California State Route 110
Interstate 110 is an interstate highway located in the Greater Los Angeles metropolitan area, traveling primarily through the city of Los Angeles. The original freeway, known as the Arroyo Seco Parkway, ran from downtown Los Angeles to Pasadena. It was the first freeway ever built in the United States, completed in 1940, and was considered a modern engineering marvel at the time. Nowadays, the roadway is considered outdated and dangerous by today's standards; for example, motorists must merge with oncoming traffic almost immediately upon entering the freeway and the right shoulders are very narrow making it very dangerous to make an emergency stop in case of tire puncture, etc.
Since its original opening, the freeway has been extended southwards from downtown Los Angeles to the port of Los Angeles, in San Pedro. The freeway runs through the poorer inner-city sections - with a predominant African American population - of Los Angeles. (During the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, a white truck driver named Reginald Denny was pulled from his truck and beaten on an intersection about a mile west from the 110 Freeway). Locally, the original portion is called the Pasadena Freeway and the extended portion is called the Harbor Freeway. As a whole, it is also referred to as the 110 Freeway.
Some famous landmarks along the 110 Freeway include the University of Southern California, Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, Staples Center (home of the NBA's Los Angeles Lakers and Clippers and NHL's Kings), Chinatown and Dodger Stadium (home of the Los Angeles Dodgers).
The 110 Pasadena Freeway can be seen in the introduction of the 1971 Steven Spielberg film, Duel. Dennis Weaver's character drives through several tunnels before entering the Interstate 5 interchange (which leads to Sacramento and beyond). Additionally, the tunnel sequence in Back to the Future Part II was filmed through the Figueroa Street Tunnels between the North and South Interstate 5 onramps, though, opposite to the current flow of traffic.
In 2001, Richard Ankrom, a local artist, who repeatedly got lost trying to get onto Interstate 5 North from the 110 Freeway due to the fact that there was no clear official signage for the access to Interstate 5 North, solved his frustration by covertly modifying one of the overhead signs on the freeway just before the tunnels. Using official government sign specifications, Ankrom fabricated two sign pieces, one being an Interstate marker shield with the number '5' on it, and one with the word "north", and affixed them to the left side of the sign. The unofficial modifications remain on the sign to this day.
