Head south down Vermont Avenue past Kenneth Malloy Harbor Regional Park, and you’ll soon reach a crossroads that gives you options. Lots of options.
Make a hard right onto Anaheim Street and you’ll continue through Harbor City, headed for Lomita and Torrance. Bear right more gently and Palos Verdes Drive North will take you up onto the Peninsula. Bear slightly left and you’ll find yourself on San Pedro’s main drag, Gaffey Street. Finally, a hard left sends you the other way down Anaheim toward Wilmington and Long Beach.
Welcome to Five Points, one of the South Bay/Harbor Area’s wackiest intersections.
Archaeological and historical evidence suggests that a large Native American settlement once was situated near the Five Points intersection, and that the area once was a crossing for several major trails used by coastal Shoshonean tribes.
Hopefully, they had fewer gnarly traffic crashes there than did subsequent settlers.
Because of its harbor, San Pedro was among the earliest settlements in the Harbor Area, incorporating in 1888. (It disincorporated itself and became part of the city of Los Angeles in 1909.) Other smaller settlements began cropping up north of San Pedro and south of L.A., but for several decades those areas mostly consisted of farmland.
As Los Angeles Harbor development ramped up in the early 1900s, the need for roads connecting the port and its goods to points north became obvious. Of course, it went both ways, with port workers from cities such as Torrance in need of connection to San Pedro using eastside thoroughfares, such as Western and Vermont avenues
Developing this highway infrastructure that we take for granted today took time.
The last link connecting Western Avenue from Torrance to San Pedro wasn’t finished until 1950. By contrast, the Southern Pacific freight railroad link to San Pedro came early on, in 1881. The Pacific Electric red car began bringing passengers to the port in 1904.
Anaheim Street had been established as an east-west artery between Long Beach and Wilmington in the 1880s. Vermont and Normandie were extensions of major north-south Los Angeles arteries. Palos Verdes Drive North came into the picture with the development of the Palos Verdes Peninsula during the mid-1920s.
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Anaheim St. traffic headed west passes through Five Points intersection, center, as Vermont Ave. traffic waits, left. Palos Verdes Drive North is beyond red traffic lights at right, while Gaffey St. lies beyond more distant traffic signals, center. August 2022. (Photo by Sam Gnerre)
These various planned thoroughfares didn’t start coming together in organized chaos until a series of construction projects received approval in 1929 and began in 1930. These included extending Gaffey Street from Channel Street up north to Anaheim Street and building Normandie and Vermont avenues south from 228th Street to Anaheim.
Work began on paving the Gaffey Street extension from Channel Street north to Anaheim in June 1930 and was completed that September.
North of Anaheim, the plan was for Normandie to veer east and merge into Vermont just north of Anaheim Street. But both had to be extended a considerable distance south first.
San Pedro businessman and land baron George Peck helped out on the extension northward in 1931 by deeding the right-of-way on the land he owned through which the expansion would run.
Traffic was a mess during all this construction, as one might imagine, with some sections of the roads involved, especially Anaheim, being closed for weeks at a time. But with the completion of its extension in July 1932, Vermont Avenue became the first continuous roadway connecting San Pedro to Los Angeles.
The fifth and final of the Five Points, the extension of Palos Verdes Drive North from the Peninsula eastward to link to the intersection, was approved in 1932 and completed in 1934.
It was all well and good for San Pedro to announce in 1936 the installation of a new “Welcome to San Pedro” sign at the gateway intersection. But once construction there was completed, it quickly became clear that traffic controls were what really were needed.
Crashes at the confusing intersection became commonplace.
In 1932, stop signs were installed at Gaffey and Anaheim. Improved lighting was added in 1936 to the formerly dark-at-night intersection, and there was much talk of improving safety there over the next few years.
Somehow, though, traffic signals weren’t installed until the U.S. Army demanded them in late 1943 to protect troops and defense workers trying to safely navigate the crossing. They became operational in January 1944 and seemed to help reduce crashes somewhat.
More attempts to improve the intersection came after the war.
The addition of a nearby bridge on Anaheim and new storm drains were aimed at reducing the flooding from nearby Bixby Slough that occurred at the intersection during rainy weather. Gaffey and Anaheim streets also were widened in 1946 to accommodate the heavy traffic in the area.
Improvements to the difficult traffic problems posed by the converging roadways have continued throughout the years.
The whole intersection might have been altered radically if a 1965 proposal for a coastal freeway through the South Bay had been adopted. The preferred route would have followed Anaheim Street right through the Five Points intersection. It was debated for several years, but the freeway idea was put to rest in the early 1970s.
From time to time, other proposals to improve traffic have been made. The idea of a roundabout, or traffic circle, similar to the Lakewood Boulevard roundabout in Long Beach has been tossed around for years. Detractors have said the Five Points site is too small for one and roundabouts, in general, pose unnecessarily dangerous traffic risks.
For now, Five Points remains a souped up, frequently redesigned, update of the traffic puzzle that first bedeviled traffic engineers – and drivers – in 1934.
Sources: Daily Breeze archives. Los Angeles Times archives. San Pedro: A Pictorial History, by Henry P. Silka, San Pedro Bay Historical Society, 1993. San Pedro News Pilot archives. Torrance Press Herald archives.
Note: Thanks to reader Angel Rodriguez for suggesting this topic.