The Figueroa Tunnels: Where Route Sixty-Six Went Underground

The Figueroa Street Tunnels in Los Angeles are a set of reinforced concrete road tunnels bored through the hills of Elysian Park, completed between nineteen thirty-one and nineteen thirty-six to connect downtown Los Angeles to the neighborhoods on the other side of the ridge. At the time of their completion they carried the Route Sixty-Six alignment into the city, making them among the most urban and architecturally unusual sections of the entire highway. The portals are decorated with ornamental Art Deco detailing, arched entries framed in decorative concrete that reflect the public-works aesthetic of Depression-era Los Angeles.

Route Sixty-Six was decommissioned in nineteen eighty-five, but the tunnels remain in daily use as part of the city street system. Travelers entering Los Angeles on the old Mother Road alignment would have passed through here, dropping from the hills into the grid of the city below, the endpoint of a journey that began in Chicago more than two thousand miles east.