Glendale Freeway

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Glendale Freeway

Signed as

Major cities/towns:	Echo Park Glassell Park Eagle Rock Glendale La Cañada Flintridge
Direction:	North-South

Southern California freeways

California State Route 2; the Santa Monica Boulevard segment is highlighted in red, Alvarado Street is highlighted in green, the Glendale Freeway is highlighted in blue, and the Angeles Crest Highway is highlighted in purple. Concurrencies with the Hollywood Freeway (U.S. Route 101) and the Foothill Freeway (Interstate 210) are highlighted yellow.

The Glendale Freeway is a minor freeway in the Los Angeles, California metropolitan area. It runs from Glendale Boulevard in the Echo Park district of Los Angeles to Foothill Boulevard in La Cañada Flintridge. Throughout its length, it is signed as California State Route 2. Planners originally intended for it to connect to the Hollywood Freeway in Echo Park, but community opposition killed the project by the 1960s; as a result, during games at nearby Dodger Stadium, there is often significant congestion in the areas around the freeway's terminus. The Glendale Freeway offers stunning vistas of the eastern San Fernando Valley, the Verdugo Mountains, the Crescenta Valley, and the San Gabriel Mountains.

Since the 1950s, proposals have been made to extend the Glendale Freeway to the Antelope Valley Freeway via a tunnel under the San Gabriels, relieving some of the latter freeway's notorious congestion. The difficulty of designing and building such a route and the cost of insuring it against earthquakes and terrorism would undoubtedly make perpetually cash-strapped Caltrans unable to undertake such an ambitious project.

1 Control Cities
2 Trivia
3 Legal definition
4 Communities served
5 Major Intersections
6 References

[edit] Control Cities

Northbound

Glendale

Southbound

Echo Park and Hollywood

[edit] Trivia

The section of freeway between the Ventura Freeway (134) and the Foothill Freeway (210) was largely completed in 1975, but not fully finished until 1979. During this time, the closed freeway was used as a location for several films, including Coffy, Corvette Summer, and two American television series Adam-12, and CHiPs. The transition overpass from the eastbound Ventura Freeway to the northbound Glendale Freeway was prominently featured in the notorious disaster film Earthquake when a tractor-trailer crashes over the side of the overpass (a shot completed in miniature special effects).

For at least three months in 2006, a sign along southbound Riverside Drive in Los Angeles mistakenly pointed to Glendale Freeway as Interstate 2, or I-2, a federal highway[1]. (I-2 is not a designation in the Interstate Highway System, nor is Glendale Freeway a federal highway.) The sign was corrected and replaced in December 2006[2].

[edit] Legal definition

The Glendale Freeway is Route 2 from Route 101 to Route 210, as named by the State Highway Commission on August 17, 1955.^[1]

[edit] Communities served

Because of its relatively short length, the Glendale Freeway is often less congested in comparison to other Los Angeles freeways. The overpass from which this picture was taken was featured as a "collapsing" bridge in the 1974 disaster film Earthquake.

Cities and neighborhoods along its route include: