Yahoo Autos The Hollywood Freeway Is L.A.'s Own Glittering Gutter
From the June 2016 issue
Even in 1959, the Hollywood Freeway hummed with traffic.
The death screams of a 1948 Buick speedometer evoked the sound of a snowblower clearing piles of hubcaps. The grand broadsword of a pointer suddenly buried itself at 120 mph while the odometer switched to the mileage pacing of an SR-71 over Smolensk. After removing this big grandfather clock of an instrument, I set out for North Hollywood Speedometer, a shop known for working on “the old stuff.” I figured my transition through downtown Los Angeles would be hastened by my 10 a.m. departure, carefully timed to avoid the morning rush and beat the regular evening commuter rush that starts at 2:30 p.m. and lasts till 8. No such luck. Cars were crawling on the Hollywood Freeway like turtles on Ativan. With a sigh, I settled into my usual slouchy traffic brood: elbow sunk into the armrest, chin in palm, one finger hooked on the wheel. Having nothing better to do, I studied the shoulder detritus and the tire skids and paint smears on the wall. Over an endless mile, I passed several bumpers, many liberated wheel bolts, three smashed soccer balls, a red broom, shards of shipping pallets, a flattened cellphone, and bottles and cans of every description. In a city cursed daily for its traffic, this 11.8-mile asphalt-and-concrete Cocytus is a river of tears.
The 101, conceived as an express link between the city and its exploding suburbs, wends scenically toward the Cahuenga Pass and the San Fernando Valley beyond. It passes the famously stark-white mausoleum of City Hall, the Hollywood sign, the stacked discs of the Capitol Records building, the Hollywood Bowl, and the turreted former Château Élysée hotel from 1927, now serving as the Church of Scientology Celebrity Centre. It’s bathed in the phosphorescent glow of Hollywood and Highland, the epicenter of touristy L.A., where Grauman’s Chinese Theatre still gridlocks traffic during film premieres. On its best days, the Hollywood Freeway is a tour of La-La Land in 14 fabulous minutes. On its worst, it is a glutted gutter of garbage.
I’d like to say this wasn’t always so, that back when my old Buick was just another used car, traffic ran fast and free. But it’s always been this way. Within months of Bob Hope cutting a strip of movie film on April 15, 1954, to open the final segment of the freeway, engineers figured the 168,000 cars using it daily were its max capacity. Hope later said the $55 million project had built “the biggest parking lot in the world,” but it got worse. In 2014, the daily count past the exit for Universal Studios Hollywood averaged 270,000 cars.
Caltrans spent about $868,000 in fiscal year 2014–15 for maintenance of the Hollywood, a sum that included sending a “sweeper train” of trucks down the shoulders every six or seven weeks. “Literally, everything you would find in a common household, you find on the freeway,” says Caltrans District 7 spokesman Patrick Chandler. He rattles off a list: “TVs, computers, monitors, couches, beds, microwaves.” The sweeper train, escorted by a pair of CHPs, includes a pickup truck for the bulky items, a backup truck, and a couple of large trucks with giant vacuums and swirling brushes, one of the latter having a crash cushion on the back in case the impaired or the stupendously inattentive somehow can’t avoid it.
The Hollywood’s caretakers must also deal with modern “social issues,” including homeless encampments, suicide attempts, and, in recent years, the rampant theft of streetlight wiring and steel railings. Then there’s the unexpected, such as the time a truck dumped 840 sheets of drywall in the lanes, or the car carrier that scattered its load of SUVs. A Brink’s truck once dropped $7000 in quarters and dimes, creating the closest thing to an American street paved with gold. In 2010, members of the hip-hop band Imperial Stars, famous for exactly nothing else, parked a truck across three southbound lanes and started to perform their song “Traffic Jam 101” to a vigorous backbeat of honking. They were arrested moments before being killed.
There’s a permanent colony of feral fowl in the shrubs, rumored to have gotten there when a truck overturned years ago. The Hollywood Freeway chickens even have their own Wiki page. And most Angelinos remember the freeway house from ’07, when a resident got fed up with city life and decided to load his house on a trailer and move it out to the desert himself. After an overpass cleaned off the top few inches of the roof, however, the modest mid-century stucco sat blocking a lane for 11 days while roadway wags scribbled on it, “If you lived here, you’d be home by now” and “Easy freeway access.”
I went to pick up the rebuilt speedometer two weeks later, driving the 101 with fresh eyes. Caltrans is spending $19.3 million to repair the broken, beaten Hollywood with concrete panels that are cast and cured off-site and then dropped into place. The road is slowly shedding some of its patina. For those of us born in the latter half of the 20th century, freeways just are. They were here when we arrived and they seem to have the permanence of the moon and the mountains. But they all have a story to tell, and it’s a story about us.
