A superhighway without information.
It was on this day, in 1940, that the Arroyo-Seco Parkway, the first freeway in
the western United States, was dedicated.
As we learn from an
official California site about the parkway:
Alternatively termed an "engineering marvel" and the "big ditch", the facility became the prototype of
the Los Angeles Freeway system.
And not just any prototype! The prototype for the freeways of Los Angeles! Freeways
that are (I admit that I'm biased) among the wonders of the modern world. There
are people who might see them as a blight, but for those who have had repeated
personal experience with them, they hold a special attraction. Joan Didion, in
her book Play it as it Lays (in a passage for which I've been searching
for years) wonderfully describes their pull:
Once she was on the freeway and had maneuvered her
way to a fast lane she turned on the radio at high volume and she drove. She
drove the San Diego to the Harbor, the Harbor up to the Hollywood, the Hollywood
to the Golden State, the Santa Monica, the Santa Ana, the Pasadena, the Ventura.
She drove it as a riverman runs a river, every day more attuned to its currents,
its deceptions, and just as a riverman feels the pull of the rapids in the lull
between sleeping and waking, so Maria lay at night in the still of Beverly Hills
and saw the great signs soar overhead at seventy miles an hour, Normandie
1/4 Vermont 3/4 Harbor Fwy 1. Again and again she returned to an intricate
stretch just south of the interchange where successful passage from the Hollywood
onto the Harbor required a diagonal move across four lanes of traffic. On the
afternoon she finally did it without once braking or once losing the beat on
the radio she was exhilarated, and that night she slept dreamlessly.
(full quote at: http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/queerla/didion.html)
And perhaps, in its inevitable obsolescence, the Arroro-Seco was an additional
sort of prototype. From the previous official California site:
Like other Los Angeles area freeways, the road was at
its design capacity before it was even built. Consequently, the planned emergency
shoulder was converted into a travel lane during construction.
Through frequent and continuous travel, I developed a deep respect, perhaps even
a love, for the freeways of Los Angeles. There's something pleasing in learning
that the parkway has been deemed a
federal scenic byway. I knew that there was greatness in that concrete and
asphalt. But I didn't necessarily know that they were historic landmarks. In a
style similar to Monsieur Jourdain, I thought I
was simply traveling on a road.
It's an honor to be able to give them part of the respect they deserve.
Go to: Fort PC.