Secret Walks #19: Edendale's Red Car Line, 2 miles

In 1909, before Hollywood was Hollywood, the heyday of the silent motion picture industry and home of most major picture studios on the Pacific Coast began on Allesandro Avenue in Edendale, a (back then) suburb NW of Downtown LA that's now part of Echo Park, Los Feliz, and Silver Lake. Think pie-slapping slapstick, Keystone Kops, Charlie Chaplin, Fatty Arbuckle, Norma Desmond, and Tom Mix. And because L.A. wasn't the car culture it is now, the Edendale Line of the Pacific Electric Railway carried actors, workers, artists, and residents here from downtown. In 1955 the trolley service ended and the tracks abandoned, leaving only the stretch of land tucked behind homes and schools above Riverside Drive from Allesandro Street to Fletcher Drive—our hike today. We walked up Riverside past Allesandro Elementary then up into the hills to a little known, shaded corridor called Silver Lake Court that ends at remnants of pilings for the monster 1906 trestle structure that once crossed Fletcher Drive at Riverside. I found an old photo of the viaduct, dismantled in 1959, just to see why the weird-looking cement tombstones left today were important enough to become a historical landmark. Barbara is standing on the remains of the trellis supports in the old pic.