Bunker Hill, Los Angeles, California
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Image:WaltDisneyConcertHall-12-22-04.jpg Image:JohnFerraroBuilding-122204.jpg Bunker Hill, in the downtown area of Los Angeles, California, is a short, developed hill with its peak located roughly around 3rd Street. It is located directly east of the Harbor Freeway.
Due to the skyscrapers built on it, the hill stands out from the rest of the L.A. basin and is synonymous with downtown as far as most people are concerned. A handful of skyscrapers have been built within the downtown area but away from Bunker Hill; examples include the SBC Tower (owned by retired NBA player and now businessman Magic Johnson; formerly known as the Transamerica Tower) near the Santa Monica Freeway.
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[edit] History
[edit] Early development
Image:Downtown-LA-1900.jpg In 1867, a wealthy developer, Prudent Beaudry, purchased a majority of the hill's land. Because of the hill's excellent views of the Los Angeles Basin and the then-attractive Los Angeles River, he knew that it would make for an opulent subdivision. He developed the peak of Bunker Hill with lavish two-story Victorian houses that became famous as homes for the upper-class, educated residents of Los Angeles. Angels Flight, dubbed "The World's Shortest Railway", took residents from the top of the hill to the bottom of the 33% grade and thus to the main business district. Much like today's Bunker Hill, the land of the hill was zoned for dense uses, and was therefore always a very busy area.
Until the end of World War I, Bunker Hill was a wealthy area with a very low crime rate. During the 1920s and 1930s, poor people, criminals, and vandals filled the area. Anyone who could afford to leave proceeded to do so, fleeing along the new streetcar lines towards Santa Monica and east towards Pasadena and launching the sprawling expansion of the greater Los Angeles area that continues to the present day. The Victorian houses fell into disrepair and the crime rate soared, making the area a slum.
For several decades, Bunker Hill was a popular setting for filmmakers, much like South Los Angeles today, and was used as a location for such film noir crime films as Kiss Me Deadly (1956), Criss Cross (1949), and Angel's Flight (1965). A documentary The Exiles (1961) depicts life on Bunker Hill in the late 1950s.
[edit] The Bunker Hill Redevelopment Project
In 1955, Los Angeles city planners decided that the pathetic state of the Bunker Hill area required dramatic change. Shortly after, the top of Bunker Hill was cleared and flattened as the first stage of the Bunker Hill Redevelopment Project, whose primary goal was to fill Bunker Hill with modern plazas and buildings. When the height limit of buildings for Los Angeles was finally raised (previously nothing could be taller than City Hall), developers built some of the tallest skyscrapers in the region to take advantage of the area's existing dense zoning. In approving such projects, the city sought to project a modern, sophisticated image, and this is largely the impression one receives from visiting the area today.
The project is the oldest redevelopment project in Los Angeles history, and is scheduled to end in 2015. The majority of the skyscrapers on Bunker Hill were built in the 1980's, with a new skyscraper or two being finished nearly every year. However, the momentum died down in the 1990's, shortly after the US Bank Tower was finished; this was partly due to the increase of vacant office space as employers and professionals fled the city's high taxes and traffic congestion, but mainly due to the recession. In 1999, the vacancy rate for downtown commercial skyscrapers was 26% (one of the highest in the nation for that time).
[edit] Bunker Hill today
The development momentum from the 1980's is slowly returning, as of 2005. Many of the older buildings and the early high-rises are undergoing adaptive reuse from commercial to residential. This trend began in 2000, when the Los Angeles City Council passed an Adaptive Re-Use Ordinance, allowing old unused office buildings to be redeveloped as apartments or "lofts." Developers realized there was a high level of pent-up demand for living in or near downtown, by both artists and employees of various firms in the financial district, and that they could profit by supplying upscale luxury housing (equipped with appropriate security measures) to meet such demand.
Many developers have been able to sell all the units in their new projects in a matter of hours. For example, all units in the south tower of the three-tower apartment project Elleven were sold out in 48 hours.
Because of the popularity of the New Urbanism in California, the city has required developers to build mixed-use residential buildings as much as possible. This means that the first floor of such residential developments are devoted to commercial retailers, so that residents do not have to constantly drive around for all their shopping trips and buildings present a more welcoming facade to passersby on the sidewalk.
Another factor contributing to the resurgence of development in the Bunker Hill area is the construction of high-quality public venues, such as the new Walt Disney Concert Hall and Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, and the Museum of Contemporary Art. Planned projects include the Los Angeles Sports and Entertainment District on Figueroa Street and Olympic Boulevard in South Park (the southern end of the Bunker Hill area), and the May 2005 approved $1 billion Grand Avenue Project, which over the next 10 years starting from December 2006 (the first construction beginnings) will bring in over 2,000 new residential units with over 400 of them being affordable units for all degrees of low-income families, 1 million square feet (93,000 m²) of office space, a 400 room hotel, 600,000 square feet (56,000 m²) of retail and entertainment space, and a 16 acre (65,000 m²) park connecting City Hall to certain civic establishments (office space and residential units will be in several skyscrapers ranging between 35-55 stories each).
Finally, the community is eagerly anticipating the return of the Angels Flight tramway (which was rebuilt in 1996 near where it was originally located), which was shut down indefinitely after a fatal accident in 2001. This is supposed to open some time in 2006, but a firm date has not been set yet.
One sign of the success of the downtown renaissance is that the office vacancy rate for the fourth quarter of 2004 was 16%, compared to 19% for 2003, and 26% for 1999.
[edit] Gentrification
While developers are building luxury housing on Bunker Hill today, the City of Los Angeles has very strict laws, rules, and ordinances established that prevent gentrification. Some examples include incentives for the creation of affordable housing (rather than market-rate housing), the preservation of existing affordable housing, the development of affordable housing by the city itself (rather than waiting for private developers), and other things. The city has written documentation regarding the development of affordable housing, here[1] and here[2].
On the topic of building affordable housing for very low-income to moderate-income, Principal City Planner Jane Blumenfeld said, "We are trying to make it attractive to build [downtown] and get this added affordable housing that we normally wouldn't have. We need an adequate amount of lower income housing so that in 20 years Downtown doesn't become an exclusive neighborhood." [3]
[edit] External links
- Regarding the office vacancy rate for fourth quarter 2004
- Grand Avenue Reconfigurantion Project Committee
