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Paul Haddad, Haddad Paul
Freewaytopia: How Freeways Shaped Los Angeles
English · Paperback / Softback
Will be released 05.10.2021
Description
"Freewaytopia: How Freeways Shaped Los Angeles explores how social, economic, political, and cultural demands created the web of freeways whose very form--futuristic, majestic, and progressive--perfectly exemplifies the City of Angels."--Back cover.
List of contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Each first date refers to the original opening segment of a freeway; the second date refers to a freeway's completion.
CHAPTER 1
THE ARROYO SECO
State Route 110
(1938-1953)
CHAPTER 2
THE HOLLYWOOD FREEWAY
U.S. Route 101 / State Route 170
(1940-1968)
CHAPTER 3
THE HARBOR FREEWAY
Interstate 110
(1952-1970)
CHAPTER 4
THE GOLDEN STATE FREEWAY
Interstate 5
(1955-1974)
CHAPTER 5
THE FOOTHILL FREEWAY
Interstate 210 / State Route 210
(1955-2007)
CHAPTER 6
THE VENTURA FREEWAY
U.S. Route 101 / State Route 134
(1955-1974)
CHAPTER 7
THE SAN DIEGO FREEWAY
Interstate 405 / Interstate 5
(1957-1969)
CHAPTER 8
THE GLENDALE FREEWAY
State Route 2
(1958-1978)
CHAPTER 9
THE SANTA MONICA FREEWAY
Interstate 10 / State Route 1
(1961-1966)
CHAPTER 10
THE SIMI VALLEY FREEWAY
State Route 118
(1968-1993)
CHAPTER 11
THE MARINA FREEWAY
State Route 90
(1968-1972)
CHAPTER 12
THE CENTURY FREEWAY
Interstate 105
(1993)
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About the author
Paul Haddad's books include the Los Angeles Times bestseller, 10,000 Steps a Day in L.A.: 57 Walking Adventures, and High Fives, Pennant Drives, and Fernandomania: A Fan's History of the Los Angeles Dodgers' Glory Years, 1977-1981 (named one of the Best Baseball Books of 2012 by the Daily News). As a Hollywood-born native, he has written about Los Angeles for the Los Angeles Times and hosted a column on Huffington Post about L.A.'s forgotten history. He has authored three award-winning novels, including the L.A. Noir Paradise Palms: Red Menace Mob. A graduate of University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts, Haddad has been nominated for multiple Emmys as a documentary producer.
PaulHaddadBooks.com @la_dorkout
Patt Morrison is a journalist, best-selling author, and radio-television personality based in Los Angeles and Southern California. Morrison has a share of two Pulitzer Prizes as a longtime Los Angeles Times writer and columnist. As a public television and radio broadcaster, she has won six Emmys and a dozen Golden Mike awards.
Summary
Freewaytopia: How Freeways Shaped Los Angeles explores how social, economic, political, and cultural demands created the web of freeways whose very form—futuristic, majestic, and progressive—perfectly exemplifies the City of Angels.
From the Arroyo Seco Parkway, which began construction during the Great Depression, to the Century Freeway, completed in 1993, author Paul Haddad provides an entertaining and thought-provoking history of the 527 miles of roadways that comprise the Los Angeles freeway system.
Each of Los Angeles’s twelve freeways receives its own chapter, and these are supplemented by “Off-Ramps”—sidebars that dish out pithy factoids about Botts’ Dots, SigAlerts, and all matter of freeway lexicon, such as why Southern Californians are the only people in the country who place the word “the” in front of their interstates, as in “the 5,” or “the 101.”
Freewaytopia also explores those routes that never saw the light of day. Imagine superhighways burrowing through Laurel Canyon, tunneling under the Hollywood Sign, or spanning the waters of Santa Monica Bay. With a few more legislative strokes of the pen, you wouldn’t have to imagine them—they’d already exist.
Haddad notably gives voice to those individuals whose lives were inextricably connected—for better or worse—to the city’s freeways: The hundreds of thousands of mostly minority and low-income residents who protested against their displacement as a result of eminent domain. Women engineers who excelled in a man’s field. Elected officials who helped further freeways . . . or stop them dead in their tracks. He pays tribute to the corps of civic and state highway employees whose collective vision, expertise, and dedication created not just the most famous freeway network in the world, but feats of engineering that, at their best, achieve architectural poetry. And let’s not forget the beauty queens—no freeway in Los Angeles ever opened without their royal presence.
Freewaytopia is part colorful lore, part civic and historical critique, and part homage to the most famous freeways in the world.
Foreword
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Additional text
"Freewaytopia deftly connects dreams, politics, new suburbs, and white privilege to tell the stories of L.A.’s freeways. Hostile to communities of color when they were built and loathed today by gridlocked drivers, the freeways still reveal a rough grandeur in their overpasses and interchanges. When the road ahead is unexpectedly open, L.A.'s freeways can be poetic. Paul Haddad has caught their vital rhythm." —D. J. Waldie, author of Becoming Los Angeles: Myth, Memory, and a Sense of Place Product details
"Paul Haddad’s Freewaytopia is an easy read that packs a factual wallop.” ——Patt Morrison, journalist, best-selling author, and radio-television personality
"Over the years there have been others like Joan Didion, Thomas Pynchon, David Brodsly, and Eric Avila among others that have also spotlighted Los Angeles freeways, but [Paul Haddad] might be the most comprehensive in how he examines the complete landscape." —Mike Sonksen, L.A. Taco
"The freeways of Los Angeles are so ubiquitous and functional that they're easy to ignore. But every mile of elevated roadway was carved from lost landscapes worth knowing. And in his nimbly written, deeply researched, myth-busting book, Paul Haddad chronicles both the growth and what was taken away—most often from the Angelenos who had the least to lose—as the city reshaped itself in the service of cars, speed and sprawl. Recommended for transit policy wonks, local history lovers and anyone who has missed their lane in a complicated cloverleaf and wondered why they built it that way." —Kim Cooper, Esotouric
"In his latest book,
Authors
Paul Haddad, Haddad Paul
Assisted by
Morrison Patt (Foreword)
Publisher
Ingram Publishers Services
Languages
English
Product format
Paperback / Softback
Release
05.10.2021, delayed
EAN
9781595801012
ISBN
978-1-59580-101-2
No. of pages
408
Illustrations
Hundreds of black and white photos and maps, Raster,schwarz-weiss
Subjects
Guides
> Motor vehicles, aircraft, ships, space travel
> Car, motorcycle, moped
Non-fiction book
> History
> Miscellaneous
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Popular Culture, TRANSPORTATION / Automotive / General, TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING / Civil / Highway & Traffic, TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING / Civil / Transportation
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