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Much of the urban history of America in the 20th Century has ridden on the back of a bulldozer, lit up by sticks of dynamite. This seems especially true the farther west you go.
At the edge of the Pacific Ocean, Los Angeles has been blown up, scraped clean, and re-built over and over again. Very little is left of El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora Reina de los Ángeles, and much of the Los Angeles that served as a backdrop for Hollywood movies from the 1920s through the 1960s has also disappeared. Even the Los Angeles River has been lined with concrete.
Like most U.S. cities, Los Angeles changed as waves of immigrants arrived. L.A.’s “Little Italy” outgrew the section it had taken over of Olvera Street (now a much-altered touristy version of the old Spanish-Mexican street), and expanded into an adjoining area, which later became the “New Chinatown” when the old Chinatown was demolished to make way for the city’s iconic Union Station in the late 1930s.
But the biggest demolition project, one that changed the face of Los Angeles forever, was first proposed in 1912.
A group calling itself the Bunker Hill Razing and Regrading Association proposed to pump water out of the Pacific Ocean, pipe it 20 miles to the city center, and spray high-pressure jets of brine against a ridge of hills to the immediate northwest of downtown Los Angeles. In all, the project would sluice away some 20 million cubic yards of shale and sandstone that Angelenos knew as Bunker, Fort Moore, and Normal hills.
The city once prized these hills for their commanding heights. Atop them, 19th-century civic leaders placed courthouses and colleges, which floated above the city and dominated the skyline…
In the eyes of 20th-century business interests and civic leaders, however, the hills stood in the way of progress.
— The Lost Hills of Downtown Los Angeles
This ambitious proposal remained just a proposal. In 1912, Bunker Hill was home to a lot of wealthy and powerful Angeleno families. Developer Prudent Beaudry had purchased a majority of the hill's land in 1867 because of its commanding views and convenient location. He developed the peak of Bunker Hill with lavish Victorian houses for the moneyed residents of Los Angeles. The Angel’s Flight funicular, dubbed "The World's Shortest Railway," was added in 1901 to take the prosperous home owners and their servants up and down the hill’s steep grade in comfort.
Suburbs like Hollywood...boomed on the plains to the city's northwest, but the hills made these new towns difficult to reach from downtown by streetcar. Because they could not scale the hills' steep eastern faces, the trolleys circled around the hills, creating bottlenecks on the few routes out of downtown. At first, the city carved deep road cuts and bored tunnels into the hills to relieve congestion, but regrading offered a more comprehensive solution.
Traffic relief was not the only justification. Regrading offered the prospect of 181 acres of new, vacant real estate to a dense central business district that found itself cornered-in by the hills…
— The Lost Hills of Downtown Los Angeles
By the end of World War One, the fashionable people were moving off Bunker Hill, and their lavish homes were subdivided, becoming increasingly shabby apartment buildings and rooming houses. The new tenants had no friends at City Hall.
The Depression and World War Two delayed plans for re-development, but by 1955, Los Angeles declared that Bunker Hill required massive alterations. The Los Angeles Redevelopment Agency launched an ambitious urban renewal program after getting federal funding for “slum clearance.” Not quite on the scale of the 1912 proposal of the Bunker Hill Razing and Regrading Association — nevertheless, the CRA/LA program lopped about 30 feet off the top of Bunker Hill over the next several years, clearing 27 “superblocks” for high-rise development.
All the changes have failed to relieve the city’s notorious traffic congestion. Los Angeles once had a public transportation system that was envied and studied by cities from around the world, but it was bought out and deliberately dismantled by National City Lines, a front company used by General Motors, Firestone Tires, Standard Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum, Mack Trucks and others to replace most of the L.A. street cars with buses between 1938 and 1950. They did the same in two dozen other cities, including St. Louis and Balitimore. The majority of the companies behind NCL were convicted in 1949 of conspiracy to monopolize interstate commerce in the sale of buses, fuel, and supplies to NCL subsidiaries, but were acquitted of conspiring to monopolize the transit industry (United States v. National City Lines Inc.)
L.A.'s Community Redevelopment Agency continued to actively re-shape the city all the way until 2013, when it began the lengthy process of phasing out, while transferring some of its functions to the Los Angeles Department of City Planning. According to the CRA/LA website, they’ve been selling off “...a remarkable portfolio of 50 commercial and residential properties (the "Properties") located in prime, urban infill Los Angeles districts including Hollywood, the NoHo Arts District and Downtown Los Angeles. The sale of CRA/LA Properties represents the conclusion of a legislative mandate to terminate redevelopment agencies across the state of California.”
I often cursed the National City Lines conspirators while stuck in traffic during the 20 plus years of my morning commute to work on the 405 Freeway, and still curse CRA/LA whenever I have to go into or through downtown Los Angeles.
Sources:
Articles by Nathan Masters, host-producer of Lost L.A. on KCET, a local public television series:
Additional information on Bunker Hill, Prudent Beaudry and National City Lines:
Historic Los Angeles photos from:
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L.A. as Subject, an association of more than 230 libraries, museums, official archives, cultural institutions, and private collectors.