Salvation Army Bell Shelter: An Environmental Case Study
General
Freeway System Development
The Los Angeles freeway system is laid over a palimpsest of historical transportation networks in the area: early indigenous and Spanish colonial trails, the steam railroads, the railways of Pacific Electric, automotive highways. Note the continuity of transportation routes, indicative of an increasingly dispersed urban setting.
Footpaths and raodways of indigenous groups and Spanish settlers, pre-1860.
Railroad system, post-1860.
Pacific Electric Railway, 1925
Automotive highways, 1930
Freeway system, 1950
Symbolism
Freeways figure into much of the Los Angeles mythology, in line with the pleasant weather and the movie industry. Angelinos' great reliance on the freeway to traverse the city makes any discussion about Los Angeles incomplete without mention of the city's expansive intaglio of concrete structures.
An advertisement for the 1979 Los Angeles International Film Exposition. Note the juxtaposition of the freeway (made to appear like a strip of film) and the Hollywood sign; both are significant symbols in L.A. mythology.
On the other, freeways may be taken for their contributions to the drawbacks of modern society: air and noise pollution, traffic congestion, the uprooting of communities, etc.
In this regard, freeways harken back to tensions inherent in the American agrarian tradition: the pastoral versus the industrial. These tensions are embodied in the 19th century Romantic and Transcendentalist movements in which leading figures like Henry David Thoreau suggested an Edenic "fall" as result of Man's incursions on nature: "When I consider that the nobler animals have been exterminated here... I cannot help but feel as if i lived in a tamed... emasculated country."
Thoreau's views have not been lost on more modern interpretations. Richard Lillard writes in Eden in Jeopardy that "As 1970 draws near, and the Age of Superhighways is at hand, many Californians see as a new menace the white serpentine tentales of concrete that wind around communities and smother the environment. Eden has become the world's biggest concrete asphalt desert." Malvina Reynolds' 1964 folk song "The Cement Octopus," contains a likeminded stanza:
Title. Double click me.
A mural by Sandy Bleifer beneath the Havenhurst overpass of the Ventura Freeway suggests the experience of sitting in traffic.
There's a cement octopus that sits in Sacramento, I think,
Gets red tape to eat, gasoline taxes to drink,
And it grows by day, and it grows by night,
And it rolls over everything in sight.
Oh stand by me and protect that tree
From the freeway misery.
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Freeway symbolism is more often than not negative. On one side, freeways may stand for the insensitivity and self-interestedness of large bureaucracies. In a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times, Owen B. Shoemaker complained of the "mutilation" and "the forced rape of this beautiful city by the freeway gang," referring to those administrations responsible for freeway planning such as the California Division of Highways and the Federal Highway Administration.
Wayne Thiebaud portrays metropolitan sprawl in his painting "Urban Freeways." Note the contrast between the incongruity of the freeways and the orderliness of the rows of palm trees.
It goes without saying that many of these metaphorical interpretations of the Los Angeles freeway system enlist biblical allusions (e.g. through serpentine imagery) to the Fall.
"Isle of California" (1972); This mural by Victor Henderson, Terry Schoonhoven, Jim Frazin, depicts what's left of California after a (presumable) "Fall." It is perhaps an example of Mother Nature pushing back.
The freeway bears an array of meanings in literature. Joan Didion portrays the freeway as something narcotic in her novel Play It As It Lays. The protagonist seeks escapism on the freeway, and a sense of place:
"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."
Simply thinking about the freeway has a psychotropic effect for the protagonist:
She had only the faintest ugly memory of what had brought BZ and Helen together, and to erase it from her mind she fixed her imagination on a needle drizzling sodium pentathol into her arm and began counting backward from one hundred. When that failed she imagined herself driving, conceived audacious lane changes, strategic shifts of gear, the Hollywood to the San Bernardino and straight on out, past Barstow, past Baker, driving straight on into the hard white empty core of the world. She slept and did not dream.
Thomas Pynchon gives the freeway no definitive meaning in The Crying of Lot 49. Rather, the freeway becomes a fluid symbol signifying at once the disorder of metropolitan sprawl and cogitative clarity. Pynchon reifies the standard metaphor of the freeway as a nourishing artery:
or pain.
What the road really was, she fancied, was this hypodermic needle, inserted somewhere ahead into the vein of a freeway, a vein nourishing the mainliner L.A., keeping it happy, coherent, protected from pain, or whatever passes, with a city, for pain... but were Oedipa some single melted crystal of urban horse, L.A., really, would be no less turned on for her absence.
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Pynchon shares with Joan Didion the same narcotic imagery of the freeway with the exception that rather than promising liberation, the freeway here only imposes the harsher reality of the individual's insignificance and confinement within the urban system.
Pynchon also draws on the tensions between pastoralism and industrialism. After a graveyard is bulldozed to make room for a right-of-way clearance, the protagonist contemplates the dandelions that grew in that same graveyard:
... as if their home cemetery in some way still did exist, in a land where you could somehow walk, and did not need the East San Narciso Freeway, and bones still could rest in peace, nourishing ghosts of dandelions, no one to plow them up. As if the dead really do persist...
There is also Los Angeles poet Lawrence Springarn whose "Freeway Problems" paints and overwhelming and oppressive portrait of the freeway:
There is no free time on the freeway:
Only a quick look in the rear mirror
To identify the black-jacketed pursuer
Roaring with his muffler out, gaining
On your best intentions, screaming
Curses through his windshield. Mister,
These days we all need safety belts.
And it is miles, more octane miles
To the rocker and the rug on your knees
The cat purring by the Franklin stove,
The victrola playing "Hearts and Flowers."
Have you heard your master's voice again
Or measured the cell for length and width?
Here's where the road ends an dark begins
Springarn offers and image of home amidst the freneticism of the freeway and caps it with an image of darkness. The poet redirects his audience away from the traditional sparring between the pastoral and the industrial and suggests there is something of far greater importance: the prospect of human mortality.