Downtown la underpass drivers#
Walkers stop at ornate bank buildings now used by artists or housing bookstores, at onetime lavish hotels that accommodated East Coasters fresh off their rail journeys, or for a drink at Cole's, a wooden saloon established as Cole's Pacific Electric Buffet in 1908 to serve Red Car drivers after their shifts. Upstairs, in the visible world, the tour gives a picture of what life was like downtown 100 years ago, after the great quake of 1906 sidelined San Francisco and propelled Los Angeles into its position as the most powerful U.S. Guests are required to sign forms swearing they'll never reveal the locations of the speakeasies-many are connected to still-operating businesses and homes. On the "Underground LA" tour, which takes two and a half hours, urban explorers have permission to pass through the unmarked doors that lead to the secret stairs that once fed streams of revelers into the old bars.
Strangely, the rise of the automobile both ruined Los Angeles and saved it-when the population lost interest in downtown and left in the 1950s, a lot of wonders remained intact, from painted-on ads for newsreel shows (on Broadway's Tower Theatre) to the grand bank that risked funding Walt Disney's early films (restored as the newly opened NoMad Hotel).Ĭartwheel Art Tours, founded and led by some of the creatives who are rediscovering and restoring the fabulousness of DTLA's heyday, is a local outfit, so its organizers earned the trust to obtain special permission to dip into privately owned portions of the old underground network. Now DTLA, as downtown is often known, is again booming, this time with new condos, artists' spaces, hipster bars, progressive and award-winning restaurants, and the sublime pleasures of uncovering the architectural surprises of a city that was built with powerhouse wealth and then abruptly abandoned to collect dust. Downtown Los Angeles suffered after World War Two as the city's center of gravity shifted west, first to Wilshire Boulevard and then to the sprinkler-fed lawns around Beverly Hills and beyond. It was one of the most corrupt cities in the country back then, and it was honeycombed with shady doings.īy word of mouth and through urban exploration, vestiges of the illicit speakeasy era are resurfacing today. Secrecy was important if you were shuttling liquor between the estimated 400 speakeasies that raged in Los Angeles during the 13 years of Prohibition (1920-1933). Many of the tunnels were forgotten because they were never properly mapped. Some were for moving cash between banking institutions.Īnd some were for illegal hooch. A hundred years ago, the tight urban streets were so congested that locals burrowed underground to solve transportation issues.
The original heart of the city, its urban downtown area, was booming for a century before that. But much of that sprang up only in our lifetimes.
as an expanse of swimming pools and freeways. One growing walking tour company is taking visitors into them. Unknown to most tourists, there's a network of tunnels underneath the city of Los Angeles.
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