Bunker Hill, Los Angeles

Why you should experience Bunker Hill in Los Angeles, California.

Bunker Hill is a commanding enclave where Downtown's metropolitan core meets steep urban topography, grand cultural architecture and a high-rise district created through one of the most sweeping physical reconstructions in the city's history.

Positioned between the Civic Center, Financial District, and Historic Core, the neighborhood occupies elevated ground above the western edge of Central Downtown, with Grand Avenue running along its crest and streets descending sharply toward Broadway and the lower basin. Glass towers, travertine facades, sculptural cultural buildings and broad terraces give the hill an architectural scale distinct from the dense early commercial blocks below. Grand Avenue supplies the primary encounter through a ridge-top sequence of office towers, residences and cultural institutions linked across blocks whose elevations repeatedly separate upper plazas from lower streets. Second and Third streets cut through the hill in tunnels as stairways, terraces and steep cross streets expose the vertical difference between the summit and surrounding Downtown. The result is a neighborhood whose extreme reconstruction preserved its commanding topography but replaced nearly its entire earlier fabric, making the contrast between successive visions of Los Angeles unusually visible across a single urban hill.

What you should know about Bunker Hill.

Bunker Hill is best known for undergoing a near-total transformation from an elite Victorian residential quarter into the corporate and cultural high-rise district that reoriented Downtown during the second half of the twentieth century. Prudent Beaudry acquired acreage on the hill during the nineteenth century and helped open the elevated terrain to residential development, with Bunker Hill Avenue and surrounding streets attracting substantial houses as Los Angeles expanded beyond its earlier center. The neighborhood's elevation initially supplied wealthy residents with physical separation from the commercial city below, and Victorian mansions became a dominant feature of the ridge during the late nineteenth century. Wealthier households began departing for newer residential districts during the opening decades of the twentieth century, leaving many large houses to conversion into apartments and rooming houses as the social composition of the hill changed. Angels Flight began climbing the steep eastern grade in 1901, connecting Hill Street with the summit and giving residents a direct route between the elevated neighborhood and Downtown's commercial streets. By the middle of the century, aging houses and apartment buildings occupied land increasingly coveted for expansion of the central business district. The Bunker Hill Redevelopment Project received City Council approval in 1959, initiating acquisition and demolition across an immense section of the hill. By 1968, virtually e structure on the summit had disappeared apart from two late-Victorian residences awaiting relocation, and Angels Flight had been dismantled for storage. Twenty-five superblocks replaced the earlier fine-grained street and parcel pattern, creating the physical platform for a radically different Downtown. Union Bank Plaza began construction in 1966 and became the first Bunker Hill tower to rise above City Hall, marking the decisive arrival of the vertical business district that would dominate the neighborhood for the following decades.

Bunker Hill Towers translated that reconstruction into a residential experiment intended to return affluent metropolitan living to terrain cleared of its earlier housing. Architect and planner Robert E. Alexander designed the $60 million complex, whose three towers rose between 1966 and 1968 as one of the earliest projects undertaken within the redevelopment area. Two 19-story buildings and a 32-story tower surrounded a central courtyard across an entire sloping block, placing hundreds of residences inside a composition of plazas and terraces high above the freeway corridor. Its opening in 1968 presented high-rise living beside Downtown employment as a new residential model for Los Angeles, reversing decades in which professional households had increasingly moved away from the central city. Office construction simultaneously accelerated across neighboring superblocks after the city's longstanding 150-foot height restriction had ended in 1957. Crocker-Citizens Bank Tower reached 42 stories in 1969, followed in 1973 by the 55-story Security Pacific Plaza and 62-story United California Bank Building. Financial institutions consequently migrated into new towers on and around the hill as older commercial buildings farther east lost major tenants. Cultural construction developed alongside that corporate skyline, gradually giving Grand Avenue another role beyond finance and residential towers. Bunker Hill's rebuilt form consequently emerged through an extraordinary concentration of vertical construction, replacing a nineteenth-century residential hill with the skyscraper district that established the modern scale of Downtown.

How to fold Bunker Hill into your trip.

Bunker Hill works as the anchor for an outing connecting Bertram Goodhue's great civic library, a century-old public market and the extraordinary nineteenth-century office building that survives immediately below the hill.

Begin at Los Angeles Central Library, where a prolonged dispute over location ended with selection of the former State Normal School site at the western edge of Downtown. Los Angeles voters approved a $2.5 million bond in 1921 with $1.5 million directed toward the library, and Bertram Goodhue received the commission for a building constrained by neighboring structures and the rising mass of Bunker Hill immediately to the north. Goodhue adapted ideas from his Nebraska State Capitol into a composition of layered rectangular volumes beneath a central tower, then died in April 1924 before construction was complete. Longtime associate Carleton Winslow carried the project forward to its June 1926 completion. Goodhue had proposed a pedestrian bridge spanning 5th Street directly from Bunker Hill to the library's Rotunda level, an unrealized connection that reveals how closely the building's architecture responded to the hill looming beside it. Continue to Grand Central Market, which opened in October 1917 across the ground floor of the Homer Laughlin Building as the so-called Wonder Market. The Beaux-Arts building had originated in 1898 as the region's first steel-reinforced, fireproof structure, and the market was promoted at opening as the largest public market on the Pacific Coast. Its position between Broadway and Hill Street placed food commerce directly below Bunker Hill during an era when the upper neighborhood still contained its dense residential population. The market subsequently survived the dramatic physical changes around it and continues operating with dozens of stalls inside the same building, preserving a commercial institution from the Downtown that existed decades before redevelopment erased the neighboring hilltop streets. Conclude at Bradbury Building, commissioned by mining and real-estate figure Lewis Bradbury and opened in 1893. Bradbury initially engaged Sumner Hunt, but George H. Wyman subsequently supervised construction, leaving the precise authorship of the final design unresolved. The restrained exterior gives little indication of the immense interior court, where open-cage elevators, wrought-iron stairways and galleries rise beneath a glazed roof that floods the central volume with daylight. The building survived successive eras of Downtown decline before a major restoration during the early 1990s became part of the Grand Central Square project, and its interior later appeared in films including Double Indemnity, Blade Runner and The Artist. The progression moves from Goodhue's civic architecture through a public market embedded in Downtown commerce and culminates inside Bradbury's extraordinary light-filled court, descending from Bunker Hill into three surviving institutions that preserve the architectural city largely erased from its summit.

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