One cannot help but be enamored of the Nugent. Maybe it‘s the big spooky tower. Maybe it‘s the Nugent‘s corner site at Third Street and Grand Avenue…3rd & Grand just purrs off the tongue, which only seems to further imbue that location with the status as Ground Zero, Bunker Hill.
But truth be told, the Nugent was never a hotbed of vice, should you be perusing our OBH blog to sate your currish needs. Heck, a 1905 article about the original White Ribboners who fought demon drink back in the early ”˜70s mentions that crusading Quaker Josephine Marlatt chose the newly-opened Nugent as her home.
The Nugent‘s most notable resident was a Southern Pacific brakeman by the name of Walter J. Dean. It was March 10, 1935, and Dean was busy plying his honest trade out in Pomona at a railroad right of way while a train crew was switching freight cars in the local yards. Then some woman, as high and as mighty as they come, decided to drive her automobile across said railroad right of way; this enraged Dean, who pitched his lantern through her car windshield. Unfortunately the woman was Mrs. Lois Browning, wife of Desk Sergeant Browning of the local police force, which might give some insight into her high-and-mightiness.
And so, while I‘d like to say that every resident was a pill-pushing pedophilic grave-robbing ghoul (or at least you‘d like to read such), we‘ll just have to content ourselves with pretty pictures. I must admit, my inclusion of the Nugent (which became the New Grand some time in the 1940s, to be pulled down in the mid-1960s by the CRA, naturally, ad victoriam) is due in larg
e part to the wonderful color image I am fortunate enough to here include.
August, 1903:
Sanborn, 1906:
Sanborn, 1950:
(If you really must read of murder most foul, note the Alto [at 253] having been built just the other side of the New Grand.)
Bunker Hill had, without question, the highest per-block concentration of Corinthian capitals in Los Angeles.
One does have to wonder as to whether the two-story Corinthian columns were always broken up by those fire escapes.
"Housekeeping/Sleeping ROOMS by the Day-Week or MONTH Phone MA 5-0507"
The deli has become a KooKooRoo. I had half a mind to march in there and say yeah, gimme a couple of your Landjäger, and a Csabai Kolbász, and a half pound of something Italian, Sopressata maybe, sliced thick, and something Jewish for the wife, say a pound of brisket, then let me have a fist-sized thing of herring, in brine not cream, and a pickled egg to go but of course like the rest of Bunker Hill, there was no-one there.
With the New Grand gone, the 1970s and 80s thrilled to this hole in the ground. (Here, we are facing the other way down Grand from the image above.) At left, the 1982 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill Crocker Tower II and at right, the 1973 AC Martin Security Pacific National Bank Plaza tower, butting up against Third (the road in the foreground would become Thaddeus Kosciusko). Then West-LA Nadel Architects (who are at present in charge of designing two thirty-story towers at Third & Beaudry) showed up in 1988 and said here:
And in went the Grand Promenade Towers.
But that‘s not why we‘re here. Not really. As I alluded to earlier, this post is really all about the Nugent/New Grand, 1952–in color:
Which now looks a lot more like this.
Images 1 & 2, Arnold Hylen Collection, California History Section, California State Library; Images 3 & 4, William Reagh Collection, California History Section, California State Library; Images 5 & 6, California State Library; color image of the New Grand, Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection.
(The IU Archives were very kind in granting us permission to publish their images here on On Bunker Hill. You are advised to go to the Cushman temple and worship accordingly. Exempli…South Main on a Sunday…peering down Harlem Place at City Hall…a length of Broadway, including the Mason Opera House, before it was wiped out by a 1957 parking garage [which itself was recently razed]…and the corner of Wilshire and St. Paul, hardly changed a bit.)
In the 1951 film noir Cry Danger, Dick Powell goes to the New Grand Hotel to make a bet on a fixed horse race; he returns later when he realizes he’s been set up. Location shots include the interiors of the corner store, the upstairs lobby, and a hallway.
When I lived on Bunker Hill in the 1940’s – 50’s, I used to like to go into the delicatessen on my way back to the Castle from downtown via Angels Flight. If it was a hot summer day, I’d get a Pepsi from the cooler inside. In the movie, when Dick Powell walks into the delicatessen, he goes right by the cooler with the bottles inside. It is achingly nostalgic for me.
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