August 5, 2009
UHL: The Red Line Trail
In 1983, the City of Los Angeles began to drill a great tunnel. The intention was to place a train under the ground that would one day be able to ferry travelers from one end of the sprawling metropolis to the other. By 2000, passengers were indeed able to move between Union Station Downtown and North Hollywood in the Valley, all by subterranean locomotive. Further expansion of the underground transit network was halted when Congressman Henry Waxman alerted the world to the serious dangers should the tunnelers encounter explosive methane gas or Morlocks. However, the Red Line (as it was dubbed to commemorate the blood of the countless laborers who died in its construction and whose bones even now add structural integrity to the station walls) is today the most trafficked of L.A.’s intracity railways, and the Urban Hiking League therefore set out to experience on the surface what so many experience below: an 18-mile journey through many of the places that give L.A. the reputation that it has, for better or worse.
Downtown
The Red Line Trail begins at Union Station, a cavernous cathedral of conveyance covered in gorgeous tilework and lit by art deco chandeliers looming over the halls like iron jellyfish. We detour quickly through Little Tokyo and Olvera Street, in order to stock up on curry donuts and luchador masks, respectively, and then climb up Bunker Hill to hit our second Red Line Station at the Civic Center.
The route from the Civic Center down to Pershing Square (Station 3) is lined with shops selling Quinceañera dresses and old theatres that are either boarded up or house wholesale textile imports. Pershing Square park is a popular spot for many of L.A.’s destitute to meet up for a chat with the voices that torment them. As we pass through, I wonder how many nights sleeping in this park it would take before I too started speaking to myself. Has this place had an effect on me already? Did I say that out loud?
Wilshire
After Pershing Square, we trek up towards the 7th/Metro Center stop and then west out of the cacophonous grasp of Downtown. Hoofing along Wilshire Blvd. we’re traversing terrain familiar to us from The Wilshire Plan: the 110 overpass, the white art deco hotels, the giant mural of Edward James Olmos with his arm around the teacher from Stand and Deliver. MacArthur Park (Station 5) is in the throes of a Salvadoran cultural festival slash carnival, and we have to weave our way through carnies and pupusa-aficionados in order to stay on course. Eventually, we reach the Great Crossroads, the towering new complex built around the Wilshire/Vermont Station, and we turn north.
East Hollywood
After a long trek north along Vermont (meanwhile hitting station 7, 8, and 9), we make camp at the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Hollyhock House, a Mayan temple perched atop a hill overlooking East Hollywood. Refueled by the shade and sculptures, we head down the other side of the hill and chart a course west on Hollywood Blvd. The city signs designate the territory east of Normandie as Little Armenia and the territory west as Thai Town, but the borders of these two great kingdoms are far more contested than this. To me at least, the Thai and Armenian scripts look oddly similar for two cultures separated by the entire continent of Asia. For many of the local businesses, I might not know until I was inside whether I’d stumbled upon a bakery or a massage parlor.
Hollywood and Highland
Next door to the wax museum and across from Ripley’s Believe-It-Or-Not, there’s a seedy-looking little joint called the Snow White Café. It is notable for two reasons: 1) the murals on the walls depicting seven midget gem-miners and their fair-skinned consort were drawn by the original Disney animators; and 2) 34 oz. mugs of beer. The Snow White is also a great spot to people-watch, situated as it is near the corner of Hollywood and Highland, the vortex around which all of L.A.’s creepy nervous energy swirls. We watched Jack Sparrow plop down at the table outside. Harlequin came by and sat in his lap, and both costumed vagrants began to aggressively solicit money from passing tourists. The Snow White barmaid tried unsuccessfully to shoo them away, but she was in over her head: the pirate and clowness both lit cigarettes and taunted her back inside. After our beers, we descend perilously into Babylon itself, keeping our wits about us as we push our way through that looming temple of awfulness that is the Hollywood and Highland Complex.
The Cahuenga Pass / The Hills
On Cahuenga Blvd., a mile or two past the Hollywood Bowl base camp, our expedition encounters a nearly fatal obstacle: we run out of sidewalk. The municipal road crews had apparently not been prepared for the harsh conditions this high up in the Hollywood Hills and been forced to turn back, leaving miles of paved pedestrian access that lead precisely nowhere. In an almost-insane gambit, the Red Line Expedition team votes to cross Cahuenga and enter the steep and winding avenues of the Mulholland territories, looking for the storied Northwest Passage that would lead us into the Valley. It’s a dangerous move, for the masters of these hills possess dark and terrifying power and are known to dispatch their ghoulish “personal assistants” forth from their hillside castles to waylay passing travelers and perhaps feast on their flesh. Never has the Urban Hiking League been so tested, and it is only through our superb navigational skills that we are able to descend the Cliffs of Mulholland and enter triumphantly the Land of Noho.
Universal City / North Hollywood
After many hours without seeing any sign of the Red Line Trail, it was heartening to finally come upon the Universal City Station. From there, the few blocks to the North Hollywood Station, the Trail’s terminus, were a mere victory lap. We braved the methane gas and the Morlocks in order to take the underground train back to our trailhead. While waiting, a madwoman (whom we would later learn had a spinal tumor, was drunk, was turning 52 at midnight, once won some sort of radio contest, was sexually attracted to Angelina Jolie, and carried around a blurry photograph of newscaster Robin Roberts for some reason) approached us. “Wow. Are you guys hobbits or something?” she asked as she trundled over. “Are you on some type of mission?” If she’d let us get a word in edgewise, we could have explained how right she was.
