Watch me walk across La Cañada’s freeway cap park over the 210 freeway
Last week, I attended the Friends of Park 101 meeting in El Pueblo where a panel of city planning experts and an urban conscious audience converged to discuss the exciting future of capping the 101 freeway through Downtown LA with a park.
As most of us know by now, the construction of freeways have single-handedly destroyed our communities by severing them and creating social chasms with deep psychological divisions within our urban fabric. Nevertheless, urban parks designed around people are just what we need to reconnect the city’s communities we lost to the automobile.
The 101 freeway began construction through Downtown LA in 1949 and would permanently scar the built environment as it sliced through the city. Today, the birth place of our city, El Pueblo, along with Chinatown and Union Station are severed from the rest of Downtown LA by the trench known as the 101 freeway, connected tenuously with a few barren overpasses that are anti-pedestrian at best.
What should be a strong connection between the two areas of Downtown LA–ideally melded together seamlessly–is sadly not the case. Instead, to cross from one side to the other as a pedestrian (not a driver!) along the concrete overpasses (over the 101 freeway trench) is a textbook example of the most egregious kind of urban planning gone horribly awry. No wonder nary a pedestrian can be spotted in the second largest city in the country.
As the rest of Downtown LA continues to go through an amazing urban renaissance, it is even more important that we continue that momentum by bridging together the very historic heart of our city with the bulk of Downtown LA. And the 101 Cap Park Project is just the answer to fix this urban planning conundrum.
Cities like Seattle and Dallas have completed their own freeway cap parks, and we need to look no further than our own backyard in Los Angeles County, seen in the video above of La Cañada Flintridge’s 210 freeway cap park, to apply a perfect example of what we can do to ameliorate the damage done by the freeway.
Let’s reconnect our city by capping the 101 freeway trench…
…with this example of a freeway cap park in La Cañada Flintridge
Click here for an aerial view of La Cañada’s freeway cap park.
I do believe this can be Downtown’s single most transformative project in our lifetimes.
Couldnt agree more Steve.
This would be a major milestone in the urban gentrification of the DTLA area into an ideal central core. The park should somehow have a connection with union station, and would really be the driving force for a complete urban renewal from Downtown to Hollywood. Pasadena should consider this same option over the 210 freeway between Fair Oaks and Lake ave overpasses.
I don’t like to read articles about this because I want it so much.
This is similar (but in a reverse kind of way) to Boston’s Big Dig. They shoved the highway underground and rebuilt streets and grassy areas above it at street level. While the city really hasn’t made the most of it in terms of how to use and develop the space, it has completely transformed how that area feels and re-connected neighborhoods that were separated.
@Brudy – totally agree. The thing is, this freeway cap cap park would be even less intrusive or complicated than Boston’s Big Dig as the freeway is already in a trench. We just need to cover and add green space. What this plan ultimately needs is a champion to fight for funds etc. and vocal support from the downtown community.
Sounds great in theory.. but what will you do with auto and diesel emissions? Many, many studies have shown that air quality within the first 1/2 mile of a major freeway is full of auto particulate matter. Having children with developing lungs running and breathing deeply in this air is not a good idea, in my opinion.
Perhaps twenty years from now when electric and/or fuel cell autos and trucks rule the road, then I would love to have a freeway capped park.
Well, the more greenery and trees you add, the more pollution will be absorbed. Great excuse for overly greening the immediate surroundings of a cap park!
You mean 20 years from now, when say the funding, planning and construction is completed? Great, well we’d better move quickly then.
This is great reporting. Maybe they should do this in Glendale over the 134 freeway to link the north and south and rejuvenate its office market, then they could do the 210 through Pasadena, and the 110 freeway through downtown, and dare I say possibly even the LA RIVER!! cap those divides then we would have a real start to a more united LA once again. To see an aerial rendering of green parcels capping the 110 freeway downtown, 101 freeway downtown, and the LA River downtown and I am pushing my luck but also having the LA River’s concrete lining dug up and allowing for natural dirt and grass as it was intended as a natural waterway with kayakers, bikers and hikers trekking from downtown to Glendale Hyperion and beyond WOW in our lifetime?
Almost anything could be less complicated or intrusive than the big dig! :-)
If you think about the experience of walking to/from Chinatown or Union Station and downtown, this would create a wonderful seamless experience. Combined with Civic Park, that whole area would be remade and redefined and what most people think of the northern boundary of downtown would be extended to the top of chinatown.
I think it’s a tremendous idea and I hope Park 101 comes to fruition. Even Dallas has jumped on the bandwagon and is in the final construction stage of a similar project. http://www.theparkdallas.org/
I grew up in La Cañada, and was at that park quite a bit while I was growing up. One of the local elementary schools is very close to memorial park.
I’d love to see a park over the 101 in downtown. It would be great to reconnect Chinatown and El Pueblo to the rest of downtown.
I’ve always felt that another cap park opportunity could be over the 110 in City West starting at 7th St on the south spanning north to Wilshire Blvd or 6th St. The growing pocket of residential and office space in City West has a pretty bleak connection to the rest of downtown, forcing folks to walk over the gnarly 110 or hop on a DASH/Metro bus to access the rest of downtown. Some green space here would not only soften that walk, but add much-needed park space convenient not only to City West and the Financial District, but also to the dense neighborhood of Westlake.
I couldn’t agree more Alika! We could also, in the meantime, make those bridges over the 110 a lot nicer to walk on by adding nicer railings, street lamps, and pots with plants in the them. The current railings are so short, any taller person walking on the bridge would feel pretty vulnerable from falling over!