Office towers and museums sit on a raised plateau above downtown, linked by plazas and a block long funicular railway.
What Bunker Hill looks like
Bunker Hill today is a plateau of office towers and museums above downtown, reached by a short funicular and linked by a run of plazas. Its towers replaced a hilltop of Victorian mansions. Developers Prudent Beaudry and Stephen Mott bought most of the hill in 1867 and laid out about eighty lots there, building two-story houses for the city's upper class. Those residents moved to newer suburbs through the 1920s and 1930s, and the houses were cut into boarding houses and cheap apartments as the neighborhood grew poorer.
In 1955 city planners targeted the hill for slum clearance. The Community Redevelopment Agency won a series of court fights, and plans to save some of the old houses ended in their demolition instead. Most of the skyscrapers on the hill now went up during the 1980s.
opened in 1901 alongside the Third Street Tunnel, running two short blocks between Hill Street and Olive Street. It was dismantled in 1969 when its site was cleared for redevelopment, then rebuilt in 1996 about 300 feet south. A fatal 2001 accident and a 2013 derailment closed it twice more. It has run daily from 6:45am to 10pm since reopening in 2017.
The opened in 1977. followed in 1989 and stayed the tallest building in California until 2016. 's taller tower is older still, completed in 1983 as the Crocker Tower.
The opened in 1986 as part of the development deal with the city. and the , the newest buildings on the hill, stand next to each other on Grand Avenue.
An older network of elevated pedway bridges connects several towers, including the Bonaventure, left over from a 1970s plan that lost its funding. The run from Hope Street toward the Central Library, with an escalator alongside them and a 1992 fountain by Robert Graham at the top.
Films shot in Bunker Hill
Bunker Hill's Victorian houses were still standing when several films used the neighborhood in the 1950s and 1960s. The 1955 film Kiss Me Deadly shot at a mansion on Bunker Hill Avenue and on the steps beside . Joseph Losey's 1951 remake of M used a different Victorian house on the same street. Cry Danger, also from 1951, used the New Grand Hotel at Grand and Third as its fictional Crosley Hotel. Kent Mackenzie's documentary The Exiles followed young Native Americans living in the neighborhood's rooming houses at the end of that decade. A low-budget 1965 film called Angel's Flight was shot without permits during the 1962 demolition and ends on the funicular itself. Almost none of the buildings from those films are still standing.
La La Land, 2016
had already been closed to the public for safety reasons when the production reactivated it for one day in 2016, so Mia and Sebastian could ride it during the film's montage. Safety officials barred any further filming on the railway afterward. It did not reopen to the public until the following year.
Bosch, 2017
The Amazon series is based on a Michael Connelly novel called , and the production got special permission to film scenes on the real cars just before the railway's public reopening in the fall of 2017.
Perry Mason, 1966 and 2020
The original Perry Mason used the funicular in a 1966 episode called The Case of the Twice-Told Twist. It was the only color episode the series ever made. HBO's 2020 remake filmed there as well.
In the Line of Fire, 1993
The hotel's Green Square, Red Circle and Yellow Diamond glass elevators each carry a bronze plaque marking a film shoot. In the Line of Fire and True Lies were filmed there in the same month in 1993. Forget Paris followed the next year. Interstellar's production shot at the hotel in 2013.
What Bunker Hill can double for
Bunker Hill can stand in for New Chicago in the 1979 series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, a space colony administration building in 1999's Power Rangers Lost Galaxy and the fictional Arcadius Business Center in the 2013 video game Grand Theft Auto V.
