Hard to imagine—well, not that hard, come to think of it—but Los Angeles’ 1958 Master Plan of Freeways and Expressways included not only a “Beverly Hills Freeway” but a four-lane monster plowing through the heart of Laurel Canyon using more or less the route of the present Laurel Canyon Boulevard.

The “Laurel Canyon Freeway”—felicitously named after the leafy canyon it would have destroyed—was to have run from LAX up what is now La Cienega Boulevard before crossing over the Santa Monica Mountains (and interchanging with the “Mulholland Expressway”) into the San Fernando Valley. Which would have made hitchhiking from the Strip over to Studio City a bitch.

Most of these nutty, Robert Moses-like empire-building fantasies came to nothing, of course, and Laurel Canyon was spared. (The only part of the freeway actually built was a truncated section down by LAX—now you can stop wondering why La Cienega all of a sudden turns into the world’s shortest expressway next time you’re late for the red eye.)

Had the freeway actually been built, we’d be forced to confront the fact that “Laurel Canyon” and all that it implies in the Sixties-atmospherics sense of the name would have never existed. (Some would say that this would have been a good thing.) And it’s possible the musicians flocking to L.A. from New York and London would have found each other in another habitat—possibly Topanga Canyon, where Neil Young pitched his flag—and the same creative foment would have ensued.

But Topanga and Malibu, an hour from Hollywood in much more rugged terrain, lack Laurel Canyon’s five-minute-hitch-to-the-Sunset Strip codependence; the Whisky, Thee Experience, Pandora’s Box, London Fog and Troubadour (on Santa Monica) thrived partly because the musicians and their retinues considered these clubs a public extension of their canyon woodshedding, and everyone went home happy. Late, but happy. Unbelievably stoned and vertiginous, but happy.

So here’s to what might have not been had the CalTrans concrete freaks had their way. But it sure would have made getting to the damned airport easier…

(For more, visit the awsome California Highways, where they take their road history very seriously indeed.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 11th, 2006 at 4:18 pm and is filed under Laurel Canyon Freeway. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.