On Los Angeles and its streets

My favorite reads of the week have been Thomas Curwen's musings on Los Angeles and the automobile in the Times' commemorative issue of the Highway One section. About Mulholland Drive, the time warp that winds through the Santa Monica Mountains for 55 miles (some of it still unpaved), Curwen writes that it is at heart a driver's road, the perfect strip of asphalt for steering a sports car, "an open invitation to forget about efficiency and expediency and experience a Los Angeles long lost to freeways, traffic and modern life."

Dusty and rugged, ethereal and dark, Mulholland holds truths about Los Angeles that are lost in the flatlands. Gary Cooper, James Dean and Steve McQueen heard the siren call of its S's and hairpins. David Hockney discovered a new city in its steep canyons, David Lynch found a dreamscape in its night and Michael Stipe said goodbye to the 20th century from its lonely overlooks....

When Mulholland Drive was completed in 1924, the city took the day off. It was just after Christmas, and the daylong celebration began in Calabasas.

William Mulholland, the man who stole water from the gods, was the honoree. It being Prohibition, he smashed a bottle of Owens Valley's finest over a foot-long key that opened a padlock to a floral gate stretched across the road. City fathers in fedoras squeezed in for photos, beaming in no small part over the $200,000 that remained from the $1 million bond issue.

Curwen also pays deserving tribute to a founding document of the Automobile Age city, published the same year that Mulholland Drive opened. The Major Traffic Street Plan, devised by hired-gun city planners Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., Harland Bartholomew and Charles H. Cheney, proposed a radical solution for Los Angeles to solve the traffic congestion then choking the narrow streets. Its central premise was that, even in 1924, "the street traffic congestion problem of Los Angeles is exceeded by that of no other city.” Expand selected avenues and streets—about a mile apart—into boulevards and in spots build what passed in the 1920s for expressways, Olmsted and pals urged.

It went to a vote and the public bought it. Out of the 1924 plan we got driving landmarks like Riverside Drive, the Arroyo Seco Parkway and Olympic Boulevard—and Wilshire Boulevard as a wide concourse of commerce from downtown to the ocean, with a cut across MacArthur Park. Wilshire, the plan urged, should be elevated to elite status and be “notably handsome and artistically impressive.”

Photo: Los Angeles Times