Quote:
Originally Posted by CaliNative
Looking at these old Bunker Hill pics, starting to realize why they leveled the hill in the early 1960s. This was no Nob Hill. The forest of boxy towers that replaced the slum could have been done better, for sure. Some of the Victorian neighborhoods should have been left in place. A city works best when it is a mixture of old & new. This is why L.A. is fortunate to have so many pre-1930 buildings to the east of Hill--on Broadway, Spring & Main. Mix in a few modern towers, and you have a real city with history. A streetscape finally seems to be returning to Bunker Hill as residential towers, Disney hall, museums, etc. proliferate. They carted off some of the old Vics to "Heritage Square" north of DTLA--is that still there? They also should have done a better job of providing housing to the displaced poor. I guess most of them drifted into skid row to the east.
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I'd say yes, it would never be confused with Nob Hill. But the Hill was not nearly as bad as many other parts of town—see
Nadel's images of the areas around Aliso, 7th & Mateo, Fickett Hollow, all the places where there was heavy industrial-meets-residential mixed use. BH had its better parts (up on Bunker Hill Ave was much nicer than this area around Figueroa, and the part of BH about the west end of the Third St Tunnel was pretty dodgy, and north of First, but then, north of First was taken by the Civic Center/Music Center, and didn't get wiped because it was downtrodden).
Point being, the City went after BH in the 30s because of the national housing acts, and in the immediate postwar years they wanted to cash in on all that Federal money, and the local legalities to declare the Hill a "slum" involved all sorts of well-meaning jargon about "the common good" and being "progressive" and the Hill was a nice, cohesive plot of land—most saliently, it had not only lots of pensioners, but many other voiceless folk (communists, homosexuals, and the like) directly adjacent City Hall—and was as such declared slum-clearance Redevelopment Area #1 in 1949.
The real question is, what if the City had simply looked to code enforcement? If a mix of old and new is desirable, then I agree a quantity could have been excised, and the better parts retained. My two cents anyway.
But in answer to your few final sentences, yes,
Heritage Square is still there! But the sole two houses to be saved from Bunker Hill are not...they were carted off there in March of 1969 and, because the City didn't bother to fence or otherwise protect them, they became party houses and were
burned to the ground by vandals in October of that year.
As to the displacement, yes, the City did a shameful job. When the Bunker plan finally made it over its legal hurdles, Councilman Roybal particularly opposed it on the grounds of its inadequate relocation provisions and failure to provide senior housing. 9,000 people, a vast majority the urban elderly poor, shuttled off with the promise that they'll have first place in the sexy new high-rise community; but they removed people in the early-60s, and the Angelus Plaza senior living complex didn't open till the early-80s. Imagine you're 75, displaced, given a pittance, and told to come back in twenty years. Good luck!
So let me end with some Bunker Hill pix that counter the conventional narrative of it being a blighted area casting long shadows across darkened alleys (and so on). The accounts I've heard were it was calm, and quiet, and people liked living there just fine. Because of low car ownership, and there being stores on every corner (with residential above), it kind of typifies the sort of "New Urbanist" neighborhoods we attempt to engineer today...
The 300 block of S Bunker Hill Ave
201 S Bunker Hill was always known for being kept in tip-top shape
300 block of S Olive
244 & 238 S Bunker Hill
all above,
lapl
Third and Grand—proving that not all the apartments were big wooden firetrap-lookin' things, sometimes you had crenellated parapets and witch-hat towers
cushman
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Yes it is t2. lol. 
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