Esther Keith took on the Century Freeway and helped win millions of dollars for inner-city minorities. She also lost her home of 46 years to it, so Thursday's opening of this final new freeway in car-crazy L.A.'s 510-mile concrete web is a bitter event.
"The debasing way that they treated the people is something that still boils my mind," said Keith, 72, in the living room of her tidy house two blocks from her old neighborhood.She recalled how, two decades ago, government men walked the neighborhood, demanding that housewives sign papers agreeing to give up their homes under threat of seizure by eminent domain.
"The women would be in tears," Keith said.
Plans showed that the east-west freeway, slicing 17 miles through some of metropolitan Los Angeles' most densely populated areas, would wipe out the neighborhood Esther Keith and her husband, Ralph, called home since 1947.
Keith, a meteorologist, also was convinced the freeway posed a smog-belching health threat to Hawthorne, located near the growing Los Angeles International Airport.
"We lived two houses east of the San Diego Freeway, and when they built that, we didn't fight it," Keith recalled. "But with this one we felt it wasn't needed, it wasn't environmentally correct, and my husband said, `By God, we're going to fight it.' "
The Keiths, three other couples, the NAACP, the Sierra Club, the city of Hawthorne and other groups sued the state in 1972, demanding an environmental impact statement on the road, also known as Interstate 105.
The lawsuit was settled in 1979 on condition that state and federal governments help resettle those displaced by the freeway, hire minorities and women to help build it, and create other affirmative action programs.
Planning had begun in 1958 for a 51-mile roadway from San Bernardino to the coast. That eventually was dropped in favor of the 17.3-mile road from Interstate 605 in Norwalk west to El Segundo and the airport. Construction began in 1982.
The freeway's cost reached $2.2 billion; that's $127 million a mile, among the nation's most expensive. But no other highway project embraced such an ambitious social agenda, transit officials argue.
"This really broke new ground for a transportation agency," said Russell Snyder, spokesman for the California Department of Trans-por-ta-tion.
A Century Freeway Housing Program was created to oversee construction of more than 7,000 housing units. More than 3,000 units have been built so far at a cost of $370 million.
In nearby Lennox, the Century Freeway Pre-Apprenticeship Program has trained and found work on the highway and other jobs for more than 2,500 people, many of them women and minorities.
The freeway - officially the Glenn Anderson Freeway-Tran-sit-way, named for a congressional booster of the project - also accommodates mass transit. The Metro Green Line trolley runs along the median and will be complete next year.
It's the last new freeway for metropolitan Los Angeles, save remaining connector work, including a boiling controversy over a decades-old effort to push an eight-lane, 6.2-mile extension of the 710 Freeway through the middle of tiny South Pasadena. Cost claims range from $651 million to $1 billion.
Real estate is too expensive, and environmental concerns too prominent, to allow more freeways, Snyder said.
That's of little consolation to Keith, whose husband died in 1982 and who finally lost her home the following year. She recently got an invitation in the mail for a dinner marking the freeway's completion.
"Why in hell would they expect me to celebrate the thing?" Keith said.
"The only way I'd go on the Century is if I was being hauled somewhere in my casket."