1924 Los Angeles Highways and Frederick Law Olmsted Traffic Plan

This is a 1924 Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. et al map of Los Angeles, with proposed parkways, widened streets, and other modifications, that was prepared for the 1924 report A Major Traffic Street Plan for Los Angeles. Though only partially implemented, this farsighted plan, compiled by the greatest civil engineers of their generation, correctly predicted L.A.'s future traffic problems and influenced the construction of its earliest highways.

A Closer Look

The map covers from Mulholland Drive, Griffith Park, and Glendale in the north to Inglewood, Watts, and other communities of South-Central L.A. in the south, and from Beverly Hills and Baldwin Hills in the west to Alhambra and Boyle Heights in the east. The area's street grid is traced throughout, with major streets labeled (the width of the road indicating the lines or lanes of traffic) and other features such as parks, cemeteries, and rail yards noted. A legend at left details the recommendations of the Committee on Los Angeles Plan of Major Highways, including existing roads to be widened and new roads to be constructed, including a series of parkways that were precursors to later highways and interstates.

The Committee on Los Angeles Plan of Major Highways

In both concept and design, this map was far ahead of its time, resembling those made in the 1960s and 1970s that also sought to address L.A.'s infernal traffic problems. (See, for example, maps from the early 1970s by the city's then-Traffic Engineer, S. S. Taylor, also offered by us.) The impetus for the creation of the present map and the formation of the Committee on Los Angeles Plan of Major Highways was a recognition that automobiles would soon present a major problem for Los Angeles. Beforehand, L.A. was served by a streetcar network (the Los Angeles Railway, also known as the Yellowcars), and an interurban system (the Pacific Electric Railway, also known as the Redcars) that connected downtown Los Angeles various 'nodes' of Southern California (San Bernardino, Long Beach, Santa Monica, the San Fernando Valley, etc.). Though these two systems had originally been bitter rivals, after 1910, both were effectively owned by Pacific Electric's Henry Huntington and his heirs.

These systems were near their maximum extent when this map was produced (Pacific Electric's passenger total peaked in 1924), but, in retrospect, their future difficulties were already apparent. In the 1910s, the increasing use of automobiles (not to mention bicycles and some remnant horse-drawn vehicles) was creating traffic headaches and accidents in downtown Los Angeles as different modes of transport jostled for space. The city began to explore options for building underpasses, overpasses, new mass transit, and other methods, including a 'bicycle highway' (akin to the short-lived California Cycleway along the Arroyo Seco River at the start of the 20th century), for alleviating the congestion. Following World War I (1914 - 1918), an economic boom and Henry Ford's perfection of the Model T production process (which made automobiles much more affordable) combined to make L.A.'s automotive population skyrocket. Additionally, the human population was growing at an incredible pace, roughly doubling between 1920 and 1924.

Los Angeles officials assembled a 'dream team' of top civil engineers, creating the Committee on Los Angeles Plan of Major Highways, which took two years to research the problem and prepare a report. The Committee was led by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. (1870 - 1957), son of the legendary civil engineer behind New York's Central Park, who worked extensively with his father and was his sole surviving successor. The other members of the Committee were similar luminaries: Harland Bartholomew (1889 - 1989) had extensive experience with ambitious urban planning in the Midwest, and Charles Henry Cheney (1884 - 1943) worked on urban projects throughout California. Aside from the obvious need for a plan to address the city's traffic problems, the Committee also had important political backing, including from the increasingly influential Automobile Club of Southern California (ACSC), which in 1921 commissioned A Report on Los Angeles Traffic Problems, prepared by engineer J. B. Lippincott. The Committee acknowledged that Lippincott's 1921 report was highly influential on its own 1924 report.

In addition to widening existing roads and building new ones, as Lippincott had suggested, the Committee also planned grade-separated parkways, a novel concept for pleasant tree-lined thoroughfares pioneered by Olmstead in New York. It is worth noting that several years after their traffic report, Olmsted and Bartholomew were paid by an L.A. citizens' committee to examine and propose plans for the city and county's greenspace, resulting in a 1930 report Parks, Playgrounds and Beaches for the Los Angeles Region, which was as visionary as their traffic plan.

The Committee's wide-ranging and ambitious recommendations were well-received by both its sponsors and the public, which was annoyed by worsening traffic congestion. Many of the Committee's more modest recommendations, such as a network of widened arterial roads, were implemented in the following decade, leaving L.A. with its grid of major, long-distance boulevards mostly running straight in a north-south or east-west fashion. Subsequent zoning laws channeled businesses along these main corridors, (temporarily) relieving traffic problems. Other ideas, such as dedicated roads for trucks, were sensible in theory but difficult to implement.

As for the parkways, as would happen with other proposed highways in Southern California in the following decades, locals liked the idea of a highway as long as it did not disrupt their own community. Local opposition and the Great Depression put a stop to most of the parkways proposed in the report, including along Wilshire Boulevard, Los Feliz Boulevard, Mulholland Drive, Riverside Drive, through Griffith Park, the 'Silver Lake Parkway,' and a Hollywood - Palos Verdes Parkway along Crenshaw and Cypress Avenues. (Notably, the Olmsted Brothers also planned Palos Verdes Estates around this time). Only the parkways through the Cahuenga Pass and along the Arroyo Seco to Pasadena were built. (The Hollywood Freeway and Arroyo Seco Parkway, respectively, both opened in 1940.) Eventually, however, highways and interstates would handle much of the intended traffic along the lines of the unbuilt parkways proposed here, albeit through a less pleasant setting, with Interstate 5 (the Golden State Freeway) following the planned Riverside Drive Parkway, Interstate 110 (the Harbor Freeway) serving as the intended highway connecting the southern parts of the city to the West Side and downtown, and Interstate 10 (the Santa Monica Freeway) serving as the main connection with the beachfront communities to the west, running further south near Venice and Washington Boulevards rather than along Wilshire as imagined here.

Publication History and Census

This map was prepared by the Committee on Los Angeles Plan of Major Highways and initially appeared in the Committee's 1924 report A Major Traffic Street Plan for Los Angeles. However, the current map was separately issued by California Bank in 1924. While the map is independently cataloged among the holdings of five institutions in the OCLC and the report is more widely distributed, we have only been able to locate two examples of separately-issued maps, held by Harvard University and the University of California Berkeley, both dated to 1927 and issued by the Security Trust and Savings Bank. The present map is, therefore, a highly scarce and perhaps unique surviving example of the 1924 California Bank separate issue.