2024-12-22T03:12:31-05:00 https://archinect.com/news/article/144964221/turn-the-2-into-housing-or-a-park-or-a-solar-array-christopher-hawthorne-s-pitch-for-one-of-la-s-most-awkward-freeways Nicholas Korody 2016-01-04T13:58:00-05:00 >2016-01-17T21:59:53-05:00 <img src="https://archinect.gumlet.io/uploads/tp/tpmu30msgofmwkrr.png?fit=crop&auto=compress%2Cformat&enlarge=true&w=1200" border="0" /><em><p>An elevated park filling a retired stretch of freeway may sound reminiscent of the High Line, the hugely popular park built along an abandoned elevated train line in Manhattan. In symbolic and practical terms, the potential of a remade 2 spur is greater than even that project. It would take a working stretch of freeway in Los Angeles, a city still synonymous with car culture, and reinvent it as a vibrant, diverse urban landscape.</p></em><br /><br /><p>Critics rarely take advantage of their position to propose urban initiatives of their own, but when they do, it usually merits some serious consideration.<br><br>Christopher Hawthorne has issued an inventive, but well-reasoned, proposal to remake the awkward terminus of the 2 Freeway, where it "bends south and west from Interstate 5 and dips into Silver Lake and Echo Park, two miles or so from downtown Los Angeles," into a new urban space.</p><p>Noting the general feasibility of the idea &ndash; similar projects have had little to no harmful effect on traffic conditions &ndash; Hawthorne asserts that transforming the freeway could turn "noise into quiet, gray into green, dangerous into healthful, a no man's land into a destination."<br><br>Hawthorne proposes a variety of possible programs, from parkland to housing to storm water treatment (or all of the above), rather than prescribe a single idea. In the process, his call reads more as an invitation for designers than an edict.<br><br>He concludes by suggesting a glimmering ...</p>