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Nearly $10 Million Owed to LAUSD by Teachers Who Were Mistakenly Overpaid
This week, the Metro Transportation Library debuted an impressive set of historical maps depicting transit lines and proposals for routes and systems. Among the multiple versions of our current subway system and systems long come and gone is a proposed monorail from 1960, the transit vision for LA in 1974, the map produced based on the Kelker-Deleuw study of 1925 (when the city's first subway was built), and a map from the time when the Red Line was called the Orange Line.
The oldest map of the bunch is from 1906, and it shows the city's expansive streetcar system, including the Pacific Electric and LARy (Los Angeles Railroad) routes. So take a ride on memory lane rails and consider what was...and what could be.
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So I can I thank GE & Standard Oil & Firestone now or later for ruining all this.
Holy crap, looking at the old streetcar maps makes me horrendously angry.
Me too. It's hard not to get angry to look at what we lost to an unsustainable car culture and auto industry lobbying.
The good news is that times are changing. The passage of Measure R means we will actually create the foundation of a real transit system.
Streetcars will even be returning to Los Angeles in a few years.
http://www.lastreetcar.org/
'grats, LA! a hundred years of progress!
my dad is going to love this. he grew up in boyle heights in the 40's. i remember him telling me about streetcars in los angeles when i was a wee lass.
Every now and then I like to send Metro or the city council haranguing emails asking them to rebuild the streetcar system. Its a shame, and most of the rail lines are still there, jut buried beneath a few inches of asphalt.
The Downtown Pomona library (lower-level) has a framed original red-car map showing the routes from Redondo (Hermosa?) Beach to Big Bear and just about anywhere
in-between. I agree with the earlier comments about it being a shame that they're no longer here due to the greed of a few near-sighted business interests.
those are some pretty fascinating maps... although I have to admit, any monorail built to 1960 standards would start to look pretty dated and grungy pretty quickly.... the Disneyland monorail has not aged well at all, IMHO. Even the Vegas monorail is more of a toy than a serious transit option.
and as impressive as those old streetcar maps were, they really should have converted more of them to subway lines... if they had put more lines underground, maybe more of them might have survived.
but I guess our "leaders" at the time were afraid of becoming more like NYC....