Old Depot Faces Uncertain Fate

NORTH HOLLYWOOD —  Lucas Morvo, rambling down Lankershim Boulevard on his way to buy hot purple hair dye, knows his way around the thrift stores of North Hollywood.

But ask him about the broken-down train station at the end of the block, and the teenager shrugs.

“I don’t know it,” he says, his long hair brushing the metal spikes on his dog collar as he cranes his neck for a peek at the century-old building. “And I hang out here a lot.”

Morvo, an animated 18-year-old wearing a “Napalm Death” T-shirt, is the face of the new North Hollywood, home of a fledgling arts district, the newly renovated El Portal Theater and plenty of trendy types with dyed hair.

So far, those in charge of the neighborhood’s make-over haven’t made much of the dilapidated train station, a relic of the old North Hollywood that dates back to the 1895 opening of the Southern Pacific Railroad’s Valley line.

Once a lively hub in a thriving town, the station now languishes like a forgotten grandparent across the street from Los Angeles’s latest rail project, the North Hollywood station of the Metro Red Line subway.

The subway line is scheduled to open in June, but the fate of the Valley’s oldest railroad station, also owned by the MTA, remains undecided.

The depot, a single-story wooden structure surrounded by a chain-link fence, is slowly falling apart. Its old doors are padlocked, its windows coated in dust and guarded by metal bars. Most passersby probably don’t even know it used to be a train station--the sign by the roof says “Hendricks Building Supply,” a remnant from its post-depot days as a warehouse.

Its weather-beaten white paint hasn’t seen a brush in years. The station platform has collapsed into a heap of rotting wood. The roof is starting to cave in.

Guy Weddington McCreary, the great-grandson of one of North Hollywood’s founding fathers, stands inside the dusty room once used to store baggage and sighs.

“It’s a miracle it’s still here,” McCreary said. “This is about the last hurrah, so it’s got to be protected at all costs.”

Station Is at Heart of North Hollywood

The old station, located at the corner of Lankershim and Chandler boulevards, lies at the heart of much of North Hollywood’s history.

In December 1911, Pacific Electric opened its new Big Red streetcar line from Hollywood to Lankershim (as North Hollywood was then known). McCreary’s great-grandfather, Wilson C. Weddington, the area’s first postmaster, was there to help drive a golden spike through the rails in celebration--one of the tiny town’s first photo opportunities.

The Hollywood Freeway, our modern-day route of choice through Cahuenga Pass, didn’t open until 1940. This grimy asphalt ribbon is now cluttered with 325,000 vehicles per day, but a century ago it was a one-lane dirt road, traversed chiefly by foot, horses, a twice-weekly mail stagecoach and an occasional wild turkey.

Trains linked the Valley’s sleepy ranches and peach orchards to the rest of the world, paving the way for development.

But the railroad’s heyday was short-lived. Trolley ridership dropped sharply during the Great Depression, and rising automobile traffic meant longer trips for streetcars that traveled on roads shared with cars. After a brief surge in ridership during World War II, as workers flocked to Southern California’s factories, streetcar operators began substituting buses on many rail lines.

By 1952, the trolleys no longer stopped in North Hollywood, and by 1958 the aging station housed the building supply warehouse, which remained there for nearly 40 years. Boxes of rusty nails and old bags of mortar mix still litter the floor, even though the warehouse closed in 1997.

The railroad tracks were barely used, although freight trains continued to chug by sporadically until the route was finally abandoned in 1994, according to MTA officials.

Depot Remained Unused for Years

For the past few years, the building has slumped unused behind a chain-link fence as construction workers dug the subway next door.

“It’s just a shame,” said Jim Sowell, the MTA’s environmental compliance manager, as he runs his hand along the cracked wood of the abandoned station. “It’s had a lot taken out of it and not much put back in.”

The station’s preservation has been left to the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency, whose 20-year, $117-million effort to combat blight in North Hollywood has met with limited success.

The CRA recently obtained about $1 million to rehabilitate the building, including $817,000 from an MTA grant, said Lillian Burkenheim, the CRA’s North Hollywood project manager. Mayor Richard Riordan’s Targeted Neighborhoods Initiative, which set aside money to spruce up downtrodden areas, contributed $200,000 to renovate the station.

Ideas abound for ways to reuse the historic depot. McCreary thinks the place would make a swell railroad-theme restaurant, with the servers dressed up as old-fashioned engineers. Sowell, of the MTA, envisions retail shops tucked into the old station, possibly selling made-in-the-Valley products.

James Albright, who owns a nearby costume store, would like to see a railway museum, complete with a restored Red Car trolley ride.

Others, including the Los Angeles Conservancy, have suggested placing Phil’s Diner, an old North Hollywood restaurant, next to the old depot. The 1928-vintage landmark, built to resemble a dining car, now sits unoccupied on Chandler Boulevard. The diner closed in 1996 after MTA subway construction drove away customers, reopened briefly in 1997 and soon closed again amid a tangle of bureaucratic red tape involving a CRA loan.

“The opportunities are remarkable,” said Ken Bernstein, the conservancy’s director of preservation. “There’s a very powerful potential to use historic sites as redevelopment and economic development tools in North Hollywood.” The CRA has tracked down an old steam engine--currently mothballed in a Southern Pacific storage building in Omaha, Neb.--that it might be able to move to North Hollywood, Burkenheim said.

The agency may also install a model railroad and rebuild a small park and gazebo that once graced the corner of Lankershim and Chandler boulevards.

A series of public meetings are being planned to gather suggestions. Whatever the outcome, it won’t be ready in time to greet the first passengers boarding the subway this summer in North Hollywood.

Revival of Subway Area Doubted

Albright, a member of a citizens committee that helps guide the CRA’s redevelopment efforts, is skeptical that city officials will ever revive the dreary area around the new subway station.

“The MTA needs something to happen here, but who’s going to ride to this place?” Albright said bitterly, writing off the auto repair shops, a plumbing supply wholesaler and the mortuary around the corner with a wave of his arm.

But McCreary, whose family has ridden out North Hollywood’s crests and troughs since 1886, is more upbeat.

“I’ve waited a hell of a long time for this [redevelopment],” McCreary said. “I’ve turned from a young punk on the block to an old fart on the block.”

Now in his 60s, he gazes past the bleak scenery at the corner of Lankershim and Chandler, which includes two boarded-up houses, a discarded baby stroller and several splashes of graffiti. He pictures the long-gone Rathbun’s department store where his family shopped, the old El Portal, where he squirmed through many a Flash Gordon flick as a boy, and the sidewalks so teeming with people that he was once knocked into the gutter.

“This was one of the magic places in the Valley,” he said. “And it’s going to be again.”