Outro — The 10 Interchange

Where the pass tour ends — a three-level interchange, and the first in California designed by a woman.

Key facts

The I-405 / I-10 interchange is the Marilyn Jorgenson Reece Memorial Interchange, a three-level stack opened in 1964 — notable as the first major California freeway interchange designed by a woman engineer (Marilyn Jorgenson Reece).
The I-10 here is the Santa Monica Freeway; the I-405 is the San Diego Freeway.
South of this interchange the 405 leaves the Westside's dense landmark corridor and runs on through Culver City and Inglewood toward LAX and the South Bay — the architecture story ends here.

Narration transcript

And here's the end of the pass. The great curving ramps rising around you are the interchange where the four-oh-five crosses the 10, the Santa Monica Freeway — and it's worth knowing whose work you're driving through. This three-level interchange opened in 1964, and it was designed by Marilyn Jorgenson Reece, the first woman to design a major freeway interchange in California. She built it like a piece of sculpture, long sweeping curves instead of tight hooks, and it's been admired as one of the more beautiful interchanges in a state that has a lot of them.

That's where we'll leave you. The four-oh-five keeps going — south past the airport, out to the refineries and the harbor — but the pass, the hilltop museum, the condo canyon, the towers on the old backlot and the gold angel are all behind you now. You came down through the one gap in the mountains and read eleven miles of a city in the buildings alongside the road. Drive safe — and thanks for riding shotgun.