A Brief History of Great Big Things on Top of the Hollywood Freeway

by Nathan Walpow

I spotted this story in yesterday’s Times, about a plan to build a park on top of a mile-long stretch of the Hollywood Freeway, roughly from Santa Monica Boulevard to Bronson Avenue. Because, according to unnamed “advocates,” it’s “one of the city’s most parks-poor areas.”

I dunno. Griffith Park’s not that far. It’s pretty big. And pretty green. Pretty damned park-y, if you ask me.

And, ignoring the need or not of such a park, what about the people stuck in this new tunnel for twenty or thirty minutes during rush hour? All the obvious safety stuff would be in place, but how about their mental health? I get a little crazy in the Sepulveda tunnel at LAX, and I’m through that in 30 seconds. “We didn’t have a psychologist on board,” says the feasibility study leader for a report on the project. Hell. Shortsighted much?

But I didn’t bring this up to whine about questionable use of our tax dollars and to voice my concern about commuters’ psyches. I brought it up because the whole thing reminded me of another project to build something really big atop the 101. It was called the Steel Cloud, and it was the result of a design competition in the late ’80s, and it was a great big jumble of sidewalk and girders and projection screens and God knows what else that was going to be a symbol of how Los Angeles welcomes immigrants. Or something like that.

It’s a shame the thing was never built, because it would have been a lot of fun. A cool place to go and hang out, a fine target for late-night comedians, a wonderful opportunity to far exceed a budget. But the funding never came through and people got scared about the monument’s avant-garde nature and now almost everyone’s forgotten about it, except people who are paid to remember, like the Times’s D.J. Waldie, who wrote this piece last March.

(There’s more about the Steel Cloud at this website and this one, where the image below lives, along with a couple more.)

Some years ago, when my first publisher (Dell-rhymes-with-hell) dropped my mystery series and I was fairly fed up with the book world, a decided to write a high-concept thriller, because well-written series mysteries brought their authors paltry sums and crappily-written thrillers routinely got them six figures. My high concept: the Steel Cloud did get built. And someone was going to do something bad at the opening ceremonies. And my heroine was going to get involved and somehow save the day. The presence of all those words beginning with some- in the previous couple of sentences points out the problem of a writer whose work is character-driven trying to come up with a novel which depends on, uh, plot points. I wrote 120,000 words, not many of which had anything to do with each other. Somewhere along the way I expanded the concept into an alternate reality where a bunch of other things that had been proposed for L.A. but never happened, happened. (A giant Donald Trump tower where the Ambassador Hotel used to be, a floating airport off the coast.) And, not satisfied with that as an unmanageable idea, I decided some things that had gone away hadn’t. (The Pan-Pacific Auditorium, for instance.)

Eventually I came to my senses. The Steel Cloud project got shelved. I wrote a couple more Joe Portugal mysteries, which brought even less money than the first two. (There’s a fifth one running here at FourStory, by the way, because I figured a serial was another great way for someone who doesn’t know how to plot to get his ass in trouble.)

A giant undescribable mass of steel hovering over the 101 (and not, as I understand it, entombing the drivers beneath), welcoming all and everyone to the patchwork of small towns we call Los Angeles. What a wacky idea.

Wouldn’t it’ve been great?

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