Bunker Hill: Urban Renewal Builds a New Downtown by Removing the Old One
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Transcript
Bunker Hill looks like corporate Los Angeles because the city deliberately erased much of what came before.
In the late nineteenth century, wealthy residents built houses on this elevated ground.
As affluent families moved elsewhere, many large homes became apartments and rooming houses.
The neighborhood grew denser and poorer.
City planners increasingly described Bunker Hill as blighted.
That word carried enormous power in postwar America.
Under urban-renewal programs, government could condemn property, clear land and assemble large parcels for redevelopment.
Beginning in the 1950s and accelerating through the 1960s, much of the old neighborhood was demolished.
Thousands of residents were displaced.
The replacement city used a different scale.
Superblocks.
Office towers.
Cultural institutions.
Parking garages.
Wide roads.
The new Bunker Hill represented modern planning confidence.
It also represented a judgment that an existing community had less value than a future business district.
Today Grand Avenue contains important architecture and cultural institutions.
The point is not to declare them illegitimate because older housing disappeared.
Cities inherit the consequences of earlier choices.
The useful task is to keep the trade visible.
For tourists, downtown's dramatic towers can feel like evidence Los Angeles never had an old urban core.
For locals, surviving photographs of Bunker Hill can look almost like another city.
Both impressions come from the scale of clearance.