Hill Street, Los Angeles

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

Hill Street is a storied corridor where Downtown's metropolitan character meets nineteenth-century topography, early commercial expansion and a transportation axis repeatedly reshaped as the city pushed across its surrounding hills.

Running through Downtown between Chinatown and South Park, the southbound corridor follows the eastern foot of Bunker Hill from College Street across Cesar E. Chavez Avenue, Temple Street, 1st Street, 3rd Street, 5th Street, 7th Street and Olympic Boulevard before extending into the flatter urban grid south of the central business district. North of Temple Street, the roadway occupies a transitional landscape where Chinatown's low commercial blocks meet the remnants of Fort Moore Hill and the elevated civic buildings surrounding the freeway trench. Between First and Fourth streets, Hill traces the base of Bunker Hill beneath an abrupt wall of towers and terraced development, with the surviving grade producing one of Downtown's clearest vertical relationships between a lower commercial street and the elevated district immediately west. Farther south, the terrain levels as continuous early-twentieth-century commercial buildings tighten the street wall around Sixth and Seventh streets before larger parking structures, hotels and later development loosen that grain toward South Park. The result is a corridor whose topographic transitions, dense commercial frontage and passage beneath Bunker Hill preserve an unusually legible physical history of Los Angeles expanding across terrain that repeatedly dictated where streets, railways and business districts could grow.

What you should know about Hill Street.

Hill Street is best known for originating within Edward Otho Cresap Ord and William Rich Hutton's 1849 plan for Los Angeles before Bunker Hill itself received that name. The original route extended only between Sixth and Second streets, terminating where steep terrain obstructed further northward construction. Developer Prudent Beaudry named Bunker Hill in 1873 and promoted the elevated district for residential development, gradually changing the geography that had constrained the early street. North of the hill, a separate roadway known as Calle del Toro belonged to an older landscape associated with bullfighting during the Mexican and early American periods. That northern street became Castelar Street in 1874, honoring Spanish statesman Emilio Castelar, and retained the name for more than eight decades. Hill's southern commercial blocks underwent their own dramatic change as Los Angeles's central business district expanded south and west from the Plaza during the opening decades of the twentieth century. Buildings between Sixth and Eighth streets rose principally from 1906 through 1934, producing a concentrated corridor of seven- to thirteen-story commercial structures dominated by Beaux Arts architecture. Department stores, theaters, offices and smaller retailers filled the blocks as adjacent Broadway and Spring Street approached their development capacity. Fifteen of the 19 properties within the surviving two-block Hill Street Commercial Historic District contribute to that architectural concentration. Castelar finally became North Hill Street in 1960, joining two historically separate roadways beneath a single name and completing a street lineage extending from the 1849 American-era city plan through the commercial metropolis of the twentieth century.

Transportation transformed the northern blocks through a separate engineering campaign driven by the steep ground between Central Los Angeles and communities to the northwest. Los Angeles Pacific Railroad opened a rail tunnel beneath the northeastern edge of Bunker Hill on September 15, 1909, creating a faster route for electric cars traveling between Downtown, Hollywood and Sherman. The shortcut removed about twelve minutes from the trip, and an adjoining roadway bore opened to automobiles in September 1913. Electric cars continued north beneath Fort Moore Hill through a second tunnel, creating a subterranean passage beneath terrain that had constrained surface movement for decades. Pacific Electric advanced the concept in 1925 with a one-mile subway extending from a new terminal at 417 South Hill Street toward the Westlake district. The Subway Terminal Building contained 1,100 rooms and concentrated interurban passengers inside one of Downtown's largest office structures, allowing trains to leave the business district below ground. Construction of the Hollywood Freeway and extensive removal of Fort Moore Hill rendered the older tunnel system obsolete around midcentury, and the Pacific Electric subway ceased passenger operation in 1955. Hill Street had moved through surface railway, tunnel and subway eras within less than half a century, making transportation engineering one of the principal forces behind its physical evolution.

How to fold Hill Street into your trip.

Hill Street works as the anchor for an outing connecting the ceremonial entrance to New Chinatown, a century-old public market built through two pioneering commercial structures and a five-acre civic square whose successive designs track changing ideas about Downtown public space.

Begin at Chinatown West Gate, erected on Hill Street in 1938 as part of the initial construction of New Chinatown's Central Plaza. Chinese American leaders developed the new district after the displacement of the earlier Chinatown associated with the construction of Union Station, with engineer and businessman Peter SooHoo playing a central organizing role. Architects Webster & Wilson shaped much of Central Plaza with sweeping rooflines, carved brackets and clay tiles, and the Hill Street gateway incorporated 150-year-old camphor wood imported from China. Chinese characters across the gate translate as “Cooperate to Achieve,” giving the structure a civic message tied to the community enterprise behind the development. New Chinatown formally opened on June 25, 1938, with ceremonies centered on Gin Ling Way beside the West Gate. Continue to Grand Central Market, occupying the ground floor of two connected buildings extending between Broadway and Hill Street. Homer Laughlin constructed the original Broadway building in 1897, creating one of Downtown's earliest fireproof steel-framed commercial structures. Architect Harrison Albright extended the property through to Hill Street in 1905 with the Laughlin Annex, recognized as the first reinforced-concrete building erected in Southern California. Ville de Paris occupied the enlarged complex before relocating in 1917, clearing the ground floor for a new public market. Grand Central Market opened that September and has operated continuously since, originally serving the population living on Bunker Hill directly above its Hill Street entrance. A 1990s rehabilitation removed a later tile facade, restored second-story windows and revived historic architectural details across the complex. Conclude at Pershing Square, five acres of original pueblo land whose public history reaches to 1866, when Mayor Cristóbal Aguilar dedicated the parcel as La Plaza Abaja. Cypress and citrus plantings followed during the 1870s, and city engineer Fred Eaton created an early formal layout during the 1880s. John Parkinson redesigned the square in a Beaux Arts mode during the 1910-11 real-estate boom, preceding its 1918 renaming for General John J. Pershing after World War I. An 1,800-car underground garage radically altered the property during the 1950s. Architect Ricardo Legorreta and landscape architect Laurie Olin produced another comprehensive redesign beginning in the early 1990s, and the reconstructed square was dedicated on February 3, 1994. The progression moves from a Chinese American community-built gateway through two generations of pioneering commercial construction and culminates in a public square repeatedly redesigned across more than a century, connecting migration, mercantile growth and civic space along Hill Street.

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