SoCal Focus, KCET's daily blog, recently featured a fascinating pictorial essay on LA's major superhighway, the Pasadena Freeway, built along 1.3 miles of what had been the California Cycleway and replacing an earlier plan by Frederick Law Olmsted. Olmsted, considered the founder of American landscape architecture and the nation's foremost park maker, had wanted to build a motorway that would provide "a great deal of incidental recreation and pleasure along the Arroyo Seco." The Cycleway was a 1.3 mile elevated tollway for bicycles that opened in 1900 and ran from Hotel Green in Pasadena to the Raymond Hotel in South Pasadena. It was to have connected Pasadena to downtown LA, but was never extended beyond the first segment.

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