California's version of ‘The Way We Were' can be seen in SoCal and NorCal

San Francisco Chronicle​

24-05-2025

Here are a couple of California stories — one about a fading landmark district, the other about a crooked railroad. One is a Southern California classic. The other is in San Francisco's backyard.
It's always a bit of a culture shock for San Franciscans to spend time in Southern California. Maybe it's the freeways, the traffic jams, the palm trees, the Los Angelesness of the whole place. 'Look,' said my companion, 'they are selling Dodger Dogs in the gas stations.'
Times never stand still in L.A. Everybody's tailgating. Slow streets? That must be one of those quaint Northern California affectations.
So it was a shock to turn off Wilshire Boulevard and into Westwood Village, what one radio station once called 'the hippest place in L.A.' There was a time, and not long ago, that Westwood Village was packed with people on weekends. There were 20 movie screens, hundreds of stores and restaurants and so many cars trying to crowd into the district that automobiles were prohibited. It was right next to the UCLA campus, the ultimate college hangout. More recently the UCLA magazine featured a long piece about the heyday of hip Westwood. The title: 'The Way We Were.'
That was then. Last weekend, Westwood Village was nearly deserted. Plenty of parking in the vast garages. Lots of 'For lease' signs on storefronts. The landmark Regency Village Theatre, famous since it opened in 1931 as the Fox Westwood, had a chain-link fence around it. The theater was the classic movie palace in the Golden Age of Hollywood, with a 170-foot-tall white tower, decorated with stucco lions and griffins, part Spanish colonial revival, part showbiz, all Southern California.
Across the street, the smaller Bruin Theater, a streamlined moderne neon showpiece in its own right, was closed, too.
A group of Hollywood heavyweights, including Chris Columbus, Bradley Cooper and Steven Spielberg, plan to reopen and revive the Regency Village Theatre, but the message is clear: San Francisco's struggling downtown is not the only district that has been affected by changing times.
Meanwhile, the small Marin County city of Mill Valley will celebrate its own changing times on the Memorial Day weekend when an engine from the crookedest railroad in the world returns to town after 101 years.
This was the Mount Tamalpais and Muir Woods Railway, and the pride of the line was engine No. 9, which has been restored to its former glory.
No. 9 is ticketed for display at Mill Valley's landmark former rail station this weekend and will be the centerpiece of the town's Memorial Day parade Monday. No. 9 will ride on a flatbed truck just behind Mill Valley's shiniest red fire truck from the Old Mill School through downtown and along Miller Avenue to Tamalpais High School. The parade starts at 11 a.m.
No. 9 is the last surviving artifact of the mountain railroad which ran from Mill Valley to a terminal just below the summit of Mount Tamalpais starting in 1896. Later there was a branch line to Muir Woods.
The railroad was a tourist line, pure and simple, and advertised its winding roadbed (with 281 curves in just over 8 miles) as 'the crookedest railroad in the world' and the ride 'the greatest sight-seeing trip on earth.'
Engine No. 9, purchased new from the Heisler Locomotive works in 1921, was the pride of the line, the most powerful engine — a 'thoroughly modern' machine with all-wheel drive.
However, it was expensive to operate, and when the railroad ran into financial difficulties in 1924, No. 9 was sold at a bargain rate to a Humboldt County lumber company for use on logging trains. But it was charmed; it survived for a century. The railroad did not. Done in by changing times, it was abandoned in 1930.
But the crooked railroad lived in legend. Rail historians and a few old-timers kept the memory alive for another generation. One of the railroad's admirers was Fred Runner, who became aware of the railroad when he stopped by the West Point Inn, built by the railroad in 1904 and still in operation.
'I thought it was a good story that needed to be told,' he said. Besides the West Point Inn, one other artifact had survived: Engine No. 9, then owned by the Pacific Lumber Co. in the mill town of Scotia in Humboldt County.
The old engine was sitting in a park for more than 60 years. In the meantime, the lumber industry faded, the mill closed and the old locomotive gathered rust and attracted vandals.
Runner and some of his associates formed a group called Friends of No. 9, bought the engine at auction for just over $50,000, spent more than $30,000 moving it to the North Bay and close to $500,000 restoring it. 'We took out tons of rust and rebuilt it,' Runner said.
Now No. 9 is in museum quality condition, down to the controls in the cab, the gauges, even the engineer's brake handle. The craftsmanship in restoring the engine was meticulous. 'It's breathtaking, honestly,' Runner said. It's not possible to operate No. 9 under steam. It's just too old.
After the Memorial Day parade, No. 9 will go to a temporary home at the California Railroad Museum in Sacramento as a featured display. There's talk about a permanent display around Mount Tamalpais. But that's a discussion for another time.