The remains of Bunker Hill

The walk through downtown Los Angeles from 7th Street Metro Center to the Wells Fargo Center took longer than necessary.

Leaving my Expo line train, I turned right on Flower Street, heading toward the big Wells Fargo building where I was going to meet my friend Mickey Kantor for lunch at Nick & Stef’s. But sentimentality detoured me across Flower to what used to be known as the ARCO Plaza. Nancy, my wife, was communications director for the ARCO political operation for 18 years. I worked at the Times, owned for most of that time by Times Mirror, and so we often met downtown for dinner or the theater. (Note: Neither of those corporate giants exists today.)

Thinking of old times, I walked around what is now called City National Plaza, figuring it was on the way to Wells Fargo. I had overshot the mark. Then I saw an elevated walkway I was pretty sure would take me to my destination. It led to another walkway with a sign indicating it was the road to Wells Fargo. Actually, it was a road to a wall. I was lost amid the high rises.

These walkways, crossing Flower, Figueroa and other nearby downtown streets are monuments to the paranoid planning that shaped the area from Fifth Street to north of the Music Center.

Through much of the 20th Century it had been Bunker Hill, with streets on steep hills and rundown, seedy Victorian houses. We tore down the Victorians in the mid-20th Century, and all but flattened Bunker Hill for a redevelopment project, channeling many millions of public dollars into the pockets of the developers who built high rises on the newly leveled ground. Reflecting the mind set of the time, the developers figured the high-rise tenants and hotel guests were so afraid of being mugged, they would not venture onto the street. The elevated walkways were designed to take them from place to place safely. What they did was kill off street life and ground level businesses.

In San Francisco, the Victorians on that city’s steep hills survived, as did hotels, stores and classic office buildings. That’s one reason a walk in San Francisco is such fun and a stroll through the remains of Bunker Hill is a barren experience.

After lunch, I found a more direct and pleasant route back to the train station, the 103 steps leading from the former Bunker Hill down to the main library, designed to look like the Spanish steps in Rome. The 1986 library fire spurred the reconstruction of the beautiful library we have today. It also led to the pedestrian-friendly steps, to the grassy park around the library and to the pleasant restaurant nearby. In a bit of sleight-of-hand, redevelopment money had been moved around—this time for a good cause—to join with private donations and rebuild the library. The plan also financed the steps and the Library Tower, now the U.S. Bank Tower. It reflects what the designer of the steps, noted landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, said on their dedication: "Great cities are not made by automobiles, freeways and high rises. Basically, they are made by open spaces and the people who use the open spaces.”

I passed the California Club. It used to be a seat of power, second only to the real seat of power, the Times. The Chandlers, who owned the Times, and the California Club guys—and they were all guys, rich and white—agreed that the Bunker Hill slums had to go, as did the hill itself, to make way for automobiles, freeways and high rises.

A new downtown is replacing their narrow dreams. I thought of them as I settled into a seat on the Expo Line train, one of the transit lines changing Los Angeles.