Stitching the Bridges of L.A.

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Ride Report: Stitching the River

by Richard Risemberg (Los Angeles, August 2006)

[article reprinted from the Bicycle Fixation website]

I live in the Miracle Mile district of Los Angeles, near the County

Museum of Art, so I headed up 6th St. through Koreatown and all the

stacked and crowded two-story streetfront shops housing dentists,

acupuncturists, florist, tofu houses, herb clinics, and so forth, up

and down the rolling hills leading to downtown. A little east of

Vermont Ave. the ethnic mix switches to Central American, and the

streetscape now incorporates tiny storefront churches, pupuserias,

small-time lawyers, and residential hotels–but the rolling hills

continue apace.

I pass by MacArthur Park with its picnicking families and its

notorious sellers of false IDs, its pushcart vendors, its balloons

and laughing kids, crest a few more rolling hills, and finally come

to the Harbor Freeway, the western border of downtown, where a

steeply-descending S-curve requires me to use the fixie’s front brake

for the first time that morning.

Downtown is tall buildings shadowing the busy streets, newer glass

towers alternating with ornate Art-Deco hotels and lofts and who

knows what–the LA Cultural Affairs department has a stunning office

in a marble and mahogany building with an ornate grill gracing the

entire frontage. Left on Broadway takes me through a cacophony of

Mexican and Salvadoran loudspeakers and families cruising the

hundreds of tiny, glittering shops selling jewelry, fancy dresses,

boom boxes, cell phones, TVs, and damn near everything else. I dodge

the buses and trucks and cop cars and pushcarts and shopping carts

and crest another hill by the courthouse district, and finally roll

down into Chinatown.

Chinatowns the world over manage to be both dingy and bright, lively

and grim, smog-fouled storefronts bearing vivid red and gold neon and

plastic signs, stern-faced Chinese scurrying purposefully in drab

clothes, always busy, usually serious. I pulled into a little alley

by the Phoenix Bakery (whose cakes are unsurpassable) and found the

little hole-in-the-wall dim sum shop, nearly invisible behind a row

of dusty SUVs. I picked up some goodies to bring home to the wife,

threw them in the messenger bag, and squirreled back out onto

Broadway, headed for the bridge over the LA River.

You can see the Los Angeles River as pathetic or as terrifying, for

it usually bears almost no water and is almost entirely encased in

concrete. To me, it’s a monumental sculpture, and while I agree with

the community’s plans to green the river, I’ll miss its sculptural

aspects if we are ever fortunate enough to succeed. For now, it is a

study in minimalism: from downtown to the sea it ranges between 20

and 100 meters wide and about ten meters deep, pale white concrete

unadorned except for graffiti, strutting pigeons, and a narrow deeper

channel in the center where the water stays most of the year. (In

winter storms it can fill to the banks in a few minutes.) Tributary

channels swoop in from the side, streamlined into the main channel,

and lesser drains open up as simple holes in the hard walls, or hide

behind heavy iron sluice gates which open from the relentless

pressure of stormwater when the skies rage in January. On either side

run busy railroad tracks, and a long file of steel power pylons and

the catenaries of high-tension lines mark the path of the river in

the sky long after you can no longer see its banks in the distance.

Between the tracks and the river, dust and weeds; beyond the tracks,

rusty corrugated walls of factories, warehouse, and junkyards. And

the bridges: the justly-famous bridges of downtown, built mostly in

the 1930s, elegant leaping arches decorated with elaborate lampposts

and guardrails, concrete made into civic poetry in a era that was

learning to love itself again after the Depression.

Looking downriver from the Broadway Street bridge, I decided (at

last) on my route for the day: I would ride all of the downtown

bridges, from Broadway to Olympic Boulevard, zigzagging back and

forth across the great gray gulf like a line of stitching.

The river wasted no time giving me a workout: no sooner was I over

the Broadway bridge than I turned back nearly 180 degrees and crossed

the river again on the Spring Street span, looking to my right to see

the bridge I had crossed just a minute before. Once back on the west

bank, I turned between a row of cinderblock warehouses to north Main

Street and crossed, again almost immediately, on a level bridge

leading to, of all things, an active winery and one of the first

artist’s loft developments in LA…sharing the neighborhood with a

concrete plant, a notoriously deadly housing project, and a sprawl of

blank-faced warehouses abutting the multimodal yard where cargo comes

off trains and onto trucks, and off trucks and onto trains. A dip

under the freeway, another brief climb, a turn to the right, and I’m

off in search of the next bridge.

Now, the east bank of the river is a bluff, considerably higher than

the west bank, so after climbing the arch of the bridge and easing

down the descent to the east bank, I would face another climb almost

immediately–and in the manner of LA streets, the roadway just goes

straight up the face of the bluff, without angling to ameliorate the

steepness in any way. But my trusty Fuji fixie magically allowed me

to scale the walls with only a bit of grunting and standing on the

pedals. So up and down I went, over the bridges then up the bank–and

of course the blufftop road often dipped up and down as well,

swerving by parks and ponds, cruising through clapboard

neighborhoods, winding between the looming, shabby walls of the

warehouse district. I saw plenty of stunning buildings: old brick

sheds built in the days when even warehouses merited a few curlicues

along the roofline and a hand-painted sign, or concrete structures

built when the material was novel and architects loved to play with

its plasticity.

One long bridge left the bluff at its height and traversed not only

the river itself but a railyard and about two square miles of

warehouses, passing them all well above roof level; in the distance

blue mountains slouched under puffy drifting clouds. And always the

river, broad and white and dirty and empty and grand, with train

tracks and powerlines wound around it like demented jewelry, and the

little squirmy specks that were my fellow humans inching tediously

within or along it on this sunny Sunday noon.

Finally I got to Oympic Boulevard by the gigantic ancient Sears

building (one of the few left, I hear), and headed west towards home.

Olympic cuts through the festive clutter of the garment district and

by Santee Alley, where hundreds of open-front shops line the streets

and the alley itself (which really is just an alley, for pedestrians

only), and the odors of roasted corn and fresh-made salsas fill the

air. Zipping wearily out of downtown, passing the Staples Center and

then under the Harbor Freeway once again, I was soon back in

Koreatown, then the residential flats of Wilshire West, then La Brea

Avenue and home.

Hot, sweaty, exhausted, and happy. Not many miles–maybe thirty?–but

lots of hillclimb sprints, too much to see, too much to remember to

go back to. A grand day, a grand ride indeed. –Richard Risemberg

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Stitching the River Ride, Redux October 22, 2006

A few weeks ago I posted an article about a ride I took one Sunday,

riding all of downtown Los Angeles’s bridges between Broadway and

Olympic boulevards. Last Sunday I repeated it, this time with about

twenty other riders along, including a few members of the L. A.

Wheelmen, and the indomitable Chuck Schmidt of Velo-Retro, riding an

immaculate black Waterford fixie. (But all of Chuck’s bikes are

immaculate.)

We wandered back and forth between the Eastside bluff and the

warehouse district, past the San Antonio Winery and the Brewery lofts

(one of the first factory-to-lofts conversions in LA, and still an

artists’ colony), over, around, and under a variety of delightful Art

Deco bridges, between rows of loading docks, past busy alleys, past

hilly parks complete with ponds and resident ducks, and through leafy

neighborhoods cluttered with clapboard bungalows and gang graffiti.

At one point we came to a bridge that had been closed for filming,

but a friendly motorcycle cop escorted us across the bridge and

through the set–where the grips dropped their work to take pictures

of the parade of bicycles.

At the last stop, on the Olympic Boulvaqrd bridge just past the old

Art Deco Sears, Roebuck, & Co. building, one woman commented that

she’d lived in LA all her life and had never seen so much of the city

as she had that day! Not bad for a twenty-mile ride, and a testament

to the power of the bicycle for revealing our world and our

communities to us.

Glad to report that only a tiny minority of riders drove to the start

of the ride. Most rode their bikes, and a last group of six of us

headed west after some tasty Chinese pastries by the statue of Sun-

Yat Sen, riding together to the Miracle Mile area, where we all

finally parted ways. –Richard Risemberg



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