Before the Freeway: The Pueblo, the Ranch, and the Red Car

Before the Freeway: The Pueblo, the Ranch, and the Red Car

On a morning in late September, when the Santa Ana winds have yet to descend from the mountain passes and the air still carries the marine layer's cool dampness, Los Angeles reveals itself differently than it does to most visitors or even most residents. Drive east from the Pacific on the 10 Freeway in the earliest hours, before sunrise, when the commuters have not yet claimed their lanes and the asphalt still holds something like stillness, and you can see it—the shape of the city beneath the city. There, in the flatness of the basin floor, in the corridor carved by the Los Angeles River between the Santa Monica Mountains to the north and the string of hills that includes the Hollywood Hills and the San Gabriel Mountains beyond, you can trace the contours of what this place was before the concrete and the steel and the endless motion of ten million people. You can see, in the negative space between the structures, the ghost of the old ranchos. You can sense the Tongva villages where shopping malls now stand. You can imagine the route of the Red Cars threading through neighborhoods that have forgotten they were ever connected to anything beyond their own streets.

This book is about engines—about the machines that have powered Los Angeles and, increasingly, the world—but it begins in a time before engines. It begins in the time of the Tongva, of the missions, of the ranchos, of the pueblo. It begins with the Pacific Electric Railway, the most ambitious mass transit system the world had ever seen, which connected a dispersed region in ways that would both anticipate and ultimately be destroyed by the automobile. Understanding this pre-freeway landscape is essential to understanding what we lost when the car arrived—and, perhaps more surprisingly, what we gained.

The Geography That Made It Possible

Los Angeles did not have to exist. The city that sprawls across more than four hundred square miles of southern California today, home to more people than live in most nations, arose from a particular convergence of geography and climate that was both blessing and curse, that made possible the greatest automobile-dependent metropolis in human history while simultaneously containing the seeds of its most profound challenges.

The physical setting defies easy description. Los Angeles is not a single place but a collection of places—valleys and basins and coastal plains separated by ridges and ranges that create distinct neighborhoods of geography as well as culture. At its heart lies the Los Angeles Basin, a broad alluvial plain that was, in its natural state, a mosaic of grassland, coastal sage scrub, and riparian corridors along the rivers and streams that radiated outward from the San Gabriel Mountains to the north. The basin is bounded by the Pacific Ocean to the west and south, by the Santa Ana Mountains to the southeast, and by the Repetto Hills and Puente Hills to the east. Through this flat terrain, the Los Angeles River once meandered in a shallow channel, its banks lined with willows and cottonwoods, its waters teeming with steelhead and spawning grounds that the indigenous people had used for millennia.

North of the basin, the Santa Monica Mountains create a barrier between the coastal plain and the San Fernando Valley beyond. Two passes—Sepulveda and La Cañada Flintridge—provided relatively gentle routes through the mountains, but for most of human history, these were significant obstacles to movement. The Santa Clarita Valley and the Antelope Valley lay beyond, connected to the basin by routes that wound through the Tejon Pass or the Cajon Pass, the latter a natural corridor that would become one of the most important transportation routes in California.

To the east, the San Gabriel Mountains rise abruptly from the basin floor, their peaks reaching elevations of more than ten thousand feet. These mountains capture moisture from Pacific storms, creating a rain shadow effect that moderates the climate of the basin while simultaneously feeding the rivers and aquifers that would later sustain a metropolis. The San Fernando Valley, hemmed in by these mountains on three sides, created a second basin of sorts, a place apart, its own distinct geography within the larger geography of the region.

This fragmented landscape of valleys separated by hills and mountains might have made Los Angeles impossible. In an era before mechanized transportation, such terrain made regional integration difficult, kept communities isolated, limited the scale of economic activity. And yet the same geography that created barriers also created something essential: a Mediterranean climate that would prove irresistible to settlers from more hostile environments.

The climate of Los Angeles is, by any reasonable measure, remarkable. Average temperatures range from the mid-fifties Fahrenheit in winter to the mid-seventies in summer, with relatively modest variation between seasons. Rainfall averages about fifteen inches annually—enough to support vegetation but not enough to create the mud and cold that characterized the climate of the Pacific Northwest or the northeastern United States. The sun shines on more than three hundred days per year. The marine layer, pushed inland by the Pacific High pressure system, provides natural air conditioning during summer months, its cool fog moderating temperatures and creating the famous "June Gloom" that blankets the coast in morning clouds before burning off in afternoon sun.

This climate made outdoor work possible year-round. It made the cultivation of citrus and other specialty crops viable, crops that required consistent warmth but could be damaged by frost. It made possible a way of life in which the boundaries between indoor and outdoor, between work and leisure, were blurrier than in other regions. And it made the region attractive to people from places where such conditions seemed miraculous—a factor that would prove decisive in the city's explosive twentieth-century growth.

The natural harbor proved equally important. While San Francisco Bay would emerge as the dominant port on the California coast, the harbor at San Pedro Bay—with its combination of deep water, protected anchorage, and proximity to the Los Angeles River mouth—offered significant advantages for regional commerce. The harbor was not as dramatic as San Francisco's, not as obviously suited to maritime activity, but it was sufficient. And as rail connections linked the harbor to the interior, as shipping technology evolved to allow larger vessels and more efficient cargo handling, the Port of Los Angeles would grow to become one of the busiest ports in the world.

But the geography that made Los Angeles possible also contained limitations that would shape its development in ways that only became apparent in the automobile age. The lack of a major river for barge traffic, the limited natural waterways for transportation, the difficulty of connecting the various valleys and basins—these factors meant that Los Angeles would always be dependent on artificial transportation systems, on roads and rails and eventually freeways. The city that would become synonymous with the automobile was, from its very origins, a city that had to engineer its own connectivity.

The First Angelenos: The Tongva People

Long before the Spanish arrived, long before the missions and the ranchos and the pueblo, the land that would become Los Angeles was home to human beings who had adapted to its geography and climate over thousands of years. The Tongva, also known as the Gabrielino people after the nearby San Gabriel mission, were the indigenous inhabitants of the Los Angeles Basin, the coastal area from the Santa Monica Mountains to San Diego, and the offshore Channel Islands. Their presence on this land extended back at least seven thousand years, and their culture had evolved to take full advantage of the region's resou