There's a freeway running through the yard

The Century (105) Freeway provides a speedy link through southern Los Angeles County. It runs between LAX and Norwalk, and connects three freeways.

It also spawned one of the first major freeway revolts and a complicated legal battle that forced Caltrans to implement unprecedented legal remedies to the mostly low-income communities through where the 105 was built.

Photographer Jeff Gates provides a history lesson.

He shares photographs and essays of the drawn-out process of building Los Angeles County's last major freeway opening on his site, In Our Path. He began photographing the construction of the freeway in 1982, and interviewed residents in the path of the freeway who were displaced by freeway construction.

The Century Freeway, which was originally set to be completed by 1980, opened in 1993 after the state battled cities and residents in the courts. The freeway was ultimately built, but the state agreed to enter a consent decree that required replacing homes taken for the freeway, giving preferential hiring to nearby residents for construction, and integrating mass transit into the highway's design. The Metro Green Line, running in the freeway's median, opened in 1995.

The litigation brought on by construction of the freeway factored in slowing down highway expansion throughout the county.

Gates, a Los Angeles native now living on the East Coast, supplies images and writing on the construction of the freeway and Southern California's transition from the suburban boom started by the Pacific Electric streetcars and completed with the highway grid that largely replaced the traction.