Why you should experience Angels Flight Railway in Los Angeles, California.
Angels Flight Railway is a storied funicular where Bunker Hill's metropolitan character meets steep hillside transportation, compact engineering and one of Downtown's most enduring connections between its upper and lower streets.
Set along South Hill Street near West 3rd Street and just steps from Grand Central Market, the railway climbs the eastern face of Bunker Hill between the Historic Core and the elevated cultural district surrounding Grand Avenue, occupying a sharp transition in terrain where Downtown rises westward from the basin floor. Its lower portal sits within the dense commercial blocks around Broadway and Hill Street before the track ascends toward the towers and plazas occupying the reshaped summit. Two compact cars move along an exposed incline framed by steelwork, stairs and the surrounding vertical city, making the grade itself the dominant physical feature of the passage. The short ascent compresses a substantial change in elevation into a few hundred feet, revealing how dramatically Bunker Hill interrupts the otherwise flatter street grid extending east toward the Los Angeles River. The result is a miniature transportation corridor whose steep alignment, exposed machinery and position between two distinct elevations make the topography of Downtown immediately legible.
What you should know about Angels Flight Railway.
Angels Flight Railway is best known for carrying passengers up Bunker Hill since Colonel James Ward Eddy developed the original incline beside the newly completed Third Street Tunnel in 1901. Eddy, a Civil War veteran and engineer, secured approval from the Los Angeles City Council that May and began construction on August 2. Passenger service started on December 31, with more than 2,000 riders using the railway between Hill and Olive streets on its first day. The system operated as a funicular, linking two cars named Sinai and Olivet so the descending vehicle counterbalanced the ascending vehicle along the steep grade. A 1905 reconstruction placed the track on a trestle above Clay Street and produced the cars in substantially the form associated with the railway afterward. The Hill Street entrance gained its ornate arch in 1908, and seven decorative metal hoops installed along the incline in 1910 became another enduring part of its appearance. Ownership passed from Eddy to the Funding Company of Los Angeles in 1912 and then to Continental Securities Company in 1914, the year engineer Robert Moore began a 38-year tenure managing the railway. Moore purchased Angels Flight in 1946 before selling it in 1952 to Lester Moreland and Byron Linville, continuing a succession of private operators that carried generations of residents between Bunker Hill's apartment district and the commercial streets below.
The destruction of old Bunker Hill eventually severed that original transportation role and produced the railway's most consequential period of displacement. Los Angeles acquired Angels Flight in 1962 as redevelopment erased the Victorian houses, apartment buildings and streets surrounding its tracks, yet service continued amid demolition for another seven years. Sinai and Olivet made their final journeys at the original location on May 18, 1969, and dismantling began the following day. The cars entered storage along with the station house, entrance arch, drinking fountain and other surviving components, beginning a 27-year absence from Downtown. Preservation efforts intensified during preparations for Los Angeles's 1981 bicentennial, then gained momentum through the Los Angeles Conservancy and the Angels Flight Coordinating Committee during the following decade. Reconstruction proceeded during the mid-1990s on a site several hundred feet south of the original alignment, using a 335-foot track set at the historic 33 percent grade. Angels Flight reopened on February 24, 1996 under the newly created nonprofit Angels Flight Railway Foundation and entered the National Register of Historic Places in 2000 for its significance in transportation, engineering and architecture. A fatal collision in 2001 led to a prolonged closure and redesigned drive and control systems before passenger service resumed in 2010. Another closure followed a 2013 derailment, and a subsequent rehabilitation led by ACS Infrastructure with SENER Engineering and Systems preceded the August 31, 2017 reopening, extending the life of a railway repeatedly reconstructed around the transformation of Bunker Hill itself.
How to fold Angels Flight Railway into your trip.
Angels Flight Railway works as the anchor for a Downtown outing connecting a Victorian commercial building conceived around natural light, an early movie palace created for Sid Grauman and the permanent library that accompanied Los Angeles's explosive growth during the 1920s.
Begin at Bradbury Building, commissioned by mining and real-estate millionaire Lewis Bradbury and completed in 1893 after Sumner Hunt prepared designs and George H. Wyman subsequently supervised construction. Its restrained Romanesque Revival exterior conceals a 50-foot interior court flooded with daylight through a glazed roof, with open-cage elevators, marble stairs and ornate ironwork rising through the central void. The building became the oldest surviving commercial structure in Central Los Angeles and later entered cinema through productions including Double Indemnity in 1944 and Blade Runner in 1982. A major restoration during the early 1990s formed part of the Grand Central Square project, preserving the extraordinary interior that made a speculative nineteenth-century office building one of Downtown's most recognizable architectural works. Continue to Million Dollar Theatre, created for impresario Sid Grauman as his first Los Angeles venue and opened on February 1, 1918 with the premiere of The Silent Man, accompanied by a 30-piece orchestra before guests including Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin. Albert C. Martin Sr. designed the adjoining 12-story building, and William Lee Woollett developed the 2,345-seat auditorium. Sculptor Joseph Mora covered the Spanish Churrigueresque exterior with a vivacious program incorporating bison heads, longhorn skulls, allegorical figures and musicians, giving Grauman an architectural performance before his later Egyptian and Chinese theaters in Hollywood. Conclude at Los Angeles Central Library, financed after 71 percent of voters supported a $2.5 million bond measure in 1921 and designed by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue during the final years of his career. Goodhue died in 1924 before completion, leaving longtime associate Carleton Monroe Winslow to carry the project through its 1926 opening as a 190,000-square-foot building with capacity for 1.125 million volumes. Sculptor Lee Lawrie developed exterior figures and symbolic ornament, and Dean Cornwell completed twelve grand California-history murals for the rotunda in 1933. The progression moves from a nineteenth-century commercial experiment in light and iron through Sid Grauman's early transformation of cinema into architectural performance and culminates in the permanent civic library built for a rapidly expanding metropolis, tracing the ambitions that reshaped Downtown across successive generations.
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