Marc’s post about Times Square yesterday reminded me about Los Angeles’ equivalent: The once thriving downtown suburb of Bunker Hill. In the very spot where now sits the Disney concert hall and the 1960’s music center complex was once a thriving neighborhood packed with turn-of-the-century Victorian houses, theaters, bars, restaurants and a large population of retired old folks. By the mid 1950’s when Kent Mackenzie, future director of the acclaimed film The Exiles (which also takes place in Bunker Hill), made this short documentary film the neighborhood was already doomed. By the end of the 60’s, save for a few buildings it was all gone. In a city such as ours which perpetually tears down the past and re-invents itself there was no way a few rickety old buildings and poor people would ever get in the way of progress. Fortunately we have the below film and countless other movies and books to remind us of what once was.
 
oops, the video was taken down. To view the short film, buy or rent The Exiles DVD. Sorry !

 
On Bunker Hill (great resource for Bunker Hill in films and literature)

This is amazing. I screened The Exiles at my theater in Taos a couple of years ago and was hoping that more of Kent Mackenzie’s Bunker Hill footage would get released. Thank you Milestone.
Thank you Brad.

Author John Fante lived in Bunker Hill for awhile and wrote a fine book of short stories called ‘Dreams Of Bunker Hill’.

Strange.  My artist grandfather lived in Bunker Hill in the late 20’s and 30’s… after returning from being bored as fuck painting rich bankers in NYC in the 20’s.  He came back to LA and was later painting all of the murals in the (new at the time) downtown movie theaters (Million Dollar Theater, etc) as well as was one of the first neon artists, ever, designing the neon monikers, etc of those movie theaters as well, along with painting water-color picture ads of burlesque dancers for the now-defunct evening Examiner. (Despite being an impressionist painter at heart - he later taught painting at Chouinard, which decades later relocated from downtown to Valencia and renamed itself, “Cal Arts”.) 

Bunker Hill was considered a run-down, bohemian, artist enclave of broke artists and intellectuals during my grandfather’s time of living there… it also extended into what is Little Tokyo today, I thought?  So apparently, it was gentrified after WWII and then got swallowed up and forgotten as it became the tourist spots we know today. Also, my grandfather’s Bunker Hill was not considered a “suburb” of LA, but was simply a neighborhood of downtown at the time.

Reminds me of how my grandmother grew up in Chinatown, before it was ever Chinatown.

My mother lived in Silverlake for 20 years (during the 60’s and 70’s, and it’s where I spent my early childhood before we moved east of the LA River).  And Silverlake has had demographic changes depending on the decade and economy as well.  It obviously was gentrified a lot during Clinton’s years… just as Hollywood Blvd and Times Square were gentrified/Disneyfied during Clinton’s time as well. However, it was the “hip” place for my mom to live back in the ‘60s before becoming a little ghettoized by the early and mid-80’s (hello, Reagan) and then gentrified again by the mid-90’s.

Sorry for my tangent.  I’m 3rd-generation born and raised in LA, and it trips me out how much it changes.  The hospital I was born in (Queen of Angels) doesn’t even exist any more.  It was “absorbed” by Hollywood Presbyterian.

Peace.

I’m also 3rd generation Angeleno, born in Ceders of Lebanon hospital on Wilshire which is now Scientology headquarters (or something).

@Brad Laner:  Lol.  Yeah, last I heard, the Queen of Angels’ former building is now called The Dream Center.  It’s some dude’s “church.”  At least it’s no longer an abandoned hospital building.

Cheers to us both being 3rd-generation Angelinos, dude! 

Cheers and thanks for the Los Angeles memories !

Read John Fante novels for some great descriptions of old LA!

@peboer:  Thanks! I keep meaning to read John Fante after having seen Charles Bukowski dedicate so many poems to him.  I’ve heard Fante regarded as the “Big Brother of The Beats.”

My mother grew up on Bunker Hill on Court Street, and some of my earliest recollections are of the two of us wandering the area at dawn, visiting the last Victorian houses, Angel’s Flight and finally breakfast at Clifton’s. The Bunker Hill documentary stirred up the very deepest dust of my memory. I bought the DVD so I could study every street sign, article of clothing and building facade. Watching this makes me feel like I’m already a ghost. Practically nobody who lived there is still alive.