The IAAL/MAF rolled out last night for a bracing 2-wheeled tour of Vernon, Huntington Park and industrial South L.A.. I took a bunch of mental notes and a passel of photos.
But until somebody perfects the olfactory browser plug-in there's no way you can get the ponk, the reek, the stench and smell of the ride - so words will have to do ...
After briefly re-savoring the brutal nasal assault we enjoyed last trip through Vernon, we moved on to an evening-long medley of sewer gas, cow manure, curing fiberglass, truck exhaust and hot fryer grease, punctuated once - delightfully - by a trace of hazelnut coffee from the Gavina coffee plant.
We rode through dead-calm warehouse districts, buzzing factory zones, busy boulevards and a few quiet residential streets - a nice tour of about 17 miles, in all.
One of the great thrills was riding up the Alameda St. access road right next to the Alameda cargo transportation corridor - the concrete canyon through which we could hear (and feel, but not see) what must have been a 100-car freight train rumbling toward the harbor.
I also managed to avoid doing a complete face-plant two minutes later when I was chatting with Spencer:
My front wheel dropped into a rail track that veered across our path and wrenched the handlebars out of my hands. The bike went one way (like, down) at about 10 mph and I bailed off of it just in time, and came up standing.
Torqued my back something fierce, but I managed to avoid hamburgering my face and busting my collarbone, which probably would have happened if I had been going just 3 mph faster. Now the front end of the bike's pretty tweaked though, so the old steed isn't rolling so straight.
As for the rest of the ride, I'll let the photos do my talking.
But here are notes from IAAL/MAF cofounder Sean and from fixie-riding Will, who notes rightly that the quiet passing of 10 bicyclists seemed to provoke someone on every corner to make happy/angry/threatening/weird animal noises at us.
Ridemaster Eric Richardson regaled us en route with stories about Huntington Park's history, and offered this summary just before the ride:
The route starts Downtown and makes its way past two sites especially requested by IAAL-MAF members: the surreal Olympic bridge trash site and the Washington Blvd bridge. We then ride through the city of Vernon and make it to the dividing line between Vernon's industry and Maywood's residential.
We then skate the boundary between Bell and Huntington Park where we encounter something a little bit odd: Flower Street, Hope Street, Grand Ave, Olive Street, Hill Street and Broadway. The names are the same, but there are no high rises on these residential streets. It seems the city of Huntington Park has co-opted Downtown's naming scheme. We turn down Broadway, but see no cheap shops and old theatres.
Just before hitting Walnut Park we cut north and soon take a left on Randolph Street. In 1902 a pair of land owners had 100-acres they were trying to develop southeast of Downtown LA. They had called their development La Park in 1901, but in this year they changed the name to "Huntington Park" and gave Henry Huntington a right-of-way on Randolph in order to entice him to bring his Pacific Electric railroad to their land. The city was officially incorporated in 1906.
From here it's north on Alameda (which Google incorrectly shows as two one-way segments) and back to Downtown.
A few photos are a bit blurry (they're all handheld, with a shutter speed ranging from 1 second to 1/20th or so) but you can click on the thumbs to make them larger and more obviously blurry.
Jesus may be el Dio, but he still really, really, really, really, really, really needs you to prove that you believe in Him. So much so that he has commanded his followers to apply as many adhesive messages to their earthbound vehicles as legally possible. I was raised Catholic, but I guess I never believed Jesus was quite that insecure. Best sticker: "1 CROSS + 3 NAILS = 4GVN."
Off into the hallucinogenic downtown night.
Old-school signage - a rustic relic of the heavy rail traffic downtown warehouses used to get before trucks took over Alameda.
A 30-foot-long inspirational message is tacked to cyclone fencing under one of the grimiest underpasses you've ever seen. Anyone know the origins of this? It does cheer the place up a bit, though none of the street-sleepers we saw were smiling much.
Looks like Sears hasn't been paying its neon-maintenance bill.
View from the Washington Boulevard Bridge over the L.A. River, a gnarly, blasted stretch of smelly drainage canal.
This bridge was likely a WPA project, from the looks of the well-formed concrete balustrades and this beautiful frieze we spotted on one of its anchoring pillars. You gotta love the fact that the frieze depicts people actually building the bridge itself. I wonder what it would take to get the current administration to turn some portion of the infrastructure-building budget towards art and craftsmanship the way the FDR administration did.
How this bronze plaque must have gleamed when they bolted it to the bridge more than 70 years ago. The men who stood around it probably posed for pictures, proud to have their names cast in such a permanent form on such an important public work. They're gone now - an inspiration to start contemplating our own mortality, and to get rolling again.
Mystery building: The raw, ungodly stench of Farmer John's whacks us in the face right around here - a weird, nether stretch between Alameda and Santa Fe. I have absolutely no idea what this structure is for.
The region all blends together in a sprawl of factories and mills, but just about every street is marked with a City of Vernon sign. The right half of this picture is color-corrected. The left half is what the sodium-vapor streetlights make it look like in reality.
I love the industrial/Megatron shape of the mighty Owens-Illinois plant, which appears to make, glass bottles.
We could see thousands of bottles streaming down conveyor lines through the windows, though they were too fast for the camera to pick up at high zoom.
Gage Bowl. 'Nuff said. Lovely Googie neon, and the place was hopping when we rode past..
Who knew that Huntington Park was the "City of Perfect Balance?"
Restaurant Sinaloense. I would love to have checked out the menu, but we were rolling past at a good clip.
Nightscape, Huntington Park, big jets on the glidepath to LAX are a distant roar overhead.
Nice neon on this auto repair shop. Really punches up the hand-painted signs of transmissions and engines.
One of these days, I want to decorate a bathroom entirely in quilted steel ...
Ride's end. Dave "eecue" Bullock enjoys a very, very, very large beer in Little Tokyo.
