Quote:
Originally Posted by ethereal_reality
Wow, great information and comparison pics sopas_ej.
It's absolutely amazing that the one-story building survived all the changes.
Not in a million years would anyone guess that there once had been a
hill and a tunnel directly behind that building.
Looking closely at the 1929 foto really makes me long for the old days.
All the characteristics that made that small area interesting have been
wiped off the map. And all to accommodate more and more traffic.
Thanks again sopas_ej, for taking the time to answer my questions.
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No prob, ethereal. My pleasure. And I agree, downtown LA would be a far different place today if they had kept those older structures-- and hills.
Quote:
Originally Posted by kanhawk
This thread has educated me on one thing in particular. Just how much hills were completely flattened in some cases to make way for new roads and developments, as we see in the latest set of photos. The total level of earth moving over the years must have been enormous. The Los Angeles "basin" must have been a much hillier place than it is today.
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Oh definitely, particularly downtown. To be honest with you I didn't know we had the technology to remove complete hills back then. Obviously the LA basin is crisscrossed by earthquake faults, which create these hills and knolls. Makes me wonder that maybe the earth is slowly but surely still creating these hills even though they've been removed by people.
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Here's the west end of the 3rd Street tunnel through Bunker Hill in 1963:
From lapl.org
Here's the same view in 1985:
From lapl.org
Completely different view, you wouldn't think it was the same place. The tunnel still exists, but Bunker Hill has been graded lower, and virtually nothing exists from the earlier photo.
Here's the east end of the same tunnel, the Angels Flight end, circa 1934:
From lapl.org
I love this pic. The guy in the foreground is blurred, obscuring his identity, but in my mind, he's a guy who's down on his luck, just finished walking through the tunnel, maybe he's gonna grab a sandwich at the place on the corner, maybe he's gonna do something seedy... or not. I love the streetlamp, too; already by 1934, it's from a totally different era, from the generation before, like it represents a part of the city that the city forgot/neglected...
I think this photo is cool, I've never seen a pic from this era which shows the inside of the tunnel:
From lapl.org