Angels Flight. Image copyright 2016 by Anna Boudinot.
“Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town!”
John Fante, one of Bunker Hill’s most famous residents, made this poetic exclamation in his novel Ask the Dust. These few words conjure up so much about Los Angeles: the wandering feet over the vast metropolis, the beauty and the sadness all bundled into one. There’s a certain glory in the agony of living in a huge American city, and New York usually gets the most credit for having “mean” streets, but Los Angeles’ streets can be even meaner because they’re disguised in so much more glitz and sunshine.
Fante and I are certainly not the only ones to make this observation, and of all neighborhoods, Bunker Hill perhaps best represents the Los Angeles paradox. The neighborhood is immortalized in dozens of film noir classics, most notably Stanley Kubrick's “The Killing,” Robert Aldrich's “Kiss Me Deadly’ and John Huston’s “The Asphalt Jungle.” Bunker Hill was an ideal setting for so many torrid tales of mystery and crime because it started as a very wealthy neighborhood and then slid into disrepair. The decaying facades of the gorgeous buildings provided the perfect backdrop for tales of decent (and not-so-decent) people who had fallen on hard times.
What’s most intriguing about the Bunker Hill of yore (that may be the first time I ever used the word “yore” in a piece of writing; “yore” welcome) is that despite its rich heritage, it almost completely vanished. The controversial Bunker Hill Urban Renewal Project began in 1959 and basically called for bulldozing the entire neighborhood and rebuilding it from scratch. The Victorian mansions that graced the neighborhood were razed. The hill itself was leveled. The skyscrapers you see in Bunker Hill today offer very little in the way of complexity or culture. Thankfully, a few icons still remain.
Angels Flight at night. Photo copyright 2016 by Anna Boudinot.
Angels Flight was constructed in 1901 and is one of the world’s shortest funicular (inclined) railways. It is made up of two small trolley cars, named Olivet and Sinai (which would be great cat names, by the way), which are connected to a cable and counterbalance each other. The railway spans less than 300 feet and was designed to take the wealthy residents of Bunker Hill on a pleasant journey down the hill to shopping destinations below. Angels Flight was privately operated until 1962, when the city took possession of it through power of eminent domain. It kept running, the subject of a short 1965 documentary that dubbed it “A gaudy colored chariot that can still take us back to the world of the near past.”
In 1969, it was dismantled and put into storage. The Angels Flight Railway Foundation describes the event on their website: “The two cars were hauled off to storage… for what everyone was told would be ‘a few’ years... For most of the next 27 years (1969-1996), the two cars were just lying in a dark warehouse.”
In 1996, thanks to the Foundation, Angels Flight was reassembled and restored, finding a new home a half-block from its original location. Passengers could ride from Hill Street to Olive Street and back again for only $1.00 round trip. But the little railway still had more troubles ahead. In 2001, “the funicular saw its worst accident when Sinai careened down the hill and struck Olivet, killing an 83-year-old tourist from New Jersey and injuring seven others. Investigators eventually concluded that faulty mechanical and brake systems, combined with weak oversight, led to the crash. The railway was closed for the next nine years.” And in 2013, a car derailed and injured a passenger, alarming the city enough to shut it down again. For a little while, the cars continued to run up and down the hill empty, almost like a museum exhibit, as you can see in this video I filmed in March 2014. The railway reopened in 2017 after safety upgrades and today you can ride it up and down the hill for $2.00 round-trip.
Angels Fight is near and dear to the hearts of Angelenos. Perhaps because it stirs in us the type of historic pride for which Los Angeles is not usually well known. When you travel to New York you see the 19th century-era tiles in the subways; when you travel to Chicago you hear the rumbling of the El along the same tracks that have existed since 1892. While the history of Los Angeles rivals the history of those two other cities, it is not usually as blatant as a gaudy colored chariot or a flower in the sand. Angels Flight reminds us that we have a past too.
While in Bunker Hill, check out the Bradbury Building and Grand Central Market.