Copyright © 1999 (revised 2006) Tom Wetzel
Pershing Square
Elevated Railway Terminal
Grand Central Public Market
Angels' Flight
Bunker Hill
Into the early 1950s the Subway Terminal in downtown Los Angeles was a major transportation hub. Because of its historical importance, the Subway Terminal is a convenient starting point for a dig into bits of downtown L.A. history. In this tour we look at the area within walking distance of the subway terminal. In the map below, circa 1950-53, the Subway Terminal Building is marked in red.
The Subway Terminal was the downtown end of a one-mile-long streetcar subway that was used as the entry into downtown for four Pacific Electric light rail lines — basically streetcar lines with bits of private right of way — operating to Hollywood, the San Fernando Valley, and Glendale. In 1952 the four routes still operating out of the subway provided a combined weekday total of about 100,000 rides.
The Subway Terminal was located in the basement of the Subway Terminal Building (photo below), which was the largest office building in downtown Los Angeles when it was built in 1925. The Subway Terminal was a "limit-height" building, that is, it conformed to the 150 foot height limit that had been in effect in Los Angeles from 1905 til the late '50s.
The underground train terminal under the Subway Terminal Building is shown in the photo below.
Two art deco limit-height office buildings were built on the same block on Hill Street as we see in the photo below left (taken in the 1980s). The building on the corner of 5th and Hill is the Title Guaranty Building, an example of the zigzag moderne style. The building mid-block is the Federal Title building...since demolished.
Below right is a postcard view of the Clark Hotel, an 11-story structure with 555 rooms, across the street from the Subway Terminal Building. The government of the People's Republic of China bought the hotel in the 1980s to be a business and cultural center — a project that was a casualty of the vagaries of China/U.S. relations.
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In the next photo (from "Pacific Electric in color Volume 1") we see a Venice Short Line train in the late '40s, having just departed from the surface tracks on the south side of the Subway Terminal Building. Note the Town theater and the Clark Hotel across the street from the Subway Terminal.
Already at this early date breaks in the street frontage had appeared here for parking lots. This creates "dead" spots in the street frontage that makes the street less interesting as a walking environment, and the cars crossing the sidewalk are an obstacle for pedestrians.
A half block south of the Subway Terminal is Pershing Square, a lively spot in the street life of downtown Los Angeles. Soapboxing in the square was a common tactic of radical and union activists in the early 20th century. This made sense because of the large population of casual workers, and workers employed at low wages in stores and workshops around the downtown area, who lived in the nearby residential hotels and lodging houses.
In the early 20th century, before the early 1920s, most people in Los Angeles got around on the streetcar system. But in 1912, the poorest segment of the workforce — people making under $500 a year — could not afford to ride streetcars. They got around by walking. This means there was a very large working class population living in and around the downtown area, particularly in the area running east from Main Street to the Los Angeles River, which was a residential area in the early 20th century. After the elite got the zoning changed for area east of Main Street to industrial in 1907, the working class were progressively forced out of that area over the years as housing was replaced with industry. As that process happened, many of the low-wage downtown workers moved to Bunker Hill.
As late as 1940, 80,000 people lived within a one-mile walk of 7th and Broadway (considered the center of downtown for many years). More than 12,000 of these residents lived on Bunker Hill. In the '40s and '50s Bunker Hill was a somewhat racially mixed but predominantly white working class neighborhood. People living on the hill worked in downtown stores, warehouses, hotels and the like. Most of the residents in the boarding houses and residence hotels on the hill were in their 20s and 30s.
By the 1980s the population within a mile of 7th and Broadway had fallen to about 40,000, though there are currently efforts to rebuild the downtown residential population by rehabbing vacant office buildings into apartments. However, the downtown property owners, speculators, developers and their allies in the media and government are aiming for a very different population than lived downtown in the 20th century. Throughout the first half of the 20th century the people living in and around downtown were the working class who did the work necessary to the stores, warehouses and loft manufacturing centered downtown.
The new loft and apartment boom downtown is aiming at a more upscale, professional class population. The gentrifying trend has become large enough that landlords are "flipping" buildings on the southwest edge of downtown, forcing out low-income people such as garment or hotel workers, and jacking up the rents, and renting to professionals, USC students...people who can afford to pay higher rents. The Figueroa Corridor Coalition for Economic Justice is the largest of the organizations that have been fighting this displacement.
Prior to 1918 Pershing Square was known as "Central Park." The lush greenery of the park (prior to the construction of the parking garage under the square in the '50s) made it an oasis in a downtown environment of concrete sidewalks and asphalt streets, lacking in street trees or other greenery. The following is a postcard view of the square in the early '40s, with the Philharmonic Auditorium and the Title Guaranty Building along the far (north) side, and the palatial Biltmore Hotel at the left. At the edge of the card at the right is the three-story Hotel Parisian. The demolition of the Hotel Parisian for a parking lot is an example of how the residential population of downtown was diminished during the postwar era.
The following view shows the Philharmonic Auditorium and the Auditorium Office Building at 5th and Olive. The Auditorium ceased to be the home of the L.A. Philharmonic after the opening of the Music Center in 1964. The building was demolished in 1985.
Prior to the construction of the Philharmonic Auditorium and Auditorium Office Building in 1904, Hazard's Auditorium, shown below, was located on this site. Hazard's was for many years the main auditorium in Los Angeles.
Across Olive Street from the Philharmonic Auditorium office building is the San Carlos Hotel (demolished). The following 1930s view shows the San Carlos from Pershing Square.
The next photo shows the same view today.
At 5th and Hill, dominating the southeast corner, were several three-story Victorian era buildings, with bay windows and apartments above shops, including a book store and a barbeque joint. In the photo below we see Pershing Square and the Biltmore Hotel in the background. These 3-story Victorians were demolished to build the Red Line subway and replaced with a nondescript concrete plaza — erasing this lively urban spot and a bit of L.A.'s architectural past.
The next photo shows this same view today.
On the southwest edge of Pershing Square, at 6th and Olive, is the Pacific Mutual Building, a classical temple of capitalist finance. The building is still there but the facade of the building on the corner has been modernized.
In the '40s and '50s Pacific Mutual was headed by Asa Call, the "Mister Big" of L.A. politics. Call and Neil Petree, president of Barker Brothers furniture emporium, had formed the Committee of 25, an elite group of powerbrokers, a kind of capitalist shadow government. In the early '50s the Committee recruited empty suit congressman Norris Poulson to unseat Mayor Fletcher Bowron in a notorious red-baiting campaign in 1953. The main issue, as far as the downtown elite was concerned, was the fate of Bunker Hill. The first Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) under Bowron proposed a housing development for Bunker Hill that would provide affordable housing units for the downtown workforce. The downtown elite had different ideas — made real in the Bunker Hill of today.
In the 1930s postcard view below, a Los Angeles Railway car on the U line is about to turn left onto Olive Street to run up to 5th Street where it would turn right to continue east on 5th.
Continuing down Hill Street we reach 7th Street, which was a major shopping street. In the postcard view below we're looking west on 7th St. at Hill. The theater on the northwest corner was originally the Pantages Theater, bought by Warner Brothers in the '40s to exhibit its product. The 8-story building housing the theater was built by Alexander Pantages in 1919. In 1988 the theater was transformed into the Jewelry Center. Today about 50,000 people work in the jewelry industry in downtown L.A. — about one out of five downtown workers.
Walking east on 7th Street we reach 7th and Broadway — regarded as the center of downtown for decades. The building on the northwest corner is the former Bullocks department store. The photo at right shows the dense throngs attracted to 7th and Broadway in the 1930s. Walking east on 4th Street...Around the corner from the Subway Terminal on Broadway at 4th Street was the huge Broadway department store (see photo below), the anchor store for the north end of the Broadway shopping strip. The Broadway derived from a small enterprise founded in 1896 at the 4th and Broadway site. At that time this was at the southern edge of the central business district which was then centered around Temple, Spring, and Main Streets, near the site of the present city hall. In 1912, Arthur Letts, owner of the Broadway department store (and also a major landowner and speculator in Hollywood and Westwood), built the present building at 4th and Broadway, which included 460,000 square feet of retail space. This big box was based on volume selling, which was made possible by its location at the hub of the regional electric railway transportation system. The Broadway was oriented to "budget-conscious" shoppers. |
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Arthur Letts also owned Bullocks department store at 7th and Broadway, which carried higher-priced merchandise. The 4th and Broadway store, the flagship of Letts' retail empire, was closed in 1972 when The Broadway moved to 7th and Flower with the opening of the Broadway Plaza (now Macys Plaza) in 1972. The former department store has been rehabbed into an office building for state employees.
The Subway Terminal was not the only Pacific Electric station in downtown L.A. Walking east on 5th to Main and then south a block, we come to the Pacific Electric Building. Until 1961 this was a working railway commuter station.
The nine-story office building housed the Pacific Electric headquarters and, on the ground level, the "Main Street station". The elevated consisted of a two-block-long steel structure plus a three-block-long ramp (mostly made of wood trestle construction) at 3.89% grade to street level. The elevated was torn out in the mid-'60s but the office building survives, recently rehabbed into apartments as the Pacific Electric Lofts).
Retracing our steps west on 5th Street to Spring, we come to the Alexandria Hotel. The photo below looks south on Spring at 5th, with the former Citizen's National Bank building at the right, beyond it is the Alexandria Hotel.
Just north of the Subway Terminal Building, on the opposite side of Hill Street were two Victorian era buildings at 4th. The two photos below give two different views of this intersection. In the first photo, we are looking east on 4th circa 1920. The building on the left (northeast corner) is the Hotel Brighton. Both of these buildings were torn down after World War 2 for parking lots (which still exist).
The photo below (from the USC digital archives)
provides another view (circa 1928-30) of the intersection of 4th and Hill. Fourth is the street coming
in at right. We're looking south. The 9-story office
building on the north side of the Subway Terminal building was torn down after World War 2 for a parking lot (what else?).
The 11-story building on the northwest corner of the intersection is a residential hotel that was torn
down circa 1970 as part of the Bunker Hill redevelopment project. Pershing Square
is in the distance.
| Continuing north on Hill Street from the Subway Terminal a long-time institution on the east side of the street is the Grand Central Public Market, a European-style open market of stalls that runs through the block from Hill to Broadway. Two Victorians — four-story and three-story — were neighbors of the market to the south, as we see in the photo at right (taken in the '60s). These buildings had single-room occupant (SRO) hotels over shops. Both were demolished to expand the parking lot that now dominates the northeast corner of 4th and Hill. Another instance of how the residential population of downtown has been diminished and the urban fabric ripped up to accommodate automobiles. The 7-story F. P. Fay Building in this photo occupies the southeast corner of 3rd and Hill. |
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After Ira Yellin, former head of Catellus Development Corp., gained control of the Grand Central Pulbic Market, with financial backing from the CRA, he demolished the Fay Building for a hideous parking structure...yet another accommodation to the automobile. Yellin also rehabbed the space in the upper floors of the Grand Central Market into rental apartments. These changes were part of Yellin's plan of changing the Public Market from serving primarily working class Latino customers to serving a more upscale population of a gentrifying downtown.
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Around the corner from the Grand Central Public Market, at 3rd and Broadway, is the PanAmerican Building, shown at right in a photo from the early 1960s. The upper four floors — formerly office space — have been rehabbed into apartments. |
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At 3rd and Hill Streets a visitor in the '40s would have encountered another long-time L.A. institution — Angel's Flight incline railway, which charged a nickel fare. The railway was removed from the hill by the Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) prior to 1970 so that the entire top of the hill could be lowered to allow construction of a two-level access environment, with plaza and pedways on top and auto roads underneath. The plan reflected the philosophy of the modernist or International Style, which rejected the traditional city street. Angel's Flight was re-installed on the hill about a half block south of the original site, and now unites California Plaza to the more plebeian city below. In the photo below left we see the turn-of-the-century Hillcrest Hotel and Astoria Hotel, on Olive Street, on Bunker Hill. These were residential hotels. The four brick buildings in the view at right are the Ferguson Building — a 7-story office building — the Hulbert Apartment Hotel (at 3rd and Clay Street), a 5-story apartment building at 3rd and Clay, and, next to the Angels Flight station, the 8-story former Elks building at Olive and 3rd, which was an residence hotel by the time of this view. "Apartment hotels" were a type of apartment building in the early 20th century that offered various services such as housecleaning. Note the old-style multi-globe street lights in these photos.
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The building at the right, in the photo above left, is the Hotel Belmont, a tourist hotel in the '30s. "You will enjoy a new experience in hotel living, combining the best features of club, social and home life," says a 1930s hotel brochure. The hotel featured a "Spanish patio" which we see in the photo below.
The Hotel Belmont was demolished by the CRA as part of the Bunker Hill urban renewal project, along with the four buildings next to Angel's Flight on the south side of 3rd Street. Angelus Plaza — a housing complex for seniors — was built on this site. The photo below shows 3rd Street and Hill today. The re-design of this side of Hill Street includes wide setbacks of buildings from the street, a huge parking garage for Angelus Plaza, and lawns and trees. In essence, this is a re-design that imposes an inappropriate suburban design in what historically had been a dense urban area.
The photo of Angel's Flight below was taken in 1909, before the construction of the Hulbert Apartment Hotel (souteast corner of Clay and 3rd). This gives a better shot of the two former Elks' Club buildings next to the Flight — a 5 story building fronting on Clay Street and a 7 story building fronting on Olive Street. The 5 story building shown here was a reinforced concrete building erected in 1909. In later years these buildings were operated as a single-room occupancy hotel.
The photo below of Hill Street, taken from Clay Street in the late '60s,
shows the Victorian buildings adjacent to the Grand Central Market. The tall
brick building in the center, located at 3rd and Broadway, was
built in the teens at a cost of one million dollars and housed the headquarters
of the Metropolitan Water District for many years. On the ground floor of that
building are the Million Dollar Pharmacy and Million Dollar Theater (built originally
for movie entrepreneur
Sid Grauman).
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Below left we see a duplex on Clay Street with the Million Dollar Building rising
in the background. In the photo at right we see the steps alongside the 3rd Street tunnel portal, across 3rd Street
from Angel's Flight. These residence hotels around Angel's Flight were the setting for
John Fante's early 1930s novel "Ask the Dust". |
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Continuing north on Hill Street there are by the '40s numerous breaks in the street frontage for parking lots along the west side of the street. On the east side of the street we encounter the Hotel Astor at 2nd Street, shown at right. The row of 3-story buildings along the north side of 2nd Street in this photo have been demolished for — what else? — a parking lot. The Hotel Astor has been completely rehabbed as the tourist-oriented Kawada Hotel. |
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The next photo shows the same view today.
The Astor Hotel is at right in the following photo, circa 1948. The 9 story building on the northeast corner is the Fashion League Building. This was originally the Union League Club. The Union League was the main Republican Party political club in Southern California in the early 1900s. Note the parking lots on the west side of Hill Street.
At the top of Angel's Flight was an area that had become a working class lodging house district by the '20s. Old Victorian houses were cut up into small units to increase rental revenue for abstentee landlords. Once-fashionable apartment buildings were no longer able to attract higher-income residents.
The commercial center of the hill was the block of 3rd Street at the top of Angel's Flight. We see this block in the photo below, by William Reagh, looking east towards the Angel's Flight station at Olive Street. The building across Grand at the left is the Lovejoy Apartments and the building at the extreme left is the Grand Hotel — a residential hotel. The Angel's Flight pharmacy is on the corner at the right. A dry cleaners is located further down the block. This piece of terrain was cleansed of its working class residents to provide space for the financial industry towers, cultural monuments, and upscale condo towers that currently occupy the hill.
A narrow street, usually free of autos (90% of the residents of Bunker Hill did not own automobiles), between Olive and Hill was Clay Street, lined with numerous Victorian era buildings. The following photo looks up Clay Street from 4th Street. The Subway Terminal Building was behind the back of the photographer, on the other side of 4th St.
The following photo shows the same view today.
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In the photo at right, by Donald Duke, the area along Clay Street at 3rd, crossed by Angel's Flight, provides an almost European flavor. |
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The Bunker Hill project was the first redevelopment project in L.A. The initial plan for Bunker Hill was developed under the mayoral administration of Fletcher Bowron in the early '50s. The first CRA under Bowron planned to remove all the old buildings on the hill, in the slash-and-burn style of urban redevelopment of that era. The Bowron CRA also came up with a plan for the top of the hill that was similar to what was actually done on Bunker Hill in being in the International Style, derived from Le Corbusier's "towers-in-a-park" concepts of the '30s. The consultants hired by the Bowron CRA did a study of the housing needs and preferences of downtown workers, and came up with a plan for limit-height (13-story) apartment highrises on the hill that would have rents affordable to downtown workers. The 1951 CRA model for the hill is shown below.
But Bowron was run out of office by the downtown elite in 1953, in a nasty campaign orchestrated by the L.A. Times, and Bunker Hill was a major issue in the campaign. Then how did Bowron's plan differ from the subsequent plan worked out under the various developer-friendly administrations in later years? The key question was: Whose turf was this going to be? The Bowron CRA proposed a commercial high rise apartment development that would be oriented to providing housing for downtown workers. What the downtown elite wanted was for the working class to be moved off the hill, and the terrain dedicated to financial district expansion, elite housing, and cultural monuments favored by the elite classes.
After the Watts riots of 1965, there was a huge exodus of corporate- and finance-related offices from downtown L.A., with major new office construction scattered along the Wilshire corridor. The largest of these post-riots office centers is Century City, with 9 million square feet of office space, developed in the late '60s on a 20th Century Fox studio site. Today, the various office concentrations from Wilshire Center and downtown Hollywood west to the Wilshire and Olympic corridors in Santa Monica jointly contain more than 45 million square feet of office space, about equal to all the office space in downtown San Francisco. By comparison, there is only 32 million square feet of office space in downtown L.A. today. A significant part of the employment in downtown L.A. in recent years has been industrial in nature — jewelry making, garment manufacturing and distribution, and the like. This makes downtown L.A. one of the most industrial downtowns in the USA.
The huge outflow of corporate, law and financial offices to the Westside caused a collapse in demand for downtown office space. This contributed to the virtual disappearance of the old financial district on Spring Street, with the remaining office uses mainly concentrated in the "new" financial district that runs from Bunker Hill south. The collapse of downtown L.A. as an office and retail center led to major declines in real estate values and a widespread shift in ownership, with speculators moving in to capture bargains. The current loft boom enables many of the new owners to capture profits from the higher market values of their properties when they are converted to market-rate housing for the professional/managerial class.
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