“Ask Silver Lake” is dedicated to exploring the history and insights of our community. If you have questions or ideas you’d like us to consider, please drop a comment or send them to outreach@silverlakenc.org.
❦❦❦
If you’re a loyal reader of “Ask Silver Lake,” you’ll know that mass transit has come up in multiple editions of the column already. Earlier this year, we took you for a ride on the Ostrich Farm Railway. A couple of months later, we arrived at Sunset Junction. In October, “Ask Silver Lake” covered the stair streets — featured in numerous comedies but built to provide access to mass transit routes and lines. Nevertheless, the people have demanded more – so this month’s “Ask Silver Lake” is a broader overview of mass transit in Silver Lake.
Please stand clear, the doors are closing.
It’s often said that Los Angeles was built around the car. This is absolutely true — assuming that the “car” in question is a streetcar. Trains, more than any other form of transportation, deserve credit for transforming the tiny El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula into the bustling City of Los Angeles.
The Southern Pacific Railroad arrived from San Francisco in 1876. By the end of the decade, the city’s population had doubled. The Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe (ATSF) arrived from the Kansas City metropolitan area in 1885. The competition between the two railways ignited a huge population boom. In the decade of the 1880s, Los Angeles’s population increased 350%.
The first cable cars also began operation in Los Angeles in October 1885. The first electric streetcars appeared in January 1887, the year the first real estate boom peaked. Streetcar suburbs sprang up around the city overnight, including in what’s now Silver Lake, where the Dayton Heights, Golden Gate, Ivanhoe, Melrose, Primrose Hill, Waterloo, and other tracts all opened in 1887. Access to public transit was their most touted amenity and Silver Lake’s first train, the Ostrich Farm Railway, arrived in 1888.
In 1895, the Pasadena & Pacific Electric Railroad Company completed an interurban railway connecting the downtowns of Los Angeles and Santa Monica via Silver Lake. Sanborn Junction (now Sunset Junction) opened in 1905, when the Los Angeles Pacific Railroad extended a line along Sunset Boulevard from the newly created junction to the town of Hollywood.
On the other side of what’s now Silver Lake, the Los Angeles Inter-Urban Railway took over the Glendale and Montrose Railway in 1904 and extended its route to connect the downtowns of Burbank, Glendale, and Los Angeles via Silver Lake.
On 1 September 1911, numerous independent railways were merged into the Pacific Electric Railway (PE), creating as a result the largest electric interurban rail network in the world. In December 1911, PE added another line through Silver Lake, the San Fernando Line, which terminated in the city of San Fernando.
PE’s red cars might be more iconic, but the yellow cars of Los Angeles Railway (LARy) enjoyed higher ridership. The red cars, which served four counties, were a bit like a combination of today’s Metro and Metrolink networks.
LARy, which was focused on Central Los Angeles, was a bit more akin to LADOT’s DASH. One critical difference, however, was that neither of these mass transit agencies were truly “public” transit. Henry Huntington was in charge of PE. His son, Howard Huntington, was in charge of LARy. Two yellow car lines skirted the southwestern edge of Silver Lake, traveling along Hoover Street in Dayton Heights.
Los Angeles’s first bus company, the Los Angeles Motor Bus Company, began operation in 1923. It was jointly operated by PE and LARy, with odd number routes operated by the former and even numbers by the latter. One bus route traveled in a circular route around Silver Lake, along Hyperion, Rowena, Glendale, Silver Lake, and Sunset.
Los Angeles Motor Coach bus no. 3107, c. 1940 (Source: Metro Library Archives)
In 1927, the company was renamed the Los Angeles Motor Coach Company. Metropolitan Coach Lines was formed in 1953 and assumed control of the city’s buses and trains – ending all of Silver Lake’s train service between 1952 and ‘55.
The city’s first true public transit agency, the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Agency (LAMTA) took over mass transit operations in 1958. That same year, the 2 Freeway terminus opened in Silver Lake, along what had been part of the Glendale-Burbank Line’s right-of-way. Part of the rest of that right-of-way remains a popular hiking trail.
The trestle footings of its crossing over Fletcher Drive (from the second Fletcher Viaduct, built in 1928) were designated Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument No. 770 in 2003. The footings of its bridge over the Los Angeles River reopened as a bicycle and pedestrian bridge in 2020.
A larger, regional transit organization, the Southern California Rapid Transit District (SCRTD or RTD) took over public transit in 1964. RTD introduced the bus numbering system still in use by Metro today, which took over in 1993.
Today Silver Lake is served by seven transit routes. The 2, 4, 10, and 92 (like all routes numbered 1-99) connect to the Downtown area – (although the 2, which travels through Westlake, is arguable). The 182 (like all routes numbered 100-199) runs east-west. The 296, which debuted on 15 December (like all routes numbered 200-299) runs north-south. The 603 (like all routes numbered 600-699) is a “special service route” – connecting, in this case, Glendale and South Central.
Today, Silver Lake’s mass transit service is part of the second largest such network in the US – and, appropriately, the network enjoys that nation’s second highest mass transit ridership. Every part of Silver Lake is less than three-quarters of a mile from a Metro stop. As a result, Silver Laker’s can enjoy a sustainable commute and single-seat ride to and from destinations near and far, including Angeleno Heights, Lincoln Heights, Montecito Heights, Atwater, Beverly Hills, Burbank, Chinatown, Echo Park, Highland Park, Exposition Park, Glendale, Hollywood, West Hollywood, Little Tokyo, Los Feliz, UCLA, USC, and elsewhere. All aboard!
Support Eric Brightwell on Patreon
Eric Brightwell is an adventurer, essayist, rambler, explorer, cartographer, and guerrilla gardener who is always seeking paid writing, speaking, traveling, and art opportunities. He is not interested in generating advertorials, cranking out clickbait, or laboring away in a listicle mill “for exposure.”
Brightwell has written for Angels Walk LA, Amoeblog, Boom: A Journal of California, diaCRITICS, Hey Freelancer!, Hidden Los Angeles, and KCET Departures. His art has been featured by the American Institute of Architects, the Architecture & Design Museum, the Craft Contemporary, Form Follows Function, the Los Angeles County Store, Sidewalking: Coming to Terms With Los Angeles, Skid Row Housing Trust, the 1650 Gallery, and Abundant Housing LA.
Brightwell has been featured as subject and/or guest in The Los Angeles Times, VICE, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Magazine, LAist, CurbedLA, Office Hours Live, L.A. Untangled, Spectrum News, Eastsider LA, Boing Boing, Los Angeles, I’m Yours, Notebook on Cities and Culture, the Silver Lake History Collective, KCRW‘s Which Way, LA?, All Valley Everything, Hear in LA, KPCC‘s How to LA, at Emerson College, and at the University of Southern California. He is the co-host of the podcast, Nobody Drives in LA.
Brightwell has written a haiku-inspired guidebook, Los Angeles Neighborhoods — From Academy Hill to Zamperini Field and All Points Between, that he hopes to have published. If you’re a literary agent or publisher, please contact him.
You can follow him on Bluesky, Duolingo, Facebook, Goodreads, iNaturalist, Instagram, Letterboxd, Medium, Mubi, Threads, and TikTok.
