USC Lines

[Gokhan]

They just unearthed railroad tracks on McClintock Ave in the USC Campus, from the narrow-gauge Los Angeles Railway Yellow Cars days:

www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=613109958713460&set=a.145792482111879.22538.134972803193847&type=1&theater

[transitfan]

Yep, the old U line, which ran until 1947. IIRC, it started at Central & Florence, went up Central to the downtown area (I think it used 5th St), then meandered west of downtown, don't remember the exact routing, but I know it ended up on Union Av (thus the "U" designation? Or maybe because the route was somewhat U-shaped?), took Union down to Hoover, Hoover to 30th St, which curved south and became McClintock Av, much as it does today, except back then it didn't pass by the USC-owned Cardinal Gardens apartment complex) , then McClintock down to Exposition, crossing the PE Santa Monica Air Line, then merging with the V on Vermont. After the V turned east on Vernon Av, the U ran solo on Vermont until it ended at Florence Av, at which time, the F line, coming to Vermont on a diagonal private ROW (I think part of this can be seen today), took over service on Vermont to the PE El Segundo line around 116th St (PE used to have a branch turn off the El Segundo line and head south on Vermont where it met the Redondo Beach via Gardena line, I suspect this went away in 1940, when PE cancelled the Redondo via Gardena (and San Pedro via Torrance) lines, forcing the cities of Gardena and Torrance to start their own bus service, first connecting with PE and eventually going all the way to downtown L. A., these lines continue as Gardena MBL line 1 and Torrance line 1.
The death knell for the U (and a few other lines) was the conversion of 5th & 6th Sts to one-way in the downtown area. The Central Ave portion was replaced by the line 3 trolley bus, the Union/Hoover/McClintock part was abandonded, and the F line was reroute from Hoover between (then) Santa Barbara and Florence over to Vermont to cover for the U on Vermont (eventually, either the Torrance or Gardena 1, as mentioned above, started using Hoover St on the way to downtown L. A., I don't know if that was concurrent with the F leaving Hoover or not).
Even if the U had not been cancelled in 1947, I wonder if they woudl've been kicked out anyway when USC purchased the land between McClintock and Vermont in the late 50s? for expansion, and McClintock became a campus road (I think when I came to USC in 1976, you could exit only from McClintock onto Exposition westbound through one of those "tire damge" thingies. By the early 80s, this was sealed off.

[Gokhan]

CityDig: When the Trolley Came to U.S.C.
Posted on 6/18/2013 5:25:00 PM by Nathan Masters


Photo by Lisa Moeller

Let us give thanks to asphalt. Without the asphalt pools known as the La Brea Tar Pits, we’d have only a dim view of the lumbering mammoths and saber-toothed cats that once roamed the Los Angeles Basin. And asphalt has preserved another, more recent chapter of Los Angeles history: remnants of the city’s old streetcar network.

Construction workers discovered one remnant earlier this month at the University of Southern California, where they unearthed streetcar rails underneath the blacktop pavement of McClintock Avenue. Hidden for decades, the tracks date as far back as 1891 and the construction of the Los Angeles Consolidated Electric Railway’s University Line. Then, the university operated out of a few buildings along present-day Trousdale Parkway, and McClintock—today a private road through campus—was a public residential street.


A Los Angeles Consolidated Electric streetcar, circa 1891-96. Courtesy of the USC Libraries - USC University Archives.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the University Line had become the Los Angeles Railway’s U Line. For decades, the yellow cars of the U Line rolled through what is today the heart of the USC campus. According to Kenn Bicknell of the Metro Transportation Library and Archive, the line was among the city’s most popular, handling 49,200 average weekday boardings in 1940. (Another trolley route, the K Line, cut through campus along present-day Trousdale Parkway.)

After World War II, the U Line met the same fate that befell all of L.A.’s other streetcar lines. In 1948, the fixed-rail streetcars gave way to rubber-tire trolley buses, and asphalt entombed the old tracks.

RELATED: Remembering L.A.'s Other Trolleys

Nathan Masters of the USC Libraries blogs here on behalf of L.A. as Subject, an association of more than 230 libraries, cultural institutions, official archives, and private collectors hosted by the USC Libraries and dedicated to preserving and telling the sometimes-hidden histories of Los Angeles.