The first elevated highway between Pasadena and Los Angeles was an ambitious toll-road built by one of Pasadena’s richest residents. In the first year of the 20th Century this grade-separated highway towered over train tracks, road junctions and slow-poke users of the rutted roads beneath. The wooden trestle was billed as a “speedway” and was to provide a flat, fast, scenic route for Pasadena’s thousands of cyclists, who could fly fifty feet high over the deepest section of the oak-studded Arroyo Seco river valley.