Present-day Bunker Hill is nothing more than a sad-eyed widow of office buildings, bastardized more than even the most unlikable redheaded stepchild. Unlike some of the flashing glimpses of true history that Hollywood and other parts of Downtown have to offer, Bunker Hill these days is completely and totally unrecognizable. What remains is Angels Flight – the world’s shortest railway – barely a fucking bread crumb to the veritable bakery of what the area used to be.
It used to be home to some of the best and most memorable slums in the Americas, with enough stories to fill a hundred books. This is the Los Angeles of Fante, this is the Los Angeles of film noir. It is now faceless, nameless, listless, endless, just more nondescript tall buildings in a city becoming increasingly synonymous with nondescript tall buildings.
On a personal level, I’m a huge fan of author John Fante’s series of books about Arturo Bandini – a hapless and poor writer who never seemed to give up the dream even when working shit jobs in a factory. The books are funny and moving, painting picture perfect details about the Bunker Hill of the 20′s and 30′s, during Hollywood’s golden era. He didn’t dwell on the fame aspect – this was a poor man’s Los Angeles – and thusly the books still hold the test of time and I highly suggest you check them out if you get the chance.
He described the area in great detail, and before I moved to Los Angeles I was excited to see the same Bunker Hill he described. I was looking forward to the hotels, the bars and diners, or at the very least enjoy the gentrification that comes with time to any run-down area. I remember hopping in my car and looking for it – driving around Pershing Square, looking for the diner where he meets the waitress as described in ‘Ask The Dust’, looking for the shitty apartment building Bandini lived in, looking for anything that even closely resembled what Bunker Hill used to be.
I find nothing, just Angels Flight, which hasn’t worked for years.
There’s a great movie called “Los Angeles Plays Itself”, which helped me get ideas for this column in general. In it, they show various clips from movies filmed in Los Angeles and talk about the city’s history, more or less. The Bunker Hill that I saw bore no resemblance to the locations filmed in the 1955′s film noir classic “Kiss Me Deadly”, a great film noir in general, which had many of the major locations filmed here, such as the Hillcrest Hotel, pictured here next to Angels Flight (thanks to uncanny.net):
All were razed very soon after the film was completed, and the area took forever to redevelop. Bunker Hill was essentially the “slums” in technical terms, but to be frank, it was affordable cheap housing – with places like the Hillcrest Hotel being what were then called ‘apartment hotels’ that offered similar amenities to modern day hotels, such as sheet changing, etc.
It was that kind of affordable living that drove a lot of the classier residents to the West side of town, over to Beverly Hills and Bel Air, the same Hollywood caste system that still divides the town so starkly into the rich and poor neighborhoods.
Writers, artists, and poor actors lived in Bunker Hill among the pimps and prostitutes and drunks. It made downtown “real”. The razing of the entire neighborhood is similar to New York’s Times Square redo in the early to mid 1990′s. By taking away the dirt and grit and sterilizing such a great full-blooded neighborhood – they took away a lot of the heart of downtown Los Angeles. Gone were the Fante’s of the neighborhood, the film noir feel, the city element that LA still fails to fully encapsulate. Skyrise apartments and office buildings loom over the neighborhood now – offering only a city ‘feel’ to a place that used to be the heart of the working class. The poor element moved to Skid Row, creating what has been referred to as America’s only 3rd World City – currently inhabited by upwards of 8,000 homeless.
Bunker Hill still has its charms; It’s a nice place to walk around. Inviting, and pleasant. A particular favorite and popular bar ‘La Cita’ plays host to some of the cities most eclectic dance nights and is well worth a visit if you haven’t been. However, looking at it now, you’d fail to even so much as catch a glimpse of the magic that used to inspire characters like Fante’s Arturo Bandini and ‘Kiss Me Deadly’s Max Hammer.
(Photo from uncanny.net)
