Before the 3,500-ft-long Sixth Street Viaduct got demolished in February 2016, the city of Los Angeles marked its pending demise with a series of free civic events, including live music and a screening of “Grease.” Later, Angelenos took home 1,300 concrete remnants of it as keepsakes, recalls Mary Nemick, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Bureau of Engineering. “There was a lot of emotional attachment to that viaduct,” she says. “We spent a lot of time talking to the public about why we had to [demolish] it.”
The reason was alkali silica reaction, a form of concrete “cancer” that began plaguing the 46-ft-wide, four-lane structure just two decades after its completion in 1932. That, along with a now functionally obsolete design and seismic vulnerability, made it necessary to take it down after years of serving as a backdrop for scores of movies, music videos and TV commercials as well as a link between the downtown arts district and the East LA neighborhood of Boyle Heights.