people, the streets of L.A. have personalities years in the making, origins that might surprise you, and endings subtle or dramatic.
Take San Fernando Road, which I do every day. Or rather I take a portion of San Fernando, from just south of the 2 to where it fades into Avenue 20 at Broadway just north of downtown. For the few miles I travel, San Fernando runs along the railroad tracks, veering west for four blocks at the very last minute. I like it because it moves. There are few traffic lights along this stretch and little traffic; the trains are fun to watch and every once in a while, I’ll spot a fleet of FedEx trucks pulling out of the nearby hub. A line of FedEx trucks is inherently hilarious, so white and officious and busy.
I love San Fernando Road; I visit it every day; I introduce it to all my friends; I think of it as one of the family. So imagine my dismay upon discovering that, as a whole, it is perhaps the most relentlessly unattractive stretch of road in the greater L.A. area.
It is an elderly street, even by Los Angeles terms, having served since the late 1700s as the main connector between the pueblo and the San Fernando Mission. When the Southern Pacific Railroad began offering service in 1874, the tracks followed the road, and less than 100 years later, the Golden State Freeway followed suit. So for the majority of its 40-odd miles, San Fernando Road hugs either track or freeway, hedged on either side by the kinds of establishments so often drawn to the gravelly shores of train tracks and offramps. Auto repair yards, storage units, factory outlets and big-rig depots, electric plants and waste management facilities, building-material and recycling centers, and some of the sadder, most run-down motels you have ever seen, with wincingly hopeful names like the Mountain View Motel. These are often flanked by small Mexican eateries advertising cold beer, and liquor stores, the necessity of which is abundantly clear.
Not all is gray and grim. In Glendale there are a couple of nice moments--the now-defunct but still retro Seeley Furniture store, the Harley-Davidson shop. Likewise, several blocks of San Fernando Road make up part of Burbank’s burgeoning Old Towne--the road is interrupted for several blocks by the Media Center Mall. The stretch through the town of San Fernando has the head-in-parking charm of a small-town main street (the preponderance of wedding stores is a bit baffling). But these are mile-or-two bits at best, and in between, through Sunland and Sylmar, from San Fernando to Santa Clarita there is no getting away from the sheer ugliness of the route. This is a working road, baby, with no time for red-brick crosswalks or terra cotta flower boxes. This road is all about moving freight, from one end of the San Fernando Valley to the other, long before there were freeways.
Still, for several miles just south of Newhall, the road all but disappears beneath a tangle of overpasses as the 405, then the 5 and the 14 roar overhead, subsumed then by Sierra Highway, only to reemerge, like the sun and the blue sky from the morning haze of the L.A. basin, with the rugged hills of Santa Clarita. For a final few miles, San Fernando runs through Newhall, past the William S. Hart park, and the Canyon Theater Guild until it ends at last at a fork for Magic Mountain Parkway and Bouquet Canyon.
Auto-parts emporiums abound, but there is a certain charm to Newhall. It’s as good a place for a working road to end as any. End, or begin, depending on what place San Fernando occupies in your life, what image you see when you close your eyes in the night when the driving is done.
*
Mary McNamara is at mary.mcnamara@latimes.com.
