LOS ANGELES: ALISO STREET
Posted December 19, 2024
Views of Aliso St. in Downtown Los Angeles, before-and-after the street was transformed into a frontage road for the Hollywood Freeway, part of the 101. The street was one of the main east-west routes into the city’s early Downtown, which was centered around Plaza de Los Angeles (before Downtown shifted south along Broadway in the 1920s). The oldest part of the city (being where the Spanish colonial Pueblo de Los Angeles was founded in 1781), by the first half of the twentieth century—before “redevelopment”—the area around the plaza had a level of mid-rise commercial and residential density more typically associated with San Francisco or east coast cities than with LA.
Sonoratown spread north of the plaza, one of the centers of the city’s early Mexican-American population. Old Chinatown was to the south and east. Chinatown was nearly entirely demolished for the construction of Union Station in 1939. The rest of the area was demolished for construction of the 101 and “urban renewal” in the 50s, which replaced the dense neighborhood with the government buildings of Civic Center. Similarly, much of what was left of Sonoratown was also wiped out for the creation of Civic Center (save the Olvera Street Market, which was preserved as a romanticized, museum-ified version of the neighborhood), as well as the developer-led creation of New Chinatown as a tourist attraction.
Notably, Aliso was also the Pacific Electric’s only route across the Los Angeles River, with the tracks seen in the first image. Aliso was a critical link for the PE’s Northern District, which consisted of two dozen interurban train lines connecting DTLA with everything east of the river. This included service to Boyle Heights, East LA, Pasadena, the cities of the San Gabriel Valley and Inland Empire—as far west as San Bernardino, as far south as Riverside. When Aliso was ripped up in the 50s for the 101, the entirety of Northern District service was abandoned, nearly a third of the Pacific Electric’s lines.
In the first image (P1), in addition to the view down Aliso you can also of course see that a train wreck has occurred at Union Station, with the engine having continued past the end of the tracks and crashed through the retaining wall. This occurred in January 1948 and there were no recorded injuries. Furthermore, on the left side of the photo you can see the original location of Philippe The Original (the blue sign), one of LA’s oldest continuously operated restaurants and, personally, home to the author’s favorite sandwiches. After their original location on Aliso was demolished for the 101 in the 50s, they moved to the current location at Alameda/Main with the same menu.
Additionally, on the left side of the 2024 photo in the first image, you can also see the Los Angeles Metropolitan Detention Center, a large federal prison featured on the cover of Mike Davis’ classic history of Los Angeles, “City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles,” which as always I highly recommend.
