Walkers reclaim Wilshire

THOSE immigrant marchers who filled Wilshire Boulevard on Monday didn’t just make political history. For one strange day, they turned the cradle of American car culture upside down.

And though the organizers may have been aiming only to announce the arrival of immigrants as a political force, the spectacle also hinted at another force that could reshape life in Los Angeles: The costlier gasoline gets and the denser the city gets, the more likely Wilshire is to see more bus traffic, more subway traffic, more foot traffic -- and fewer lone drivers.

“It’s interesting to think about Wilshire Boulevard, king of the auto streets, turning into a whole new pedestrian sidewalk for a day,” said Gail Goldberg, who started work in February as planning director for the city of Los Angeles.

No, she’s not about to ban cars and recast the boulevard into a longer Third Street Promenade. But it’s clear, Goldberg said, that “as this city grows, many more people are going to choose to be on public transit because it will simply be faster and simpler for them.” The logistical success of the march, she said, may be a sign that Los Angeles is readier than many people think it is to face a future of more people and less gas.

For a boulevard that has spent most of the 20th century as a shrine to petroleum-based civilization, this is a U-turn. Its margins lined by billboards, its skyline enlivened by some of the first (motorist-friendly) neon signs in the U.S., Wilshire once held more than 100 gas stations in its 16 miles. (It now has about five.) It served as proving ground for countless drive-in businesses and home to Bullocks Wilshire, the first department store designed for car-borne customers, with a grand entrance facing the parking lot.

That’s a lot of history to defy, but so it went on Monday, when marchers faced the strange sensation of traveling at 2 mph with neither an accelerator pedal nor a couple of tons of automotive armor.

“Whenever people in this town get out on foot on the streets,” said author D.J. Waldie, “they enter a landscape they’ve never been in before, an unfamiliar place, both liberating and a little anxiety-provoking.”

Waldie is best known for “Holy Land,” a wistful appreciation of the Southern California suburban life, but as a 57-year-old non-driver, Waldie also counts himself among “the plodding vanguard of pedestrian culture” in Los Angeles. Wilshire Boulevard, he said, “is eminently walkable. It’s flat. It’s mile after flat mile.”

Waldie too expects the lone drivers of Wilshire to diminish before long, in part because of rising gas prices and urban density, in part because of the increased frequency of MTA bus service in recent years. Those buses, of course, were unavailable Monday afternoon.

“My knee is killing me. I’m taking my time,” said Dave Romero near Wilshire and Normandie Avenue that afternoon. Romero, a 40-year-old interior designer born in the Philippines, sat on the curb clutching an American flag. Earlier in the day, he’d taken a train from Norwalk to downtown, then put in three to four miles of marching on the blacktop.

“Faith without action is nothing,” Romero said. “If you say you care, you’ve got to be there.”

In some respects, noted Kevin Roderick, co-author of the 2005 book “Wilshire Boulevard: The Grand Concourse of Los Angeles,” the march returned the boulevard to its traditional function as a sort of long, thin downtown.

Through the years, it has accommodated smaller civic festivities and protests, especially near the Ambassador Hotel (now demolished) and the Federal Building. Hard-core Sierra Club hikers have made a fall ritual of following Wilshire from one end to the other.

But the scale was different this time. The boulevard was closed from Alvarado Street to La Brea Avenue, a distance of about four miles, for much of the afternoon and evening.

Until this week, “I can’t remember Wilshire Boulevard ever being closed. It really was a departure,” said John Fisher, assistant general manager of the city Department of Transportation and a 33-year veteran of LADOT.

If there were 300,000 to 400,000 marchers on the boulevard as estimated, Fisher calculated, “that’s the number of people who travel the Santa Monica Freeway in a 24-hour period, or 10 times the number of the people who would generally travel Wilshire Boulevard daily by automobile.”

The Wilshire march, which followed a midday gathering of demonstrators downtown, began with a midafternoon massing at MacArthur Park, a recreation area that was cut in half 70 years ago so cars could travel from downtown to the coast without leaving Wilshire. From there, the crowd walked west, creeping past office towers and apartment buildings.

“Needless to say, there’s something empowering about taking over a street that’s usually covered with auto traffic,” said John English, a board member of the Los Angeles Conservancy and advocate for Midcentury design. “The ultimate statement in that regard, of course, would be having a march on a freeway.”

Happily, Wilshire proved sufficient. By 5:15 p.m., the Radisson Hotel at Wilshire and Normandie was an island in a sea of white-shirted humanity. In the four lanes of the boulevard, the marchers carried banners and camcorders, wheeled bicycles -- it was too crowded to ride -- and strollers. Wilshire’s synchronized traffic lights -- the first in the city, another nod to the almighty auto -- blinked helplessly above.

“THE slower you go, the stiffer your feet get,” said Ivan Corpeno Chavez, 51, assessing the crowd of pedestrians around him. This was the corner of Wilshire and Western Avenue, once known as the most heavily traveled vehicular intersection in the world.

“That was documented in 1929,” the city’s Fisher said, “and it remained that way for about 20 years.”

These days, city statistics show 45,000 vehicles a day pass where Corpeno Chavez stood. (At Wilshire and La Brea, it’s 47,000.) But the remarkable thing about Monday, Fisher and Goldberg said, was that traffic on parallel streets wasn’t heavily affected. In part, this was because so many Angelenos made one-time adjustments in their driving plans. But the other factor was mass transit.

The MTA, whose bus-and-train ridership is two-thirds Latino on a normal day, boosted its schedule, lengthened its subway trains and added 32 buses to carry marchers away from the demonstration’s end point. Spokesman David Sotero said the subway’s Red Line was carrying more than 20,000 passengers per hour along the march route during its busiest hours that day. Though official numbers won’t be known for weeks and are unlikely to surpass the staggering bus ridership during the 1984 Olympic Games, Monday may turn out to be one of the busiest days of mass transit in city history.

“So many people, to get to the march, took transit, whether it was the Red Line or Blue Line or Gold Line or buses,” Fisher said. “It shows you, when there’s that great a diversion from automobiles to transit and walking, what a great difference that can make. Somehow, if we could get more people to use transit and walk....”

One march does not a transportation revolution make. But in a living city, change comes with the territory. It was 98 years ago, at the finish line of Monday’s march, Wilshire and La Brea, that an oilman named Arthur Gilmore opened the city’s first gas station.