Health & Fitness
Blog History: Glendale Boulevard's Electric Railway
When the Los Angeles City Council decided not to municipalize the trolley but instead to subsidize streets and highways, it killed the electric railway.
In “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” (1988) the psychopathic cartoon “Doom” takes over Pacific Electric system of trolley cars under the name Cloverleaf Industries. The Cloverleaf logo is a freeway cloverleaf. Doom (played by Christopher Lloyd) plots to own Toontown so that the city will build freeways to replace the trolleys: Doom intends to build "restaurants serving rapidly prepared food" and “billboards beautiful billboards as far as the eye can see.”
The film is a fictive map of portions of Edendale.
Toontown is Toonerville--Atwater Village where the Disney animators went for lunch everyday. A car rampage on the Hyperion Bridge in the film frames the location. In real life, at the end of the bridge in “Red Car Park” in Atwater is a mural of a Red Car. Its number is “90039.” Traffic debouches from the Golden State Freeway (“the Five”) some yards away.
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Beginning in 1904, the trolley traveled along the median of Allessandro (Glendale Boulevard). http://www.erha.org/pewgb.html. The electric train stopped running in 1955. The City pulled up the tracks in 1965.
In real history, local and state government subsidies to real estate developers with streets and highways and the City Council's refusal to municipalize the public transportation system's most vital component killed the Red Car. (Robert Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis, 1993).
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Footings from the old Pacific Electric viaduct stand on a hill on Fletcher Drive near Riverside. Climb to the top of the hill past the guerrilla garden and you'll arrive at the old electric train easement.
Follow it past turn of the 20th century houses, an arm chair, cactus and a municipal stairway to a fence. Go through the opening in the fence and enter an oasis of improbable quiet at the other end of which is a grass field. Cars roar by on the Two Freeway.
Turn then towards the San Gabriel Mountains on Corralitas Drive, go through the underpass under the Two and up Rosebud to Sunflower and look down at Doom's vision: mangled congested noisy freeway loops that blight the once edenic vista.