Gung-ho Angeleno Ezra Horne promotes and annotates the last ditch, last-minute effort to save the Riverside-Figueroa Bridge from its impending demolition and turn it into a High-Line-style park (for his webseries Ezra Loves LA). Landbridge proponents' created a pop-up park on the structure (the last steel-truss bridge over the LA River) a few weeks back, and Horne stops by to walk viewers through a brief history of the bridge and talk to some of the people who came up with the plan. (LA Creek Freak's also penned an excellent history of the bridge.) Horne's enthusiasm makes the video. Highlight: Toward the end, he makes a genuinely great analogy between The Lego Movie and the proposed greenway that leaves an architect from RAC (which has drawn up renderings for the dream park) a little verklempt.
The current version of the bridge, aka Historic-Cultural Monument #908, has been staring down the barrel of a gun for years; demolition has been in the picture since the bridge's monument status was conferred in 2008. The idea to work a little adaptive-reuse magic on the overpass was introduced several months ago by starry-eyed preservationists and architects, who were then promptly smacked down by the buzzkills at the Bureau of Engineering. It was then rumored that some sneaks at the BoE may have used their procedural knowledge to keep the park from ever really being considered and now refuse to even hear out the possibility of a bridgepark. Weak.
· LANDBRIDGE - Save The Last Steel Span Truss Bridge and Make it a PARK! [YouTube]
LA Refusing To Even Consider An Elysian Valley Bridge Park [Curbed LA]
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