Riverside Drive, Los Angeles

Why you should experience Riverside Drive in Los Angeles, California.

Riverside Drive is a sinuous corridor where Toluca Lake's residential character meets the Los Angeles River, entertainment-industry geography and a cross-city route shaped by foothills, parkland and the basin's changing terrain.

Running through Toluca Lake between Studio City and Burbank, the river-oriented corridor follows a long curving alignment from Sherman Oaks toward Griffith Park before reappearing southeast of the park and continuing beside the Los Angeles River toward Cypress Park. Western stretches cross the flat San Fernando Valley through mature residential districts and compact commercial nodes, with the Santa Monica Mountains rising south of the roadway and the river remaining close to its northern course. Traveling east carries the street through Toluca Lake and the studio district before the corridor encounters the increasingly constricted terrain between Griffith Park, the river and surrounding transportation infrastructure. Southeast of the park, Riverside bends through Silver Lake and Elysian Valley, where hills rise immediately beside the roadway and the river occupies the narrow basin below. The result is a corridor whose extended curves, river-edge geography, mountain transitions and movement between the San Fernando Valley and Central Los Angeles reveal the physical structure of the city with unusual clarity.

What you should know about Riverside Drive.

Riverside Drive is best known for tracing the Los Angeles River across a route whose modern name first appeared in 1921 and reached Toluca Lake within several years. Its eastern reaches became intertwined with one of Los Angeles's most ambitious interwar transportation programs as engineers created a new connection through the Elysian Hills and across the river. The first stage extended Riverside southward over the Los Angeles River to San Fernando Road and was completed in 1929. Three tunnels were subsequently excavated through the Elysian Hills between Solano Avenue and the river in 1931, and a roadway from the northern tunnel connected Figueroa Street with the Riverside Drive bridge. That work belonged to a larger seven-year bridge-building campaign between 1925 and 1932 in which Los Angeles replaced timber and lighter crossings with fifteen concrete bridges, thirteen spanning the Los Angeles River under the supervision of bridge engineer Merrill Butler. Riverside received crossings near Victory Boulevard and Figueroa Street as part of that program, binding the street more tightly to a metropolitan transportation network whose concrete viaducts permanently altered movement across the river basin. Another Riverside Drive bridge followed at Griffith Park in 1938 as a Public Works Administration project, using five concrete spans, segmental arches, fluted light standards and Deco-patterned detailing.

A separate phase of change developed along the southeastern corridor as rail transit, freeway construction and river engineering repeatedly reshaped the land around the street. Riverside supported streetcar-oriented commercial development during the early twentieth century, and surviving commercial properties from 1931 and 1933 remain associated with that period in Silver Lake and Elysian Valley. Los Angeles began channelizing the river north of Griffith Park in 1939, straightening meanders and shifting portions of the watercourse as concrete flood-control infrastructure replaced the earlier river landscape. Postwar freeway construction imposed another major intervention: the Golden State Freeway entered the narrow space between Riverside, the river and the surrounding hills, converting stretches southeast of Glendale Boulevard into a corridor pressed between large transportation systems. Elysian Valley experienced the consequences directly when the freeway removed part of the neighborhood's western edge in 1962, intensifying its separation from surrounding districts. Riverside remained its principal commercial street, preserving a smaller-scale urban spine beside infrastructure conceived for metropolitan movement. The street consequently carries successive layers of Los Angeles transportation history within its physical course, from streetcar-era commerce through river channelization and freeway construction.

How to fold Riverside Drive into your trip.

Riverside Drive works as the anchor for an outing connecting postwar automobile architecture, a major equestrian complex and a Hollywood Hills site whose earlier life belonged to the motion-picture ranches surrounding Burbank.

Begin at Bob's Big Boy, built in 1949 by local residents Scott MacDonald and Ward Albert and now the oldest operating Bob's Big Boy in the United States. Wayne McAllister designed the restaurant during the transition between Streamline Moderne and the free-form coffee-shop architecture associated with 1950s Southern California, using curving window walls, broad canopies and an asymmetrical profile calibrated to motorists passing along Riverside Drive. Bob Wian had opened Bob's Pantry in Glendale in 1936, and the Burbank restaurant belonged to the chain's late-1940s expansion. Its freestanding neon sign became integral to the building's automobile-oriented composition. Preservation advocates opposed demolition plans decades later, and the property received California Point of Historical Interest status in 1992. Continue to Los Angeles Equestrian Center, developed during the early 1980s through the efforts of Al Garcia, Don Burt and Charles Spira. The Equidome was completed in 1982 as the centerpiece of the complex, providing 45,000 square feet of floor area for horse shows, dressage, rodeos and other events. Contemporary figures placed the original complex cost at $15 million, with businessman J. Albert Garcia and the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks leading the public-private undertaking. Financial difficulties later overwhelmed the original operation, which accumulated $27 million in debt before foreclosure in 1988; LAEC Inc. brought the property out of receivership in 1990 and rebuilt its equestrian program. Conclude at Hall of Liberty, occupying Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills on land whose earlier history belonged to the movie-ranch era. Forest Lawn had acquired 490 acres by 1946 from properties including Lasky Ranch, Providencia Ranch and part of Hudkins Ranch, territory used for filmmaking from the silent period onward. Charlie Chaplin filmed Sunnyside on the ranch in 1919, Warner Bros. leased Old Lasky Ranch in 1929 and All Quiet on the Western Front used the landscape in 1930. Construction of the cemetery began in 1950 after a four-year approval process, and burials started on March 4, 1952. Hall of Liberty later added a 1,264-seat auditorium, and its Birth of Liberty mosaic extends 162 feet across twenty-five scenes assembled from ten million pieces of Venetian glass. The progression moves from McAllister's automobile-oriented postwar architecture through Garcia's large-scale equestrian complex and culminates on former motion-picture ranchland converted into a memorial landscape, connecting three distinct chapters in the cultural development surrounding Riverside Drive.

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