Tunnels of Trouble : Sealing of Freeway Walkways Sought
Pedestrian tunnels beneath the San Diego Freeway, built in the 1960s to provide convenient neighborhood passageways, have become unsafe neighborhood nuisances in the 1980s and should be sealed up, Los Angeles Councilman Hal Bernson said Wednesday.
Four Sepulveda tunnels have been the target of persistent complaints from nearby residents who describe them as dim shelters for vandals and drug deals and quick escape routes for criminals being chased by police.
Bernson, who represents the north San Fernando Valley, introduced a City Council motion Wednesday seeking authorization to order the state Department of Transportation to barricade tunnels at Superior, Tupper, Rayen and Chase streets. The matter should come before the council within a week.
“Those tunnels were built for convenience, but the people are afraid to use them,†Bernson said. “The community has been complaining about them for years.â€
Ramona Strongbow, 60, who lives next to the Superior Street tunnel, circulated a petition in her neighborhood to seal it.
“You wouldn’t believe what comes through that tunnel,†she said. “People stand in it and fill it with graffiti and it has turned into a giant urinal. We don’t want it. There’s no reason to have it.â€
Another resident, who lives near the Tupper Street tunnel, said he and most of his neighbors no longer want their quiet streets of single-family homes to be connected by pedestrian tunnel to the neighborhood of apartments east of the freeway.
“Our side is very well-maintained,†said Julio Armenteros, 48, of nearby Aqueduct Avenue. “The other side is a very rowdy neighborhood. When they are chased by police, they run through the tunnel.â€
Caltrans spokesman Jim McCarthy said that in 1962, Los Angeles city officials required that the tunnels be built as a part of the San Diego Freeway construction project that lasted through the mid-1960s. At the time, the tunnels were promoted as a means by which neighborhoods that otherwise would be severed by the freeway would instead remain linked, he said.
“Now they are undesirable,†he said.
If the council approves the barricades, Caltrans will fill the tunnels with sand and build cinder-block walls at each end.
“We want to keep those people from the other side from coming in,†Armenteros said.
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