Zooming in on Echo Park: 1906 transit map
Another great post by The Big Map Blog recently shows a map of Los Angeles’ 1906 railway systems. Those systems weren’t lacking in Echo Park, so we’ve zoomed in on the BIG map to show you a little bit of our ‘hood back in the day.
The Glendale Line, which you can see in green, is a” Los Angeles Inter-Urban RY Co.” line that took people between Glendale and Downtown, and possibly even up to Burbank. The Glendale Line ceased to run in June of 1955. The path made by the Glendale line went past Echo Park Lake on the west side of the lake, through “Edendale” and then they had to cut through the hills creating what was known as the “Edendale Cut” (where the 2 freeway is now) and next to Max Sennett’s studio.
The black lines, which you can see going along Sunset Boulevard then up Echo Park Avenue, were the “Los Angeles Pacific R.R.” There’s an old Three Stooges episode of note that shows Echo Park Avenue and the old railway tracks on the road, and you’ll note a lot of existing stairways in this area so that people could easily access the trains from their hilltop homes.
The red lines note the path for the “Pacific Electric Railway Co.” lines, which on the east side of the Los Angeles River took passengers up to Highland Park and beyond to Pasadena.
And finally, yellow – the “Los Angeles RY. Co.” lines, which had a lot of lines into East Los Angeles and up into what is now Elysian Valley.
However, apart from probably different sized trains between each line, I’m not certain on what the exact difference was between each company that handled the different lines. LA Taco has a little more insight on the matter:
At that point, LA was an underdeveloped but rapidly growing city, and rail was the dominant form of intra-city transportation. The yellow and red lines on the map show the two main competing streetcar systems, Los Angeles Railway (Yellow Cars) and Pacific Electric Railways (Red Cars). At this point, both systems were only 5 years old. The Yellow Cars carried more daily riders, but the Red Cars extended farther from the downtown hub. At the height of the Yellow Car’s operations, the system had 20 streetcar lines and 1,250 trolleys, and served the core of LA in addition to Echo Park, Westlake, Hancock Park, Exposition Park, West Adams, the Crenshaw district, Vernon, Boyle Heights and Lincoln Heights.
Either way, it’s disappointing that in the mid-50s and into the 1960s and ’70s these tracks were being dismantled. Surely there were politics, power and money involved, but you also can’t help but think about the emerging car culture in those times. People were probably more keen on that new Mustang than getting on a dusty old red car!
Click here to download the full map or visit the Big Map Blog website.
Great post and love the map! Those Elysian Park details are pretty great —
Indeed, when the transit systems were ripped out, very few people lamented the loss. There were some, but no outage among the public in general, no mass demonstrations in the streets. Just a shrugging of the shoulders and an attitude of “well that’s progress, I guess.” A lot of factors came together to remove these systems.
The main one was that these systems were generally NOT able to make a profit. These systems were all privately owned (until the government took over in 1958…by that time there was not much left to save…but to be fair, it was the government did rip out the remaining instructure.).
Because they never (rarely) made a profit, they could not upgrade their systems, tracks, cars and stations. Because they could not upgrade the cars, they became old and in a bad state of repair, which led to a bad reputation for the streetcars, which was one of the main reasons why the streetcars vanished.
To drive my point, I would note that only USA cities that continued to operate streetcars and never remove them (basically San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and New Orleans) were also cities where the private streetcar companies exited the scene very early on, and the municipal governments took over the system. San Francisco started the MUNI in 1912. Pittsburgh Railways went bankrupt twice, with the government finally taking control in 1951. SEPTA in Philadelphia was formed in 1964-65.
In Los Angeles, by the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973, only 10 years after streetcar service ended, it had become abundantly clear that ripping out the streetcars instead of upgrading the system had been a big mistake.
Many of the old maps showed Baxter cutting across Elysian Park – this alignment is shown as far back as the 1886
city map. The extension of Baxter into the park is the location of the Baxter Street steps. it is amazing what a site visit will do for planners.
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