History
In 1901, Henry E. Huntington (nephew and heir to the fortune of Southern Pacific Railroad founder Collis P. Huntington) began the Pacific Electric Railway as a way to develop the lands surrounding Los Angeles. The main trunk line eastwards into the San Gabriel Valley passed to the south of Pasadena (with branch lines peeling off), skirting the line of hills just south of the San Gabriel Mountains. Huntington chose for himself a large tract of land on one of these hills (which on a clear day has a view of the ocean, 22 miles (35 km) distant). When automobile ownership rose in Southern California, this main line was converted into a wide divided highway, with four tracks running down the median. In 1925, Pacific Electric began converting its train lines into bus routes, a process that culminated in 1953, when the bulk of its routes were closed.
Read more about this topic: Huntington Drive
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“I think that Richard Nixon will go down in history as a true folk hero, who struck a vital blow to the whole diseased concept of the revered image and gave the American virtue of irreverence and skepticism back to the people.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not need agents.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)