How America's Grandest Victorian Neighborhood Was Erased: Bunker Hill, Los Angeles

Bunker Hill is the polished crown of downtown Los Angeles. The Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Broad, corporate towers, hotels, plazas, and luxury apartments rise above Grand Avenue.

The hill once held a different city.

Wooden mansions, apartment houses, residential hotels, corner stores, steep stairways, and palm-lined streets covered the slopes. By the middle of the 20th century, about 8,000 people lived there, many in rooms and apartments carved from the Victorian houses of an earlier wealthy generation.

Los Angeles declared the neighborhood blighted, bought it through eminent domain, demolished more than 7,000 housing units, displaced its residents, and physically cut down parts of the hill. The skyline was not built around old Bunker Hill. It replaced it.

The Hill Above a Growing City

In the 1860s, developer Prudent Beaudry acquired land on a steep rise west of the Los Angeles business district. Access was difficult and water had to be pumped uphill, but the elevation offered distance from the noise, dust, and flooding below.

Beaudry and other developers cut streets and promoted Bunker Hill as an elite residential district. By the late 19th century, elaborate Queen Anne, Eastlake, Italianate, and Gothic Revival houses lined streets such as Grand Avenue, Hope Street, and Olive Street.

The neighborhood became home to bankers, merchants, judges, and business owners. Turrets, carved porches, bay windows, and landscaped gardens expressed the wealth of a city becoming a regional capital.

In 1901, Angels Flight began carrying passengers up and down the steep eastern slope between Hill and Olive streets. The short funicular turned the hill's geography into one of Los Angeles' best-known landmarks.

Mansions Become Apartments

As Los Angeles expanded westward in the early 20th century, wealthy residents left Bunker Hill for newer districts. The mansions were expensive to maintain and increasingly surrounded by commercial development.

Owners divided many houses into apartments and rented rooms. Residential hotels and inexpensive flats made the neighborhood one of the few places near downtown where working-class people, retirees, single adults, and recent arrivals could find affordable housing.

The buildings aged, but the neighborhood remained intensely inhabited. Stores, bars, restaurants, churches, and porches supported daily life. Writers and filmmakers used its stairways and shadowed houses as the setting for Los Angeles noir.

City officials described the same landscape through the language of decay. Deferred maintenance, overcrowding, and code violations became evidence of blight. Little attention was paid to the fact that low rents were housing thousands of people whom the private market served poorly.

Blight Becomes a Legal Tool

California redevelopment law gave local agencies broad authority to condemn property in areas declared blighted, clear the land, and sell parcels for new construction. Los Angeles created its Community Redevelopment Agency in 1948.

Bunker Hill became its largest and most ambitious target. Planners imagined a modern downtown of superblocks, office towers, hotels, cultural institutions, broad roads, and open plazas. Existing buildings and lot lines did not fit that vision.

The definition of blight transformed a social problem into a land problem. Rather than repair housing or require owners to maintain it, the city could remove the entire district. The residents who depended on its low rents became obstacles to redevelopment.

In 1959, the City Council approved the Bunker Hill Urban Renewal Project. The plan covered roughly 136 acres, bounded principally by First, Hill, Fifth, and Figueroa streets.

Eight Thousand People Leave

The redevelopment agency acquired properties one by one. Some owners sold voluntarily; others faced eminent domain. Tenants received notices and relocation assistance, but affordable replacement housing near downtown was scarce.

About 8,000 residents were displaced. More than 7,000 housing units disappeared from the project area. The clearance removed not only decayed rooms but also an enormous reserve of low-cost housing at a time when discriminatory practices already limited where many people could live.

Buildings were emptied before demolition. Photographers documented boarded windows, abandoned furniture, and once-crowded streets becoming silent. The process lasted through the 1960s, leaving large sections of the hill as vacant lots.

Two late Victorian houses known as the Salt Box and the Castle were spared temporarily for relocation to Heritage Square. Before they could be restored, both were destroyed by fire in 1969.

Los Angeles Removes the Ground

The redevelopment did more than clear buildings. Engineers regraded Bunker Hill, cutting down elevations, filling depressions, and reshaping streets for large development parcels.

The physical hill that had produced the stairways, retaining walls, and layered views of the old neighborhood was partially removed. Where narrow lots once held houses, the agency created 25 large sites suited to towers and parking garages.

Angels Flight closed in 1969 and was dismantled. It returned in 1996 on a nearby alignment, one of the few surviving names from the old landscape.

Union Bank Plaza opened in 1968, followed over decades by office buildings, hotels, apartments, and cultural institutions. Redevelopment moved much more slowly than demolition. Cleared land remained empty while financing, design, and ownership changed.

A New Skyline, a Missing Neighborhood

Today's Bunker Hill contains some of the most significant architecture in Los Angeles. The Music Center, Museum of Contemporary Art, Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Broad, and Grand Park make the district a civic and cultural center.

That success can make the earlier neighborhood seem like an unavoidable sacrifice. It was not. Los Angeles chose wholesale clearance over rehabilitation and displaced thousands of residents before replacement housing existed.

Photographs, films, maps, and oral histories preserve the old hill in unusual detail. They show a district that was worn and unequal, but also dense, affordable, and alive. Its disappearance explains why downtown later spent decades trying to restore the residential population redevelopment had removed.

Bunker Hill was not erased because it had no value. It was erased because the city measured the value of its land differently from the value of the lives already rooted there.

The towers remain visible across Los Angeles. The neighborhood beneath them survives only when someone remembers to look down.