Downtown's forgotten tunnel.

Some assert Los Angeles should take a new look at its first subway (circa '25)

I am 60 feet below the streets of downtown Los Angeles, 2,500 feet from the nearest exit, and pond-side.

I am in Los Angeles' first subway, built in 1925 by Pacific Electric, but abandoned 30 years later in deference to the auto age. Having snuck through a two-foot hole in a chainlink fence at the tunnel's entrance, I am alone.

Armed only with a Eveready Energizer emergency roadside flashlight -- a gift from an ex-girlfriend and loaded with years-old batteries -- I curse my wingtip shoes, which serve poorly in the rocky gook underfoot. I ease my way down a slimy slope to the pond's edge, to satisfy an insistent amateur biologist's curiosity: Is there life in this pond?

The pool, which is the width of the city-owned tunnel -- 28 feet -- is about three feet deep and eight across, and at the tunnel's end, abutting the Westin Bonaventure hotel. Before the hotel was built in 1975, the foundation was sunk through the old tunnel, blocking it where I stand.

If I could walk through the blockade and then on about another 2,500 feet, I would reach the Subway Terminal Building on Pershing Square, an office building built in 1928 over the subway's original terminus.

Back at pond's edge, the water looks crystal clear and is fed by two small streams. Despite the inflow, the pond's level appears stable.

A dimming flashlight perhaps reveals an answer to the pond's sterility. There, on a small earth embankment on the other side of the pond -- and one-half mile from the tunnel's sole entrance -- is an oozing automobile battery, draining into the pond. The battery could only have been carried here by hand.

I have come as far as I can, and I am eager to leave. Water is dripping from the semi-circular 22-foot-high ceiling, and it has just dawned on me that Los Angeles is a city of methane gas, and that oil wells still pump crude only blocks away.

Tunnel literature had mentioned special fans used to vent dangerous gasses back in 1925, when three shifts of 215 men each worked on the subway's construction. I don't even have a parakeet.

Walking back towards the tunnel entrance, I see little reminder that this subway for 30 years carried Red Car trollies, full of Glendalians and other travelers heading downtown. It cut 15 minutes off the downtown commute in those days.

The Red Cars went underground at the same entrance I used, near the intersection of Glendale Boulevard and Second Street, before going the last mile underground to downtown.

The Red Car system, at one time the largest intra-urban transit system on the globe, was getting crowded by itself and the auto back in the mid-1920s, provoking the tunnel-building.

An article in the Dec. 10, 1925 issue of the Pacific Electric magazine said, "The subject of subways and elevated tracks as a means of rapid transit in the City of Los Angeles is by no means a new one in the minds of the officials of the Pacific Electric Railway, as the purchase of right of way some 10 years ago for subways to serve West Coast Beaches, and also the northwest territory of the City of Los Angeles, bears out."

The tunnel was built in 18 months, from first shovel-stroke to train whistle.

But today, nowhere are the old Red Cars, and even the tracks are gone. Light fixtures have been ripped out. The floor is wet dirt, stony in parts.

Why is the tunnel so unused, in a city -- particularly a downtown -- where every square foot seems valuable?

"Because nothing happens unless the politicians get money," charges Tye Rubins, who owns a 2.5-acre parcel at the tunnel's mouth. "This is a $60 million resource that's going to waste."

By Rubins' reckoning, the old PE tunnel today should conduit mini-buses into downtown, from an urban village in "Central City West," the area of razed blocks of land west of the Harbor Freeway from downtown.

He is willing to give the city one acre at the mouth of tunnel, if only it were reopened. He figures to profit on skyrocketing land values after the tunnel opens.

"The mini-buses could go into downtown," Rubins exclaims. "It's a win-win for everybody."

He says the PE tunnel could be made to open up at Fourth and Figueroa streets downtown.

Rubins believes the city Community Redevelopment Agency is against the reopening of the PE tunnel because it would promote development west of the Harbor Freeway -- outside the CRA's tax zone, which encompasses downtown proper, east of the Harbor Freeway. (The CRA gets its money by collecting property taxes on new buildings built within its territory.)

"They (the CRA) have undermined development outside the CRA tax increment zone," says Rubins, 47, now semi-retired on the basis of profits made in real estate development.

As it turns out, various local officials are again scratching their heads as to how to use the PE tunnel, as they have been doing on and off since it was closed.

A 1975 study, by the city's street opening and widening division, talked about a people-mover in the tunnel, and today officials wonder if, in fact, Rubins' plan makes sense.

"It does cross the freeway and would connect Central City West to downtown," says James Okazaki, senior transportation engineer in the city's rail transit division. "Why not use it? I walked in the tunnel about a year ago to take a look at it."

The Los Angeles County Transportation Commission has also looked at the tunnel, but has not done much more than cursory studies. Last year the commission gave $10,000 to DKS Associates in downtown Los Angeles to mull the feasibility of reopening the tunnel.

At DKS, they say a re-opened tunnel makes sense.

"We feel there is a potential for re-use. It would be pretty inexpensive to re-open it, given that a new tunnel costs about $75 million a mile to build," says Maurice Mitchell, director of engineering at DKS. "It could run smaller buses or even full-size buses that go one way -- downtown in the a.m. and reverse in the p.m."

But at the CRA, there appears to be skepticism that the tunnel can ever be made to work again. "We have no plans for the tunnel. The question is how you get reconnected back to the surface (from where the tunnel is blocked at the Bonaventure). Also, there are safety question, new earthquake standards," said Steve Andrews, transportation manager for the CRA.

As for me, back in the tunnel, I can now see the tunnel's entrance about 1,000 feet away. Closer to the entrance are two rusty hulks of cars and flotsam from modern-day homeless -- old firesites, collected firewood, trash, bits of furniture, shards of clothing, broken bottles.

It is a crisp fall day outside the mouth of the tunnel, and I can see the purple San Gabriels against the azure sky. Kids are exuberantly spraypainting the old PE station at the tunnel entrance -- spraypaint on top of spraypaint -- and trash is everywhere. I turn my flashlight off and head back to the office, walking through where Red Cars used to clang on by.