Cross Roads, or Where Highways Tangle

Everyone knows about Southern California’s insanely clogged freeways, but let me tell you that the surface streets are no walk in the park either. Three days a week on my trek to my part-time job, I trot across a total of eighteen lanes of traffic, breathlessly trying to beat the merciless “don’t walk” signs within inches of the throbbing 5.7-liter engines of every type of gas guzzler known to man.

Only on foot have I begun to appreciate the desolation of the urban Bermuda Triangle formed where Highway 1 (Pacific Coast Highway), Highway 22 (Seventh Street), and Bellflower Boulevard (every bit as wide and congested as the other two officially designated highways) tangle. The photo on Google Maps Street View gives a pretty good indication of what it’s like – blurred and hazy with the sun’s glare on the pavement and in the far corner a dark island marooned in a sea of asphalt.

In Long Beach, Pacific Coast Highway was once State Street, a good all purpose name for a major commercial street. City fathers reluctantly agreed to allow a regional thoroughfare to split their homogeneous little burg into north and south. Perhaps their resistance led to the lax urban planning which resulted in the disjointed conjunction of these three major roads that frustrates drivers in a series of gridlocked intersections that holds up traffic in every direction. The main culprit is Seventh Street, which is limited access Highway 22 to the east until it reaches the Long Beach city limits. Where Seventh meets PCH is the first major intersection that blocks the path of these crazed commuters, and they dart and weave like wide receivers on the ten-yard line trying to beat the light or maneuver into the right turn lane to skirt the backed-up lines of cars.

Signs are everywhere – no trucks, no parking, no left turns, right turns only. All of them are violated as a matter of course, and the only violations that elicit honking from laid back Californians are left turns. There are no signs saying, “Hey, bozo, don’t hang out in the middle of the intersection expecting someone to let you in,” but it’s just as well. Drivers would ignore that one too.

As a pedestrian, I’ve become much more aware of the commercial signs that I’d ignored when I drove through this tangle of streets. The newly opened vitamin shop sports brightly colored fabric banners on the sidewalk in front of the store that flap elegantly in the rush of traffic like heraldic emblems at a medieval joust. A chain motel has a lighted digital display above the manager’s office that seems to change rates daily. Next door, the car wash’s marquee usually gives the hours in stark black and white but adds color to a rainy day with “Closed” spelled out in red.

For years now, two men have positioned themselves in the medians of these busy streets – one on Seventh and the other on PCH. They sell flowers or hold up signs saying “Help me, I’m homeless” to appeal for handouts from drivers trapped in the turn lanes. I actually only walk by the PCH guy. My illogical but surprisingly effective approach to panhandlers is that I save coins I find on the street. If I have some in my pocket, I give them to beggars, but if I have none, I just say no. I’ve only had coins once for the PCH guy, and I couldn’t help but notice the envious look on the face of the man on Seventh Street when I handed them over to his rival. Maybe one day I’ll ask the PCH guy if he ever talks to the Seventh Street guy. Somehow I doubt it. The impersonal paved-over feeling of the place sucks the life out of any inclination toward human contact.

I’d never cross Seventh Street myself. It’s not that I have anything against the other panhandler. It’s just that that side of the street has even more out-of-control traffic than on the side where I’ve chosen to walk. It has one of those gas stations with three entry points, where without even trying, everybody is in the wrong direction and everybody is in somebody else’s way. Next to it is a car wash with only one exit and cars sitting there forever waiting for an opening in traffic. Then, inexplicably, there’s a flower store (I suppose the homeless men get their flowers out of its dumpster) with a cheesy circa 1970 fake stained glass design of red roses above its entrance. I never pass it without wondering who would go to the aggravation of stopping to buy flowers there. Maybe they do a good delivery business.

Even in this urban wasteland, a few signs of life persist. In the rainy season, dandelions sprout in the sidewalks and even in the cracks in the pavement between the lines of cars. Living proof that grass can in fact grow on a busy street. One of the gracefully arching arms of the street lights that reach out over the snarl of traffic about thirty feet overhead is a favorite perch for pigeons. Anywhere from fifteen to fifty birds huddle together on this one pole and none of the others with the inscrutable wisdom of survivors. This particular pole extends out over the intersection where the most egregious violators ignore the yellow light and drift out into ongoing traffic causing a lot of risky maneuvering. I get perverse satisfaction when one of the pigeons anoints the malingerers with a well-aimed splat of bird poop.