Drive Capsule

Seeking out Southern California’s past in our QX50

- Aaron Gold

“SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA IS easily the motorist’s paradise over all other places on this mundane sphere. ... The matchless climate and the ever-increasing mileage of fine roads, with the endless array of places worth visiting, insure the maximum of service and pleasure to the fortunate owner of a car, regardless of its name-plate or pedigree.”—Thomas Murphy, “On Sunset Highways” (1915).

Set against the backdrop of a nascent California, the century-old tome “On Sunset Highways” glorifies the magic of car travel in the days when it was more novelty than necessity. While leafing through it, I became fascinated by Murphy’s fascination with my adopted hometown of Los Angeles and set out to retrace one of his journeys to see how much of the Golden State he depicted back in 1915 still survives. Standing in for the brass era car he drove would be our Four Seasons Infiniti QX50.

Murphy wrote of “leaving the city by the Broadway Tunnel and pursuing the broad curves of Pasadena Avenue to Orange Grove.” The tunnel is long gone, as is most of Fort Moore Hill it burrowed through—it was leveled in 1949 to make way for the Hollywood Freeway. Fort Moore Hill could fill an article of its own, having served as a garrison, graveyard, trendy neighborhood, and schoolyard. It was also rumored to conceal both buried treasure and a colony built by ancient lizard people (no, really). Today it’s home to the freshly restored Fort Moore Pioneer Memorial, featuring an 80-foot waterfall reactivated in 2019 after 42 years of drought.