LOST
VICTORIAN MANSIONS
OF DOWNTOWN LA
G'day folks,
Downtown LA does have history, it’s just buried under
gleaming high-rise office blocks and strip malls.
Despite
once attracting high-income residents with its fashionable apartment buildings,
'Bunker Hill' had become a working class lodging district by the 1920s. The once
thriving leafy hilltop suburb was a symbol of urban decay that discouraged new
investments. After the Great Depression, the grand old Victorian mansions were
run-down and being used as cheap apartment hotels.
In
the 1950s, the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency came up with a
drastic redevelopment plan for the entire Bunker Hill area and by
1968, every last Victorian home of Bunker Hill Avenue had been demolished.
These
pictures show the last surviving houses, the Castle and another Victorian home,
the Salt Box, being relocated by preservationists to another site in the
1960s, only to end up getting torched by vandals soon after.
The controversial redevelopment destroyed and displaced a
community of almost 22,000 working-class families who were renting rooms in the architecturally
significant but ill-maintained buildings.
In 1966, The Los
Angeles Times wrote of Bunker Hill: “Nowhere else in Los
Angeles was the architecture so ornate. The mansions were wooden-frame
Victorian with Gothic gingerbread touches applied with a heavy hand to simulate
masonry.”
Clancy's comment: Magnificent. Imagine what stories these enchanting homes could tell? Imagine who lived in them?
I'm ...
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