Nate and I stood there with our bikes under the shadow of the Expo Line's hulking aerial terminal at Jefferson and La Cienega.
We peered up the unfinished stairwell leading to the platform and took pictures of the elevator with its blue steel exoskeleton, and we talked about wanting to traverse the utterly, seductively climbable station walls.
Weeks later while biking home at night, I climbed the stairwell onto the La Cienega platform. I was alone in a construction site, and I was looking out over a magnificent, beautiful, and expansive dark city. Looking at that empty platform took me into a future LA where people await trains all tomorrow day long and into the nights to come. Standing there I could see them like ghosts, and all of their ghostly headphones and smart ghost phones. And I could see their bicycles along the path below. Hundreds of ghostcyclists going to and fro.
I grew up playing with Lincoln Logs, Tinker Toys, Playmobils, Micro Machines, and Legos. I cursed through my homework everyday and then spent hours mastering Civilization, SimCity 2000, and Starcraft. When I was young, I loved electric cars, racetracks, and train sets. I'm a form/function nerd, and I love civic projects. For me, riding a bike the length of the Expo Line Project was like a beautiful, strange, and fateful waking wet dream. And I understood what that dream meant.
Los Angeles has the second busiest public bus system in the country. LA was recently ranked third in the country with the best combination of public transportation investment, ridership, and safety. At one time, Los Angeles had a "Yellow Car" system that was the envy of the metropolitan world. Standing up there on the Expo platform alone at night and surrounded by cars, I realized that LA is taking a huge step back, and closer again to that lost and forgotten acclaim.
We pushed along the tracks east down Jefferson. Soon enough we were beneath the aerial platform at La Brea/Exposition. Just beyond this we stopped to watch the riders in the skate park at Rancho Cienega Sports Complex behind Dorsey High School. A skate park in every town, I say.
After, we found a small unfinished maintenance platform and stopped for a beer & a quick break. There, walking the track with a clipboard and a hard hat, we met Juan. Juan works as a track laying inspector. We told Juan about our ride of the Expo Line, and he laughed and smiled with us, looked at our bikes and said that he was impressed. I told him we were riding the Line because it was supposed to open October 2010, and Juan laughed. I asked him if he thought the Line would be open by the end of this year, and he laughed again, shrugging his shoulders. "It could happen then. There's a lot of work left to do."
We asked him about the project, and Juan said that there are dozens of companies working on different aspects of the whole thing. Inspectors, gardeners, electricians, welders, cement layers, pipe fitters, etc. Juan agreed that a portion of the Line, at least, might be open by November of this year. "The tracks need to be worked in before the trams can accept passengers. They have to run a machine over the tracks several times to grind them in first. They've been grinding several sections of the track already."
I looked down at the tracks and saw what Juan was talking about. There it was, a fresh strip of silver, polished, finely ground, stricken across the copper tone of the track, running right down the middle.
Nate and I rode on. We passed a line of landscapers harnessing palm trees into the dirt at the Crenshaw station with an enormous crane and a dozen spotters. Along the tracks, up and down, through neighborhood after neighborhood, thousands of little pits, mainly empty, were staggered like checker squares in the dirt awaiting shrubbery, flowers, and native plants.
For a span between Degnan & Vermont Nate & I rode in near silence, as fast as either of our legs could pump.
Passing Normandie, we flew by sixty year old single family homes until, in what seemed like no time at all, we'd reached the Masjid Umar Ibn Al-Khattab Mosque across from USC where the Expo test tram was parked across from the Los Angeles Natural History Museum, the LA Coliseum, and the Rose garden at Exposition Park.
This is surely one of the main destinations of our trip. Exposition Park is a funland of sights, sounds, and Angelenos. Families trample the grounds in every direction, hobos sparsely dot the shady places, lovers engage in loving beside rose bushes, fountains, on benches, and along pedestrian backways hidden throughout the grounds.
Nate and I made our way around the Natural History Museum and Coliseum and into the center of the park. We cut our bikes around the Natural History Museum passed the Butterfly Pavilion and the main entrance to the California Science Center. The Science Center lies next to the Aerospace Museum and a meandering native garden installation. Nate & I made for a small seating area in the native garden where we would consume our packed lunch of bagel sandwich, Larabar and beer.
Thus far on our Expo Line ride we'd travelled 7 miles in just around 2 hours. We needed energy, a short rest, and we still had so much more to see. Indeed, we were still in store for more than a handful of surprises along the way...
[The conclusion of this (increasingly lengthy yet surely to be concluded, I swear it!) urban adventure in Kids & Trains Mixed Well PART 4...]
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