Wardlow station is an at-grade

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station on the A Line of the

Los Angeles Metro Rail The Los Angeles Metro Rail is an urban rail transit system serving Los Angeles County, California, United States, consisting of six lines: four light rail lines (the A, C, E and K lines) and two rapid transit lines (the B and D lines), ...

system. The station is located on the A Line's exclusive right-of-way (the historic route of the

Pacific Electric Railway The Pacific Electric Railway Company, nicknamed the Red Cars, was a privately owned mass transit system in Southern California consisting of electrically powered streetcars, interurban cars, and buses and was the largest electric railway system ...

) that parallels Pacific Place, at its intersection with Wardlow Street, after which the station is named, in the Wrigley neighborhood of

Long Beach, California Long Beach is a coastal city in southeastern Los Angeles County, California, United States. It is the list of United States cities by population, 44th-most populous city in the United States, with a population of 451,307 as of 2022. A charter ci ...

. Metro's Division 11, a maintenance and rail vehicle storage facility, is located between the Wardlow and Del Amo stations.

Service

Hours and frequency

Connections

, the following connections are available: *

Long Beach Transit Long Beach Transit (LBT) is the operator of public transit bus and ferry services in Long Beach, California and its surrounding cities. Long Beach Transit operates 37 bus routes, serving the Gateway Cities region of Los Angeles County. In additi ...

: , , , , In addition, the station is accessible to the Los Angeles River Bikeway.

History

The present Wardlow station is between Los Cerritos and Vista Del Mar stations of the Pacific Electric Railway's

Long Beach line The Long Beach Line was a major interurban railway operated by the Pacific Electric Railway between Los Angeles and Long Beach, California via Florence, Watts, and Compton. Service began in 1902 and lasted until 1961, the last line of the s ...

, which opened in 1902. Los Cerritos station opened in 1906 to serve the new Los Cerritos neighborhood, with a county park donated by the Bixby family, who owned Rancho Los Cerritos. The Los Cerritos station was an express station primarily serving middle class suburban residents who worked in downtown Los Angeles through the 1950s. The area was annexed into the City of Long Beach in 1924. Vista Del Mar Station, which was cited south of Wardlow road, was named for Del Mar street, which paralleled the railroad right of way, and the station served as a transfer station between the Pacific Electric's Long Beach and Balboa lines rather than a destination. Many street alignments in the area such as the diagonal San Antonio Way or the curve of Carson St between Elm Ave. and Long Beach Blvd. were laid out to feed into Los Cerritos station. In 1958, the construction of the

405 freeway Interstate 405 (I-405, locally referred to as the 405) is a major north–south auxiliary Interstate Highway in Southern California. The entire route is known as the northern segment of the San Diego Freeway. I-405 is a bypass auxiliary ...

created a barrier between the two stations, and the predecessor agency to LA Metro took possession of the right-of-way underneath the freeway. After the closure of the original Pacific Electric in 1961, the area around the station became a dumping ground for toxic waste from Signal Hill oil sludge, which forced mass neighborhood evacuations when the Metro blue line was reconstructed in the 1980s. In fact, much of the embankment for the nearby I-405/I-710 interchange consists of illegally dumped toxic soil. Because of the toxic waste problem (and perhaps affluent neighborhood aversion to mass transit), a decision was made to cite the station south of the freeway rather than at its historical site next to Los Cerritos Park. A Metro-owned non-ADA accessible pedestrian path between Los Cerritos Park connects to Magnolia avenue in the Wrigley heights neighborhood – about a 20 minute walk from the station; however, because Wardlow station was sited south of the freeway when it was rebuilt in 1990 for the LACMTA's Blue Line, the historical pedestrian

catchment A drainage basin is an area of land in which all flowing surface water converges to a single point, such as a river mouth, or flows into another body of water, such as a lake or ocean. A basin is separated from adjacent basins by a perimeter, th ...

of the Los Cerritos Neighborhood (and by extension, Bixby Knolls) was cut off from the new station and pedestrian path. Pacific Place lacks sidewalks connecting from the adjoining neighborhood to the station, which is not served by any crosstown routes of

. As a result, Wardlow station is one of the least-used on the A line. In 2015, UC Berkeley's Center for Law, the Energy and the Environment ranked Wardlow Station as the worst rail transit station in Los Angeles County, citing lack of accessibility to housing, transit, and shops.

Art

The station features a 1992 sculpture by artist Jacqueline Dreager called "Great Gathering Place," described as "some of the most abstract on the entire A line." It is inspired by a sundial installed at the nearby (but now cut off) Rancho Los Cerritos.

References

{{Los Angeles Metro Rail and Busway stations navbox A Line (Los Angeles Metro) stations Transportation in Long Beach, California Railway stations in the United States opened in 1990 1990 establishments in California Pacific Electric stations