The Riverside Freeway was only 6 lanes in those days.
To get to Buena Park from Whittier in 1964, we would drive down Norwalk Blvd. through the oil fields of Santa Fe Springs—now long gone—to catch the Santa Ana Freeway in Norwalk. That freeway remained unchanged and unimproved for decades. By the twenty-first century,it was considered a Third World freeway. They are finally getting around to widening it.
In the summer of 1963, the condemned homes along the right-of-way of the San Gabriel River Freeway began to be demolished. By the fall of ‘64, the freeway was open between El Monte and Norwalk, and two years later, it was open all the way to the San Diego Freeway. Nowadays, it would take about 20 years to build such a freeway.