Laurel Canyon Freeway
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The Laurel Canyon Freeway was to have been a north-south freeway in Los Angeles, California and its suburbs. Its proposed alignment was from the intersection of the Hollywood Freeway (U.S. Route 101/CA-170) and the Ventura Freeway (CA-134/US-101) in the southeastern San Fernando Valley to the San Diego Freeway (I-405) near Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). It derived its name from Laurel Canyon, the proposed route by which the freeway would traverse the Santa Monica Mountains. However, the emerging popularity of Laurel Canyon as a movie star enclave in the 1960s ultimately doomed the project. The only portion of the freeway that was built was a small section of La Cienega Boulevard through the Baldwin Hills district of southwestern Los Angeles.
While Caltrans' abandonment of plans for the Laurel Canyon Freeway has made accessing LAX notoriously difficult from Hollywood--surface-street routes from there to the airport are a popular topic of discussion at many Los Angeles social events--it also preserved what has become one of the most eclectic communities in Southern California.
