Where is the bridge from the Red Hot Chili Peppers song ‘Under the Bridge’?
“Under the bridge downtown” is where Red Hot Chili Peppers singer Anthony Kiedis spent some of his lowest moments. It’s where he “drew some blood”, shooting the same combination of drugs that did for John Belushi. And it’s what inspired one of the Chili Peppers’ poppiest moments, which remains their highest-scoring chart hit stateside after 32 years.
But downtown where? In the “City of Angels”, Kiedis croons in the first verse of ‘Under the Bridge’. But where exactly in downtown Los Angeles is the bridge that made Kiedis and his band famous? The bridge under which he hung out with “fucking gangsters shooting speedballs”, according to his autobiography Scar Tissue.
Back in 1992, the songwriter himself said we don’t need to know. “I don’t want people looking for it,” he reasoned. Just as well, given what they might have found there. But by the time Scar Tissue was published in 2004, he’d changed his tune, pointing us towards the area around the intersection between 6th Street and Union Avenue.
A decade ago, comedy writer and novelist Mark Haskell Smith, an LA native, went searching for the bridge in that part of downtown. He believed he’d discovered just the spot Kiedis was describing, a shadowy pedestrian underpass in MacArthur Park. The same MacArthur Park, incidentally, which both began and ended actor Richard Harris’ career as a pop star.
Case closed?
Yet the 1991 documentary Funky Monks, documenting the making of the Chili Peppers’ album Blood Sugar Sex Magik, on which ‘Under the Bridge’ appears, tells a different story. There, Anthony Kiedis is filmed describing the bridge in the song as under a freeway overpass.
In line with this quote, Jennifer Swann claims in the music blog Gimme Noise that the bridge Kiedis describes must be the overpass where the Interstate 10 freeway covers Hoover Street at the southwestern edge of downtown Los Angeles.
But this overpass is absolutely nowhere near the 6th Street neighbourhoods where Kiedis says he and his then-girlfriend Kim Jones would go to pick up drugs in the late 1980s. The 6th and Union intersection is over a mile north.
Instead, it seems more likely that the “bridge downtown” is actually the tunnel for the old Hollywood Subway run by the Pacific Electric Railway. The tunnel, now known as the Belmont Tunnel, was abandoned in the 1950s when the subway train it housed stopped running. Over the years, graffiti artists and drug addicts moved in before the tunnel entrance was sealed in 2002.
That entrance is less than two city blocks away from South Union Avenue. The Belmont Tunnel runs underneath Route 110’s freeway overpass before finishing right next to 6th Street.
More tellingly, the electric substation next to the tunnel entrance actually appears in the music video for ‘Under the Bridge’. And, as if Anthony Kiedis didn’t feel that was a big enough clue for us, he had the entire video for the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ 2002 single ‘By the Way’ filmed in the Belmont Tunnel.
Though Kiedis will probably never tell us outright, we can say with some degree of certainty that the Hollywood Subway tunnel is the source of inspiration for his most timeless song.