The Ivy Substation (Los Angeles, California)

 theatre, electrical sub-station, historic landmark, education

The last major remaining structure built by the Los Angeles Pacific Railway Company, the Ivy Substation is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Los Angeles Pacific Railway built this Mission Revival substation in the summer of 1907 at the junction of three rail lines – the Redondo Line, the Venice Short Line, and the Santa Monica Air Line.

Named after the real estate tract Ivy Park (absorbed when Culver City incorporated in 1917), the substation was constructed a year after the Southern Pacific became the Pacific Railway’s majority owner. As one of the company’s largest substations, converting AC to DC, the substation most famously powered the company’s Balloon Route Trolley Trip tourist line.

The Balloon Route “was the most famous trolley trip in the west.”
Mr. C.M. Pierce (former owner of the Glen-Holly Hotel at Yucca and Ivar Streets in Hollywood) took over managing the under-promoted Balloon Route Trolley Trip on Thanksgiving Eve in 1904. Pierce, through “advertising bombardments”, grew the route’s excursions from just one car to as many as eighteen carloads a day. It was parlor car No. 400, formerly General Moses H. Sherman’s private car, which led the excursions for years and which Pierce had rented for $15.00 a day.

The route covered more than 101 miles for the cost of one hundred cents (i.e. a dollar). All told, the Balloon Route excursion visited ten beaches and eight cities during its seven and a half hour trip. The railway called it the Balloon Route because the line’s loop was supposed shaped like a big balloon.

The trolley, complete with a white-capped guide, would take off out of the Hill Street Station downtown (originally out of the Fourth Street Station), passing “the main hotels, railroad offices, Court House, the old Spanish Plaza and Chinatown, the battle-ground of Generals Fremont and Pico, through the oil district and past the Sisters’ Hospital on Sunset Boulevard, and along the foothills to the famous Cahuenga Valley and that modern 'Garden of Eden' – beautiful Hollywood”. Here, the trolley would stop at Hollywood’s first real tourist attraction, the home of painter Paul de Longpre at the northwest corner of Hollywood and Cahuenga. Across the street from the house was a freight station where the cars would stand by while passengers would visit de Longpre.
The trolley traveled through Sherman (West Hollywood) and on to Sawtelle’s National Soldiers’ Home where the passengers would have another group photo taken (the photographer would race back to his lab, develop his film, and sell the photos to the tourists later that same day). After that, it was coastward through Westgate and Brentwood Park (“modeled after Golden Gate Park, San Francisco”) to Santa Monica and its Camera Obscura and Long Wharf. The trolley also visited Ocean Park for a ride on the roller coaster and Playa del Rey for a fish lunch. Passengers would check out “Venice of America” and Redondo’s pier and Moonstone Beach, too. The trip ended by taking the Air Line Route back to Palms where they’d watch some silent movies before heading back downtown.

The Ivy Substation last supplied electric power to the Santa Monica Air Line’s sole daily round-trip passenger run in 1953. By the late 1970s, vacant for decades, the building had become “a home for pigeons and hobos”, with more than 300 transients living there.

In 1982, when the city of Los Angeles, which had bought the building five years earlier, advertised it wanted commercial and nonprofit groups to submit bids to purchase or lease the substation, Culver City jumped in the following year and offered to lease the building and turn it over to a nonprofit organization. The two cities eventually did agree to a forty-year lease, but, with typical governmental swiftness, that wasn’t until 1987. Part of the deal called for Culver City to spend $1 million not only to renovate the building's interior, leaving its brick shell intact, but also to upgrade the adjacent two-acre Media Park, which Culver City had been trying to get its hands on since 1963.

A $1.9 million rehabilitation project on the substation and park began in 1991. Milford Wayne Donaldson handled the renovation’s design and construction plans while the contractor was the Driver-Eddy Construction Company. The substation re-opened as a community center in April 1993, boasting a 3,500 square-foot main room.
Steven Ehrlich Architects and Matt Construction converted the old substation into a 99-seat theater in the fall of 2002.

Maintenance and operation of the substation and park fall to the Culver City Redevelopment Agency.

The Ivy Substation is currently occupied byt the Actors' Gang.

THE ACTORS' GANG THEATRE
The Actors' Gang is an experimental theater group based in Los Angeles.
It was founded in 1981 by a group of actors, including Tim Robbins, now a member of the board and Artistic Director of the troupe. The group states its mission is "to create bold, original works for the stage and daring reinterpretations of the classics".