Riding the Red Cars

Today my wife, my son, my mother-in-law and I all went down to Ride the Red Cars at San Pedro. I had heard many great things about them, but have never taken the time to go down and check them out. Since I have this school project coming up, it made for a cool family outing.

We had arrived at the Red Car Depot across from the Los Angeles Maritime museum at 10:00 when the first Red Car was supposed to be picking up passengers. After looking at a few of their posted signs we discovered that the hours had been very recently changed to noon. I guess they need to update their website.

So to kill the two hours we wandered around the Ports O' Call area. It was still pretty quiet there, but we knew it would be rapidly coming to life as the time moved closer to noon. While we were walking around I had suddenly developed this urge to take pictures of Signs. Why, I still don't know. I think it was because of the huge diversity. Anyway, here is a few of them:









After a while we had decided we should eat before getting on the Red Cars. After turning down multiple high-priced brunch areas down there, we finally settled on eating at Acapulcos Mexican Restaurant. While we were there, I had decided to try my hand at a little social documentation. There was a group of animated Mariachi band members playing at different tables, whom I figured would make decent subject matter and took a few shots of them. I have converted them to black and white for a little more contrast:





After eating we still had 10-15 minutes to kill, so we hung around the outside of the Maritime Museum until the first car arrived.

When the first car arrived, we had boarded rapidly chasing my son who was extremely excited about riding the train. But it was getting close to his normal nap time and the excitement slowly morphed into his normal tired crankiness.

While we were riding, I had started to ask one of the conductors questions about the car, its history, etc. He had said he only knew a little about these cars, but if I was interested in knowing more, I could take the next car that came along(which happened to be their restored original car) who had a conductor named Bob who was very knowledgeable on the subject.

After boarding the second car I had met Bob, and he proceeded to give me a wealth of information via a lecture. Some of the information I was already familiar with, but was none-the-less interesting to hear from another perspective.

The part of his lecture that I found the most intriguing was about a study that USC had completed in reference to the 1965 Watts Riots. They had known that one of the primary catalysts for the uprising was a high unemployment rate within the community, but what they had discovered was that the unemployment rate sky-rocketed after the Red Cars were removed from service and replaced with buses.

Below are a few pictures from the ride: