page_title: Arroyo Seco Parkway
section_title: Construction
hierarchical_section_title: Arroyo Seco Parkway / History / Construction
context_page_description: The Arroyo Seco Parkway, also known as the Pasadena Freeway, is the first freeway that was built in the United States. It connects Los Angeles with Pasadena alongside the Arroyo Seco seasonal river. It is notable not only for being the first, mostly opened in 1940, but for representing the transitional phase between early parkways and modern freeways. It conformed to modern standards when it was built, but is now regarded as a narrow, outdated roadway. A 1953 extension brought the south end to the Four Level Interchange in downtown Los Angeles and a connection with the rest of the freeway system.
  The road remains largely as it was on opening day, though the plants in its median have given way to a steel guard rail, and most recently to concrete barriers, and it now carries the designation State Route 110, not historic U.S. Route 66. Between 1954 and 2010, it was officially designated the Pasadena Freeway. In 2010, as part of plans to revitalize its scenic value and improve safety, the California Department of Transportation restored the original name to the roadway.
context_section_description: To connect the proposed parkway with downtown Los Angeles, that city improved and extended North Figueroa Street as a four-lane road to the Los Angeles River, allowing drivers to bypass the congested North Broadway Bridge on the existing but underutilized Riverside Drive Bridge. A large part of the project lay within Elysian Park, and four Art Deco tunnels were built through the hills. The first three, between Solano Avenue and the river, opened in late 1931, and the fourth opened in mid-1936, completing the extension of Figueroa Street to Riverside Drive. As with the contemporary Ramona Boulevard east from downtown, grade separations were mostly built only where terrain dictated. For Figueroa Street, this meant that all crossings except College Street (built several years after the extension was completed), where a hill was cut through, were at grade. The Figueroa Street Viaduct, connecting the Riverside Drive intersection with North Figueroa Street (then Dayton Avenue) across the Los Angeles River, opened in mid-1937. Closer to downtown, an interchange was built at Temple Street in 1939.
  Although many South Pasadena residents opposed the division of the city that the parkway would bring, the city's voters elected supporters in the 1936 elections. The state, which had the power to put the road where it wished even had South Pasadena continued to oppose it, approved the route on April 4, 1936. The route used the Arroyo Seco's west bank to near Hough Street, where it crossed to the east and cut through South Pasadena to the south end of Broadway (now Arroyo Parkway) in Pasadena. Another project, the Arroyo Seco Flood Control Channel, was built by the Works Progress Administration before and during construction of the parkway to avoid damages from future floods. A number of state engineers toured East Coast roads in early 1938, including Chicago's Lake Shore Drive, full and modified cloverleaf interchanges in Massachusetts and New Jersey, and Robert Moses's parkway system in New York City. The parkway was the first road built in California under a 1939 freeway law that allowed access to be completely limited to a number of specified points. Although, in some areas, it was possible to use a standard diamond interchange, other locations required folded diamonds, or, as the engineers called them, "compressed cloverleafs", where local streets often took the place of dedicated ramps, ending at the parkway with a sharp right turn required to enter or exit. The highway was designed with two 11–12-foot (3.4–3.7 m) lanes and one 10-foot (3.0 m) shoulder in each direction, with the wider inside (passing) lanes paved in black asphalt concrete and the outside lanes paved in white Portland cement concrete. The differently-colored lanes would encourage drivers to stay in their lanes. (By mid-1939, the state had decided to replace the shoulders with additional travel lanes for increased capacity; except on a short piece in South Pasadena, these were also paved with Portland cement. So that disabled vehicles could be safely removed from the roadway, about 50 "safety bays" were constructed in 1949 and 1950.) The engineers used a design speed of 45 miles per hour (72 kilometres per hour), superelevating curves where necessary to accomplish this. (The road is now posted at 55 mph (89 km/h).) Despite the freeway design, many parkway characteristics were incorporated, such as plantings of mostly native flora alongside the road.
  Prior to parkway construction, nine roads and two rail lines crossed the Arroyo Seco and its valley on bridges, and a number of new bridges were built as part of the project. Only four of the existing bridges were kept, albeit with some changes: the 1925 Avenue 26 Bridge, the 1926 Avenue 60 Bridge, the 1895 Santa Fe Arroyo Seco Railroad Bridge (now part of the L Line) near Avenue 64, and the 1912 York Boulevard Bridge. The Avenue 43 Bridge would have been kept had the Los Angeles Flood of 1938 not destroyed it. At Cypress Avenue, abutments and a foundation were built for a roadway, but were not used until the 1960s, whe
caption: The Marmion Way (foreground) and York Boulevard (background) bridges in 1940
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