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Now you can experience LA’s erstwhile Bunker Hill neighborhood thanks to a 3D reconstruction from USC

2022-07-15T14:26:00-04:00

Seven decades after it was razed to do away with what the federal government deemed “urban blight,” the University of Southern California’s Ahmanson Lab, working with the Bunker Hill Refrain Collaboratory, has created an interactive 3D reconstruction of Downtown Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill neighborhood. The initiative gives users a sense of what was lost when the area was turned over to developers and slowly remade into what is today an unrecognizable warren of commercial and luxury residential projects consistently fought over by some of the city’s most powerful names.

The 3D tour captures the area as it appeared between the late 1930s and the beginning of the government-led “slum clearance” initiatives that began in the last two years of the 1940s.

A typical Queen Anne style home in the neighborhood ca. 1940. Image courtesy USC.

Mayor Fletcher Bowron was the domineering political figure at that time, overseeing an unprecedented second wave of urban expansion in Los Angeles that inclu...

L.A. gives the O.K. to massive Angels Landing high-rise development

2022-03-30T15:15:00-04:00

The city of Los Angeles is moving forward with a historic plan from Handel Architects and OLIN for a slice of Downtown’s Bunker Hill neighborhood called Angels Landing.

The LA Times is reporting the city’s granting of entitlements needed to build on the parcel designated Y-1, which features the site of the historic Angels Flight funicular railway system.

Image courtesy Handel Architects

The project, backed by developers Victor MacFarlane and R. Donahue Peebles, is being hailed as the largest ever by a Black-owned development firm and, at 1.26 million square feet, is one of the largest in the recent history of the city.

Image courtesy Handel Architects

A once bespoke residential area west of LA’s downtown core, Bunker Hill has developed into a commercial high-rise district since the city initiated a redevelopment scheme in the late 1960s.

Image courtesy Handel Architects

Now, with only the funky funicular railway remaining as a vestige of what used to be, MacFarlane and Peebles will lo...

Angels Flight, the world's shortest railway, is reborn and dies again

2017-09-07T19:01:00-04:00

The unexpected closure of Angels Flight on Monday, four days after the funicular’s grand reopening, seemed a fitting twist for a railway that has operated in fits and starts for half a century. Since its reopening, 21 years ago, Angels Flight has been shut down more than half the time.

Los Angeles's well known car culture quite efficiently dismantled the city's public transportation, passenger railway system, and the now long-gone network of red cars. Yet, one passenger train, and the smallest of all, keeps rising from the ashes — and dying again.

Angels Flight, the shortest railway in the world, reopened on August 31st in Downtown Los Angeles. Its comeback, after four years of absence, was short-lived and the funicular closed again for maintenance on September 4th.

The train reopened today, the 7th. Ride it while it lasts!