LA’s Sixth Street Viaduct Gets Another Star Turn

There are the buildings and structures you remember from a specific movie—and then there are those you remember from every movie. The original Sixth Street Viaduct in Los Angeles had become a familiar sight for locals and tourists alike. Built in 1932, the double-arched viaduct bridge spans 3,500 feet of mostly industrial lowland and the concrete canyon of the Los Angeles River, linking the downtown’s Arts District to Boyle Heights to the east. It was a symbol of hard-edged urban America—and one of the country’s most filmed pieces of infrastructure, with appearances in Grease (1978), Repo Man (1984), and countless episodes of Charlie’s Angels and Hill Street Blues.

Only physics could end its star status. In 2016, the veritable cinematic metonym for the city was demolished after a series of inspections revealed perilous cracks in its structure. But about this time next year, its replacement will be ready for its closeup.

Local firm Michael Maltzan Architecture is heading into the homestretch of a nearly decadelong effort to create a new span, one that pays homage to its predecessor while expanding its potential social impact. Already, anyone arriving by train at Union Station or cruising U.S. 101 near the East LA Interchange can make out the seemingly familiar series of arches from west to east. (Much farther afield, the same striking profile can be spotted at the Venice Architecture Biennale, where the project appears in the form of a large semi-translucent model displayed in the Arsenale.)

“You can walk almost halfway out from the Boyle side now,” says Michael Maltzan, FAIA, speaking from his office in LA’s Silver Lake neighborhood. For Maltzan and his collaborators, the road to this point—the figurative one, at least—has been long and winding. Beginning with a competition invitation in 2012, the architects and their engineer counterparts at HNTB have seen the project through public meetings at Boyle Heights gymnasiums, presentations (with one featuring a 60-foot-long model that surpasses the current Venice edition) before city officials, and all the travails of creating a major piece of urban infrastructure in a dense and historically sensitive context. “When you’re building something like this, the project touches so many groups, institutions, and people,” Maltzan says.

The project attempts to cater to all these stakeholders and more with a multipronged approach that expands on its central, transit-oriented brief to the communities it connects—beginning with the span itself. Where the original structure served primarily automobiles, the new one includes accommodations for bicyclists—including entry ramps on either end—as well as pedestrian routes, with five stairways providing regular access points from the street level to the elevated walkways above. On its western end, the viaduct will meet the urban fabric with a planned Arts Plaza, a grand public space in tune with the neighborhood vibe.

This in turn will connect, via a former maintenance route, to the edge of the long-neglected river, not yet rehabilitated but set to receive its own bike routes and other enhancements next year. The whole viaduct will, in fact, operate as a major node in the future riverside greenway, with extensive ground-level parks located under the bridge’s leaping arches on its eastern extension. Instead of the typical, dark underbelly, the viaduct will cast a remarkable sort of green shadow, extending eastwards from the river.

“Obviously, the old bridge was a visible part of the overall city landscape,” Maltzan says. His team’s solution takes that instantly recognizable formal element and multiplies it fivefold, with 10 reinforced-concrete bows now bounding across the landscape. The result is at once playful and monumental—tailor-made for spectacular chase scenes in the future.

Maltzan, however, looks forward to a different kind of high drama. On its last day in operation, prior to its demolition, the original viaduct closed to vehicular traffic in order to host to a daylong celebration that brought out Angelinos near and far. The event, Maltzan recalls, felt “unbelievably civic, connected—just very powerful.” It was a coming-together that some might think that LA, in all its sprawl and incongruity, is incapable of fostering.

As Maltzan sees it, the whole objective of his team’s design is to make such moments possible in a public space. When the viaduct reopens next fall, the architect is counting on a celebration with a similar sense of ecstatic connectivity, one he hopes can carry over into the future life of the city. “We want to have the city literally climbing the bridge, using it not just for vehicles, but as part of everyday life,” Maltzan says. “That’s really the potential here.”