Hills Yielded Early to Make Way for the City’s Traffic

A hundred years before the Red Line subway began whisking passengers under the Cahuenga Pass, Los Angeles was already a city with “tunnel vision.”

Maneuvering through downtown Los Angeles in the early 20th century meant climbing over its many hills and ridges -- or boring through them, which is what transportation engineers did to clear paths for horses, buggies and trolley cars. Even then, officials embraced the idea of speeding up traffic.

Now one such tunnel has been unearthed. But the Hill Street tunnel will soon disappear under tons of earth to make way for Central Los Angeles Area New High School No. 9, which will focus on the performing arts.

For 50 years, ending in 2003, the Hill Street tunnel served as an archive of sorts for the Los Angeles Unified School District. Its treasures included school board reports and journals written in Spanish that dated to the early 1850s, and century-old school furniture, according to archivist Stone Ishimaru.

For a dozen years, he cataloged the district’s valuables, which were scattered across its nearly 700 square miles and more than 600 schools. They included Greek, Roman and Etruscan urns, rare books and more than 350 paintings, donated by graduating classes or benefactors and destined for a future museum.

The first “tunnel tube,” as The Times called it, was the Broadway tunnel, which opened in January 1901. It cut under Ft. Moore Hill, across the freeway from what is now Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral. The nearly 800-foot-long tunnel cut 15 minutes off horse-and-carriage travel time, sparing travelers the trip over or around the hill.

It ran from what is now Broadway and Cesar Chavez Avenue to what is now the back door of the closed Hall of Justice, near Aliso Street.

About the same time, the Third Street tunnel opened under Bunker Hill, ushering horses, wagons and eventually cars into downtown -- as it does today.

The “treasure tunnel” used by the school district did not open until 1909, when it was dedicated to the flourishing trolley system. It, too, touched Ft. Moore Hill, paralleling the Broadway tunnel and taking trolleys on the L.A.-Hollywood route for about three blocks beneath Hill Street. Soon it became a double tunnel, allowing automobiles to drive alongside the trolleys.

The speed of construction, the reported skimping on materials, and the less-than-meticulous craftsmanship in all three tunnels claimed several lives and inflicted injuries.

The worst disaster happened in the Third Street tunnel on Jan. 21, 1900. As workers bored through Bunker Hill, a landslide killed three workmen and injured nine others. A month earlier, three workmen had been seriously hurt in separate cave-ins at the same site.

The contractors declared they had no liability for workers accidentally injured or killed on the job. City officials agreed that, since it had been an accident, no liability could be attached.

Angry Los Angeles trade unionists lobbied Sacramento for years to get workers’ compensation legislation for such laborers. It took more than a decade, but in 1911 state legislators enacted a voluntary plan for compensation. Two years later, benefits were made compulsory, regardless of fault.

The concrete-and-brick Broadway tunnel opened in 1901, but someone forgot to install lights, “leaving drivers to depend on their horses to find the way,” The Times reported. The flooring was wooden planking, easier for the horses to negotiate than concrete or brick. It was also quieter for nearby residents and cheaper for taxpayers.

When a city councilman went to inspect the newly opened tunnel, some young thugs dropped a rock from above the tunnel archway, splitting his scalp open.

Speculation was that the attack had been retaliation for his efforts to pass an ordinance prohibiting the adolescent pleasures of playing ball in the street and the use of slingshots and air guns. The councilman recovered, and his assailants were never found.

The Broadway tunnel recorded some cheerier headlines in November 1906, when a San Francisco contractor named Fernando Nelson “smashed all automobile records by three hours between San Francisco and Los Angeles, covering 504 miles in a 1906 40-horsepower Columbia in 18 hours, 13 minutes,” The Times reported.

Nelson drove triumphantly through the Broadway tunnel, “with horn tooting loudly and his joyous passengers cheering to the limit of their lung strengths.”

In 1916, when the Broadway tunnel was upgraded and rededicated, engineers found that 16 years earlier contractors had skimped on the thickness of the concrete walls, which had to be reinforced. Electric lights were installed, along with sidewalks on both sides of the tunnel -- and an elevator shaft to whisk pedestrians to the top of the hill. There was money for the elevator shaft but not the elevator; it was never installed.

Mayor Charlie Sebastian christened the upgraded tunnel with California orange juice.

The Second Street tunnel -- still in operation, and still lined with glazed tiles that make it a favorite for moviemakers -- opened in 1924.

A year later, the city’s first subway opened at Fourth and Hill streets. It ran for about a mile, 65 feet beneath Bunker and Crown hills, before surfacing at the intersection of Beverly and Glendale boulevards.

From there, the trolley swayed west in the open air.

Tunnels spread around the city, even to Griffith Park. Some are still in use. But local taxpayers were beginning to call them wasteful roads to nowhere. Supporters countered that they were vital to ease traffic congestion downtown and to save time going around the hills.

In the 1930s, the problem was money, all right -- but not taxpayers’ money. Tunnels became criminal havens -- the scenes of shootouts between police and bank robbers or drug lords and the haunts of “running board bandits” who terrorized female drivers by leaping onto running boards and stealing purses, sometimes at gunpoint. The bodies of murder victims were often dumped in tunnels. And pedestrians were known to pass out from car exhaust during the two- or three-block-long walk through the tunnels.

In 1933, residents did some tunneling themselves. A man with a metal detector joined forces with two men who had a parchment treasure map allegedly leading to Spanish gold. They began digging above the Broadway and Hill Street tunnels. City officials struck a bargain with the trio -- a 50-50 split of whatever they found. Spurred on by dreams of wealth, the gold-diggers tunneled vertically for 22 feet -- striking no gold, but nearly striking the tunnels.

City officials were reluctant to give up on dreams of a wealth of new public funds. They tried to auction off the 230,000 cubic yards of dirt that had been shoveled out of the hill. A dirt-cheap bid of $11 came in from one cynical fellow. City fathers instead ordered the dirt to be dumped at the site of the new Union Station’s boarding platforms, which were under construction.

In the 1930s, the top and sides of Ft. Moore Hill were sliced away for Spring Street’s realignment. A decade later, the Broadway tunnel was removed to make way for the Hollywood Freeway, as was the Hill Street automobile tunnel.

The excavation exposed bones and coffins from an old cemetery atop the hill, as well as bottles and utensils of some great age -- but still no gold.

Most of the 1.4 million cubic yards of dirt excavated in that process was used to create a mini-mountain covered with trees and shrubs in Elysian Park.

In September 1950, the Hill Street trolley tunnel closed. It was plugged at both ends but left empty in the middle. A stairway and an elevator were installed from a school building to the deep tunnel. The place became a school district warehouse and a passageway to history.

Ft. Moore Hill’s past includes more than tunnels. In 1847, it became a lookout post for the fledgling pueblo during the Mexican War, taking its name from Army Capt. Benjamin Moore, who died in battle.

During the war and until the 1880s, it was the city’s first non-Catholic graveyard. It also served as an execution spot and, later, a posh neighborhood and the site of two schools -- a reminder that the past is prologue.