99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-70- The Great Red Car Conspiracy

Episode Date: January 12, 2013

When Eric Molinsky lived in Los Angeles, he kept hearing this story about a bygone transportation system called the Red Car. The Red Car, he was told, had been this amazing network of streetcars that connected the city–until a car … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars and this is Eric Mollensky. Hi, I'm Eric. Eric is an independent producer in New York City. Brooklyn, of course, like most public radio producers here. But before Brooklyn, Eric spent 10 years in Los Angeles. Yeah, when I was in LA, I used to hear this story pretty often. And the story, it's almost like a fable. LA had this amazing transportation system called the Red Car, and it was this trolley that covered the entire city. And then after World War II, either Ford or GM, Botha Red Car had it dismantled and then built this horrible freeway system that created the sprawl and gridlock of today. And you know, the first time I heard this story I thought, well that sounds familiar,

it must be true, I feel like I've definitely heard this story before. That's because it's the plot of who framed Roger Rapids. Oh, man! Now he raises the human! Or at least it's the evil scheme that Christopher Lloyd reveals at the end of the movie. Come on! Nobody's gonna drive this lousy freeway when they can take the red car for a nickel! Oh, they'll drive. They'll have to. You see, I bought the red car, so I could dismantle it.

What the... This isn't totally ridiculous. Remember the plot of Chinatown where Los Angeles mogul was stealing water from Northern California? That actually happened. Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown. As I learned more about the history of LA, I learned that the red car was actually not the victim of a massive conspiracy. The red car actually was the conspiracy.

The red car helped create the sprawl in the gridlock. To understand how this all came about, we have to go way back to the mid-19th century. A boy named Henry Huntington was born into a middle class family in upstate New York, but he has a very wealthy uncle named Collis Huntington. Collis has no kids, and he sort of latches on to his nephew.

And I mean, I assume you must see something in Henry, you know, he thinks his kid can be molded into a business man and he's right. And so, Kolas takes little Henry under his wing, he teaches him everything about the family business, which is railroads. Jump to 1900, Kolas dies, and Henry thinks he's going to inherit the company Southern Pacific. But the board doesn't want another huntiton in charge, so Henry's out. And he gets a consolation prize, which is $50 million, which back then

was about, maybe like, $400 million today. And he takes his cash, and he goes south to Los Angeles. The city of Los Angeles really shouldn't exist. I mean, because, you know, the LA river was a mess, and it was so prone to flooding when actually changed its location on the map. The only decent harbor is Long Beach, but San Diego has a bigger center of commerce. And downtown LA is like way far to the east. A disconnected flatland, but where many people saw the desert, Robert Barons of the late 19th century saw something else, a blank slate. So the modern city of Los Angeles, as we know it, was created as sort of like a counterweight

to San Francisco, which was liberal even back then at very strong unions. And LA was an open shop, like a businessman, like Henry Huntington, had free reign. And he starts by purchasing the biggest transportation system in the city, which was the Los Angeles Railway, otherwise known as Larry. And he incorporates it into a new company

called Pacific Electric. I talked to a bunch of historians about this, including Bill Friedrichs, who grew up in Los Angeles. I have this vague recollection of a street car running up and down the main drag, which was brand boulevard, and I think I can remember the bell ringing in the street car. Really, what did it sound like? Ding ding. Friedrichs actually it sound like? Ding, ding. I don't know. Friedrichs actually wrote a book about Henry Huntington. The key to Henry Huntington's operation

was that this was before a lot of regulation in the area. So Henry pretty much decided where development would occur by building a street car line out to the area, just ahead of development. And most frequently, he was building the street car lines out to where he owned the land. So, to put this in modern terms, the red car was kind of like the Kindle. Amazon loses money on the Kindle because they want you to use this e-reader as a portal

to buy lots of, you know, bigger stuff on their website. And so the red car was a portal to get you to buy other bigger stuff from Henry Huntington. Like your entire life. He never really made money with the Pacific Electric, but it took people out to his subdivisions where he sold them land, frequently sold them water, he controlled some water companies. He also established an electric operation called the Pacific Light and Power Company. It was essentially set up to provide electricity to his trolley cars, but he ended up selling electricity to the city of Los Angeles.

Now, even back then, this was not business as usual. There are lots of other street car developers, but they're much smaller and they frequently went bankrupt. Other developers owned land and they'd build a trolley out to some land, but not the immense amount of land that Huntington controlled. So he's sort of a complete package coming down. So from 1904 to 1913, Huntington opens 500 new subdivisions every year. He controls more than 900 red cars on more than 1100 miles of track. That's about 25% more track mileage than New York City has today, 100 years later.

Now, historically, American cities grow organically in rings out of a downtown. And Huntington really forces Los Angeles to expand outward at twice the rate. And I think that really weakened downtown LA because he was creating these little downtowns along his trolley routes. So, you know, you think he's creating this empire, he's got the trains, he's got the electricity, he's got the land, he's got the water. Only needed now, we're people.

Back then, you know, there were a lot of reasons not to like cities. I mean, they were dirty, they were crowded, they were dangerous. And Los Angeles was gonna be this very different kind of city, That was the dream. In Huntington and Harry Chandler and all these other sort of LA power brokers went on this media blitz. And during the winter, they would blink at the Midwest with advertisements.

You know that Los Angeles is a paradise full of orange trees. The climate will cure your asthma. You can go surfing. And surfing was actually a relatively unknown sport until Henry Huntington hired a Hawaiian surfer named George Frith to surf along Huntington Beach. And it worked. I mean, for a while, Long Beach was known as Iowa by the sea because so many islands lived there. But eventually, the dream went bust. So now, remember Pacific Electric is designed to lose money. It's a portal to Huntington's real estate and other companies. And so the board of Pacific Electric is not happy about this. And the meantime, the red car is becoming a threat to Southern Pacific Railroad,

which was the company that Huntington thought he was going to inherit from his uncle. So Southern Pacific wants to buy Pacific Electric. Huntington says no, his own board overrules him. He's forced to make a deal and once again his power and his ambitions are cut short. But Henry Huntington gets the last laugh in a pretty weird way. Because his uncle's fortune was split between him and his aunt Arabella. So Huntington marries his aunt and consolidates the family fortune. Now it's actually not quite as icky as it sounds, because they were not related by blood.

She was his uncle's second wife. But still. Yeah. So Huntington actually lives happily ever after, with his wealth and his aunt, his aunt, slash wife. And he brings a lot of beauty to Los Angeles. He creates Huntington Gardens, the Huntington Library. He dies in 1927.

And I don't know if he knew yet, but it was clear already to historians looking back that the red car was doomed. Red Car was doomed. Even though the overall track mileage rivaled New York, the Red Car wasn't comprehensive enough to go everywhere you needed to go by Red Car alone. And they started to become poorly maintained. People started calling them slums on wheels. The big turning point comes in 1926, a year before Huntington dies.

Southern Pacific, which now owns Huntington's Pacific Electric, offers this massive plan to build subways and elevated trains all around downtown LA. And this would be paid for by the taxpayer, so it's put up for a public referendum. And there's a lot of money spent, you know know a lot of advertising spend on both sides just like referendums today and the voters reject the plan People just didn't like Southern Pacific. They had meddled in California politics for so long that they called it the octopus Okay, so now remember the original sort of conspiracy theory that the car companies bought

up the red car and tore them down and built up the freeways. So there was a subsidiary of General Motors called National Citylines and they did buy trolley cars and they converted them into bus routes. And there were people at the time that thought it was a conspiracy. This wasn't this conspiracy that suddenly, you know, people discovered 50 years later. But the fact is, specific electric was doing the same thing to their own trolley cars. As freeways became the norm and the red car became a thing

of the past, you can see how a conspiracy theory could become cemented into the public imagination. So when I first saw a map of the red car lines, I actually thought it was an early map of the freeways, which makes sense. These are the roots that people were using to get around. And in some cases, like the red car lines, I actually thought it was an early map of the freeways, which makes sense. These are the routes that people were using to get around. And in some cases like the Koenga Pass, trains were actually dismantled to make way for

the Hollywood freeway. Santa Monica Boulevard is paved over a trolley route, and sometimes, you know, when I was heading to the 405, I'd actually drive over these phantom tracks. LA's first freeway, the Oroio Asako Parkway, which connects downtown to Pasadena, opened in 1940. A few years later, city planners proposed another plan for elevated railroads that was rejected by the city council. The last red car ran in 1961.

And you have to think it was in a way a victim of its own success. Henry Huntington's goal was to connect his far-flung properties and create a decentralized city that you'd need a mass transit solution to get around. The problem was he couldn't provide it. Over time, L.A. was so spread out that it overtaxed what the red car was capable of servicing. I like to imagine, you know, if it's 1960, I'm driving along the 10 freeway. I mean, I'm sure there was traffic, but it must have been pretty smooth, because I mean, the freeways that exist now

were the same freeways back then, but built for a much smaller population. So they must have seemed like a really impressive solution at the time. And today, Angelino's can appreciate the great solution of their highway system for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Eric Mullinsky with help from Sam Greenspan and me Roman Mars.

It's a project of 91.7, local public radio KALW in San Francisco, and the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook. I tweet at Roman Mars, but we have pictures of red cars and red car maps and pictures of Henry Huntington at 99%invisible.org. Radio Tepi-U from PRX.