Trolley Thursday 1-21-21 - The Pacific Electric Building and Subway Terminal

Whenever the topic of historical Los Angeles comes up in casual conversation, the first thing that always gets brought up is the historic architecture. After all, it's why the City of Angels can keep playing older versions of itself in movies and tv shows. From the Beaux Arts curves of the Broadway Arcade building, to the wrought iron lines of the Bradbury Building's elevators, in addition to the Eastern Building's gorgeous green Art Deco façade, you'd be hard-pressed to find an ugly historic building in Los Angeles. Two of those historic buildings that have stood the test of time continue to thrive under the Los Angeles Conservancy's patronage and care, despite being so far removed from their original purposes, and they are the Pacific Electric Building on 6th and Main Street, and the Subway Terminal Building at 4th and Hill. These were the transit hubs of the Pacific Electric, and thus today's Trolley Thursday is dedicated to appreciating their importance in the system's history.

The Huntington Building

The intersection of Spring Street (looking North) and 1st Street, circa 1880s.
This area was the original business center of Los Angeles before moving farther south.
(Water and Power Archives)

The Pacific Electric building as rendered in 1904,
prior to opening day. The houses to the lower right
are now just another parking lot. 
(Unknown Author)

When Henry E. Huntington first established the Pacific Electric Railway (PE) with financier Isaias W. Hellman in 1900, he knew that he wanted a building that was bigger, badder, and more extravagant than anything the West Coast had ever seen. After all, he was Henry E. Huntington; he owned Los Angeles, and even back then he realized that anything worth doing in LA wasn't worth half-doing. By this time, Los Angeles' only skyscraper was the five-story Bradbury Building on West 3rd Street and Broadway, dating back to 1893. Huntington's building was to be nine stories tall, swallowing up a third of a block between 6th and 7th Streets and facing Main Street. 

In lavish Huntington style, architect Thornton Fitzhugh styled the building in popular Beaux Arts and Romanesque cues, featuring sweeping floor-to-ceiling arched windows capping every column of windows and elaborate scrolled arch in-betweens and corners marked with a "PE" sigil and "HEH" (Henry E. Huntington" initials. This helped blend it in to the architecture of old Downtown Los Angeles, which was experiencing a Beaux Arts boom. The first floor was dedicated to being a train station, with ticket booths and a waiting hall serving the covered platforms serviced by the interurban, while the rest were dedicated to business and accounting for the PE and Huntington's land owning businesses. His own office was located on the south-east side of the building on the seventh floor, and was lined with expensive linoleum over hardwood floor, also featuring his initials in the tilework.

One of the corner facades of the PE building, showing the "PE" interlocking sigil
also found on the wooden PE 1001 "Commodore" officer's car.
(Mike Jiroch)

The original terminal layout of the PE Building, featuring
the original back wall and the crossover tracks. Note the 
"Palm Garden Buffet" sign in the waiting room, along with the
"Mount Lowe" destination sign in the doorway.
(Jack Finn)

The building first opened for business on January 15, 1905, to a great public celebration. Not only was it the first major mass transit hub in the city, but the Huntington Building was also Los Angeles' first real skyscraper (at least ten stories) and the largest building in the city and also west of Chicago. Passengers filed into the ornately-decorated and furnished waiting room on the Northeast side (which held food stands, restaurants, and shops) as the giant wooden red cars entered the terminal's original stub-end facing Main Street to load up with passengers bound for Pasadena, Long Beach, and all points in between. This stub-end later became a massive headache for the City of Los Angeles, as the cumbersome loading and operating procedure with only one access point often backed up traffic up and down Main Street to as far north as 4th Street and as far south as 9th Street. 

The Red Car Reaches Out

Looking eastward from the interlocking's point of view, the elevated railway is seen going over Maple Avenue (top-middle) and out past Wall Street (very top) to reach San Pedro Street. To the extreme left, that glimpse of red-orange is the "LCL" street level freight service, while the upper right is the Pacific Electric Motor Coach Lines busyard. This picture is dated 1950.
(Jack Finn)

The PE Building saw continued growth as a transit station up until the Great Merger of 1911 under the Southern Pacific Railway (SP). In a rare moment of actually giving a crap about the transit planning in his city, Henry Huntington put forth a plan in 1906 to move all the Main Street traffic off and onto Santee Street to the Southeast (a street that, originally, split off from Los Angeles Street at 3rd and ran parallel until Washington Boulevard). Huntington managed to clear the land for Santee Street's new right-of-way from 9th Street to 6th Street, with the planned segment hanging a hard left into the Eastern side of the PE building and, thus, handling all of the Southern Division lines (Long Beach, San Pedro, Whittier, Newport, etc) under one easy route. However, this never happened for one reason or another and, today, Santee Street suspiciously ends abruptly at 8th Street after a private party bought part of the Huntington land and put a loft building right in the middle. 

A 1916 view of the new Pacific Electric elevated, with cars lined up on the bottom level
serving as more platform and storage space. This area later became an elevated bus garage
and is currently a block of strip mall stores.
(Alamy Stock Photos)

To further ease gridlock off of Main Street, Huntington's second plan came in 1910 when the back wall to the terminal tracks was demolished and the train tracks were simply extended out the other side of the building. Due to neighboring Los Angeles Street being lower than the street tracks on Main, this portion was elevated and eventually stretched out 1500 feet to the southeast to reach San Pedro Street by December 3, 1916, capped by a steep ramp to reach street level. The station platforms were also expanded from two through tracks with the addition of three stub platforms against the remaining back wall for a grand total of five tracks, which opened on February 11, 1917. Interlocking (switch management) was handled by an office space on the second floor overlooking the station tracks. SP intended to elevated the whole interurban out to connect with their own four-track system at 14th and Long Beach, but this never came to pass. To further supplement the station's use as a major hub, the area below the elevated platforms were dedicated to "Less than Carload" (LCL) freight and US Mail service. The PE building remained in this configuration until the end of streetcar service in 1961.

Eat at Cole's

Cole's current neon sign.
(Big Orange Landmarks)

The Pacific Electric Building (also known as Main Street Station) was not just home to interurban railroad cars, as plenty of business filled up its 693 office units. Once the PE was bought by SP management, their offices were moved to the Los Angeles Railway (LARy) Building at 11th and Broadway and the SP's own offices took over the building. (Hilariously, just north across 6th street was the Santa Fe Railroad's Los Angeles offices.) Other tenants included the architectural offices of Greene and Greene around 1905 (who popularized the Arts and Crafts bungalow style) and the second-oldest operating restaurant in Los Angeles, Cole's Pacific Electric Buffet. Cole's claim to fame is shared with cross-town rival and first-oldest restaurant in Los Angeles, Philippe's The French Dip, as both claim to have invented the famous soaking-wet beef sandwich. Interestingly, the original tables at Cole's were made from varnished red car doors, but these have since been relocated to Clifton's Cafeteria after recent redevelopment.

Another major tenant of the PE Building was the Jonathan Club, a private businessman's social club originally established in 1894 (as a political club backing William McKinley's campaign) and then on June 8, 1895 (when it became a non-political social club). As Huntington was a member of this club, he allowed the Jonathan Club to dominate the two top floors of the PE building and this helped them gain a foothold in Los Angeles business and politics for many years. One of Huntington's business acquaintances and rivals, John D. Spreckels of the San Diego Electric Railway, was also a member of the club and the two often talked business and trolleys over an alcoholic drink. The club moved out of the PE building in 1924, when it opened a new location on Figueroa Street near the Los Angeles Public Library.

The original,  lavish arch-roof interior of the Jonathan Club, looking quite the fin-de-sicile cavern club.
(Sha in LA)

Need for a New Hub

Main Street in 1924, crossing over Fourth Street. The 950-class car is
ex-LAP, bound for a Sierra Madre service to Pasadena.
(Martin Turnbull)

By the 1920s, Los Angeles was demanding something to be done about the amount of streetcars clogging the busy avenues and boulevards around the densely-packed city grid. PE and LARy cars rubbed shoulders and fenders with the ever-encroaching automobile, leading to increased travel times as long strings of interurban cars often blocked one or more intersections coming from destinations in the North like Burbank and Pasadena. One of the other nearby stations, "old" Hill Street Station was originally constructed by the Los Angeles Pacific Railway (LAP) on 4th Street between Hill and Broadway as downtown access to its lines serving Santa Monica and Venice Beach. After the "new" PE Company bought the line in 1911, the five-track terminal station was woefully out of date to handle new traffic out to Hollywood and Glendale and as early as 1920, PE was already looking for a way to make the station part of an underground network.

Ex-LAP Hill Street Station in 1924, one year before the new Subway Terminal opened.
LAP had also built a tunnel following Hill Street through 1st Street, but while this saved 15 minutes
of travel time around the "Big Hill", it only served local Edendale and Echo Park services.
(Water and Power Archives)

Dated February 16, 1926, this temporary subway entrance
is set up as the rest of the Subway Terminal Building is
accommodating new tenants.
(J.H. Graham)

This reason to go underground eventually culminated in the California Railroad Commission (CRC) issuing Order No. 9928 in 1922. The order was simple: build a subway through downtown that can clear out as much gridlock from the city streets and grade-separate the trains. PE considered keeping the Hill Street station with through-tracks into an underground section as late as 1922, but eventually it was decided to demolish Hill Street Station and start from scratch with a real, purpose-built subway. The site for the new subway was decided quite easily: due south, right across 4th street. Construction on the new "Subway Terminal" began on May 3, 1924, with Hill Street continuing to serve as a terminal station until the new subway could be built. Interestingly, PE had plenty of financial incentive to build the subway, even without the order, as they would be saving $37,000 annually in operating costs and it also stopped Huntington's other trolley, the LARy, from extending into Hollywood.

Gone Hollywood

The new Subway Terminal Building after opening in 1925.
The trolley cars to the lower left are on the reused Hill Street terminal tracks.
This view is along Spring Street, looking northwest.
(Water and Power Archives)

The first train of "Fives" (or 500-class interurbans)
poses for a photo before the first outbound train from
the Subway Terminal.
(Los Angeles Public Library) 

The Subway Terminal Building opened on December 1, 1925, after eighteen months of construction and $18.2 million invested in the project. In contrast to the older Beaux Arts style of the PE Building, the Subway Terminal Building was designed by Schultz and Weaver in an Italian Renaissance style, with imposing silver edifices across its four light-providing "towers". The station itself (popularly known as the "Hollywood Subway") was set 31 feet below Hill Street, while the main building served as office spaces (although unlike the PE building, the Subway Terminal never held any railroad offices). The Hill Street Station building was demolished shortly after opening, while its tracks were integrated as street-level platforms. With the new transit hub, work between PE's three divisions was split about evenly with the PE Building now handling all Northern (Pasadena, San Bernardino) and Southern (Long Beach, Newport Beach) division trains and the Subway Terminal handling all Western division (Santa Monica, Hollywood, San Fernando Valley) trains. (We'll talk about the Western Division next week.) The new subway station brought with it the elimination of eight car-miles on the streets of Los Angeles, leaving only shuttle services ping-ponging between the PE Building and the Subway Terminal.

An undated photo (but judging by the PCCs, possibly after 1939) shows two Hollywood car trains (right)
and two PCC car trains (left) posed at the Subway Terminal, with the interlocking tower at center.
(Water and Power Associates)

Pacific Electric's Toluca Yard at the northern end of the Hollywood
Subway. Belmont Substation is just offscreen to the left.
This entire area is now the Belmont Station Apartments.
(Water and Power Associates)

Underground, the six-platform station was built to the finest standards any interurban railroad could ask for. The interlocking tower was located at the end of the platforms, protecting a double-slip switch as well as the other platform tracks and ensuring the tunnels were clear before sending out a train. At peak rush hour levels, the low platforms could be jammed with hundreds of people and trains of wooden "Fives" and "Nines" interurban cars or steel-bodied Hollywoods could, at any time, be filled to full capacity and be arriving almost every five minutes. The overhead electric wires of the subway were attached to wooden planks on the roof, ensuring a smooth and taut wire, and the 1.045 mile tunnel provided a swift ride under Bunker Hill out to the intersection of Glendale Blvd (which it followed to Hollywood, Glendale, and Burbank), Beverly Blvd (meeting the LARy "I" Line), West 1st Street (which took over Beverly Blvd east of the PE tracks), and West 2nd Street. At its peak during World War II, the Hollywood Subway carried well over 65,000 passengers a day in 1944, rounding out to an incredible 20 million passengers a year. After all, when there's national gasoline rationing about, how else are you going to get around?

Two Buildings In Search of a Purpose

And now, the sad part.

The abandoned Hollywood Subway and interlocking tower,
as photographed for Los Angeles Magazine.
(Hussein Katz for Los Angeles Magazine)

The Subway Terminal Building was the first to close its doors to rail service in 1955, when the Glendale-Burbank line finished the last services of the Subway Terminal on June 19. SP was quick to tear out the tracks and abandon the Toluca Substation at the subway's entrance and the tunnel remained quiet and empty for quite some time. The building itself remained an office space, with whole businesses coming and going not knowing it used to be a train station. Even the subway terminal itself was sealed off at both ends, with the tunnel portal being bricked up and the access points in the building sealed off. Over time, a few new buildings (like the Bonaventure Hotel) have punched through the tunnel in order to lay their foundations and graffiti artists have rendered the dank, musty insides with endless graffiti, but the abandoned subway remained intact for an incredibly long time.

In 1964, the Pacific Electric's elevated railway is dismantled on the
orders of LAMTA management. The land would later be used
for local business buildings and strip malls.
(Alan Weeks)

However, while the Subway Terminal was able to continue making money as a business center, the PE building was downright neglected. Following the closure of the PE, all transit services now by bus moved to the nearby Greyhound Terminal. As Main Street continued to decline, many of the offices in the PE building moved out until it sat vacant from many years, being only used in film and television projects. The former Main Street exit and main platform area was converted into a parking garage. You may have seen it in films like LA Confidential where the two man characters dangle a city district attorney from a window, or even in the Amazing Spiderman II where the friendly neighborhood web-slinger can be found perched near an ornate edifice with a clearly-marked "HEH". Over 400 film and TV productions utilized the PE building, but none ever made any serious attempts to restore or bring more attention to the building. At this point, the only remaining original tenant was Cole's PE Buffet. 

LA Confidential shows off one of the "HEH" edifices located near the top of the building.
Do not try this at home.

Living Legends

The lobby entrance for the Pacific Electric Lofts,
residing in what was once the waiting room.
(Zillow

Fortunes changed for both buildings in the early 2000s, starting in 2007 when the PE Building was purchased by the ICO Group and renovated as a residential live/work loft, along with new office spaces. Much of the renovation work went to outlining new rooms as the developers saw fit, including renovating Henry E. Huntington's office and the two-story Jonathan Club into new living and work spaces. On the outside, the ICO Group worked closely with the Los Angeles Conservancy (an architectural touring and preservation nonprofit dedicated to the old architecture of Los Angeles) to restore the building to its former glory. Among some of the changes made to the building from prior tenants included a drop ceiling in the waiting room covering the original arched columns and the parking garage in place of the original platforms. The original ceiling does still exist, and the Conservancy is working to get the original roof restored. There was originally to be a historic streetcar display in the basement as well, using an LA Railway car No. 1435, but these plans fell through for various reasons. By this time, Cole's had also closed for renovation, reopening to 2008, and lost its status as "oldest operating restaurant" to Philippe's, as despite Philippes moving locations several times, the French Dip restaurant has remained open longer by just one year. 

The logo for the Metro 417 luxury apartments.
(Brookfield Propertties)

The grand lobby of the Subway Terminal Building,
with its original marble and brass fitting restored.
(Westside Rentals)

As for the Subway Terminal Building, it too came under new ownership in 2007 after being declared a "Los Angeles Historic Cultural Monument". Under its new owners, Forest City Realty Trust, the building has been renamed to "Metro 417" and now serves as a luxury apartment building. Like the PE Building, the Los Angeles Conservancy also involved itself in the preservation of the building, from the restoration of its original natural stone exterior to the original marble and brass with terra cotta trim found in the lobbies. The Conservancy has also helped to preserve and recover much of the original Hollywood Subway down below, and despite access being shut from the building side, the tunnel is still very much open for members of the Conservancy to tour and keep in relatively good shape. Despite being in a land of earthquakes, the subway has not once suffered a cave-in or any damage apart from a few blasted-in foundations. Subway service has since been taken over by the LA Metro B (Red) Line at Pershing Square, just across the street, while the site of the former Hill Street station is now a parking lot. 

One of the remaining exit signs to the Pacific Electric Subway Terminal,
which can be seen on any LA Conservancy tour.
(Elizabeth Daniels for Curbed LA)

Thank you for reading today's Trolley post, and watch your step as you alight on the platform. My resources today included "Interurbans Special 60 - Lines of the Pacific Electric, Southern & Western District" and "Interurban Special 16, Lines of the Pacific Electric: Western District" by Ira L. Swett, the Southern California Electric Railway Historical Association, the California Historic Route 66 Association, the Water and Power Archives, and the Los Angeles Conservancy. The trolley gifs in our posts are made by Brian Clough and can be found on his site, Banks of the Susquehanna. On Tuesday, we set our sights on stardom as we explore the colorful and varied history of the PE Western Division! For now, you can follow myself or my editor on Twitter, buy a shirt or sticker from our Redbubble stand, or purchase my editor's self-developed board game! It's like Ticket to Ride, but cooler! (and you get to support him through it!) Until next time, ride safe!