The recent release of George Mann”™s 50-year-old color photographs to this site is one of the most remarkable troves of Bunker Hill ephemera we”™ve seen in decades. The accompanying photo, for instance, shows just how dilapidated the neighborhood around Angels Flight on Third Street had become by November 1962, when Mann made his final pilgrimage to the doomed neighborhood. The wrecking ball has already claimed the Hill Crest Hotel at the top of the hill on Olive Street, and the Astoria Hotel is a hulking shell of a firetrap just waiting for a match. Standing near the center of the photo is the Sunshine Apartments, looking empty and haunted, but who knows whether a few derelict souls are still inside, refusing to leave until the bulldozers come growling down the hillside?
Bunker Hill”™s Sunshine Apartments at 421 West Third Street has been gone now for over forty-five years, but it”™s still one of the most familiar unknown houses in Los Angeles. Perched on a ten-feet-high retaining wall above a narrow alley called Clay Street, it sprawled halfway up a steep hill adjacent to a stairway, its only access, opposite Angels Flight. The Sunshine was the sort of multilevel dwelling that novelist John Fante described in Ask the Dust (1939): “It was built on a hillside in reverse, there on the crest of Bunker Hill, built against the decline of the hill, so that the main floor was on the level with the street but the tenth floor was downstairs ten levels.” The only difference is that the Sunshine was only four stories tall and its front, not its sides, conformed to Third Street”™s slant, so that the first floor was only half as wide as the second floor.
Constructed on vacant property around 1905 to accommodate downtown Los Angeles”™s growing need for cheap housing, the Sunshine looked like a huge clapboard farmhouse, with a stack of three unadorned verandas and a couple of Queen Anne touches around the front entrance, which was on the third floor. Midwestern migrants probably found the place comfortably familiar. Inside, a labyrinth of odd-angled hallways, step-downs and staircases connected the Sunshine”™s many small apartments.
Though it made its film debut as one of Angels Flight”™s neighbors in a 1920 comedy called All Jazzed Up, the Sunshine didn”™t get its first close-up until 1932, when director James Whale cast it as the home of two downtown working girls (Mae Clark and Una Merkel) in The Impatient Maiden, his follow-up to Frankenstein. Because sound cameras in those days were large and unwieldy, he used a smaller silent camera to shoot the movie”™s opening scene on the Third Street steps, as the actresses came out of the Sunshine Apartments and walked up the concrete steps to the Angels Flight station on Olive Street. (The dialogue and traffic sounds were dubbed in later.) Whale shot another scene on the front steps near Clay Street and in the rear of the apartments, where a second set of concrete stairs from Clay to Olive ran between the Sunshine and the much larger Astoria Hotel.
But what turned the Sunshine Apartments into a fairly steady (if nameless) character actor was film noir, the mostly post-World War II crime genre that, in its focus on documentary realism, introduced the use of smaller, combat-tested cameras and gritty urban locations to Hollywood cinema. And since–by the mid-1940s–Bunker Hill was a run-down neighborhood of crumbling Victorian mansions, rambling flophouses, and mean, vertiginous streets, it became the perfect setting for film noir”™s fascination with the dark side of American prosperity. Despite the Sunshine Apartments”™ sunny moniker and relative youth (less than fifty years old), it did a great job portraying a shabby boarding house for desperate and worn-down people.
In Paramount”™s Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948), the Sunshine offered low-rent anonymity to a con man (Edward G. Robinson) hiding from his past. Director John Farrow pointedly established its location with an amazing 180-degree shot–taken from Clay Street–that followed one of the Angels Flight cars up from Hill Street, and panned across the top of the hill to catch Robinson”™s character hurrying down the concrete steps and up onto the third-floor porch and into the boarding house”™s front door. Another shot showed John Lund and Gail Russell approaching the Sunshine”™s wooden porch steps from below.
That same year, in Universal Pictures”™ Criss Cross, director Robert Siodmak used the Sunshine as a rendezvous spot for criminals plotting an armored car robbery. Whereas the protagonists”™ apartments in the earlier films were obviously studio creations, some of Criss Cross”™s seedy flophouse interiors were shot on location. Granted, a couple of shots that showed either Burt Lancaster or Yvonne DeCarlo standing next to a bay window, with the Angels Flight trolleys moving in the background distance, were done on a sound stage. The footage of the incline railway cars passing each other above Clay Street was taken from the Sunshine (most likely from the third-floor porch, judging from the angle), but the building itself didn”™t have any bay windows facing Angels Flight, so the scenes had to have been process shots. On the other hand, the maze of dingy hallways–whose atmosphere one character mockingly dismissed as “Picturesque, ain”™t it?”–most likely belonged to the Sunshine Apartments.
In another Paramount film, Turning Point (1952), as crusading reporter William Holden and gal pal Alexis Smith ride up Angels Flight, the camera riding with them turns to look across to the Sunshine, where a witness is hiding. But when they walk down the steps from the funicular”™s Olive Street station toward the house, they have to duck into a doorway of a nearby building to avoid several thugs standing guard on the Sunshine”™s porch.
In the low-budget Angel”™s Flight (1965), among the last of Bunker Hill”™s noirs, Indus Arthur played a stripper and “Bunker Hill serial killer” avenging an early rape by slashing the throats of men who put the moves on her. The scene of that rape, we eventually discover, had been at her one-time home in the Sunshine Apartments.
The building also showed up briefly in Act of Violence (MGM, 1949), Joseph Losey”™s M (Columbia, 1951), and the cheap Lon Chaney Jr. horror film The Indestructible Man (1956), among others. Documentary filmmaker Edmund Penney introduced his lyrical fifteen-minute film, Angel”™s Flight Railway (shot in the early 1960s and again in 1969; released in 1997) by looking across Third Street through the ornate woodwork of the Sunshine”™s doorway.
The Sunshine Apartments finally had its appointment with the bulldozer around 1965, after Los Angeles”™s Community Redevelopment Agency had already torn down many of the other buildings around it. By the time the CRA carted away Angels Flight and the last two surviving houses on Bunker Hill Avenue four years later, the nearly century-old neighborhood of Bunker Hill had ceased to exist.
Yet today the Sunshine Apartments survives in old movies, in countless photo- and postcard-tableaux of Angels Flight, and as the most prominent background feature–painted green–in Millard Sheets”™ vibrant 1931 oil painting, Angel”™s Flight, which is not only one of the most famous works on permanent display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, but also the logo of the OnBunkerHill.org website.
I welcome any further information you may have about the Sunshine Apartments, or any corrections to this blog entry. Even better, I”™d love to hear from someone who actually lived or spent time there.
For more photos of the Sunshine Apartments, check out www.americanfilmnoir.com/page18.html and www.forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?p=4855115.
Thanks to George Mann’s son Brad Smith, and daughter-in-law Dianne Woods, for allowing us to reprint his copyrighted photograph.
For a representative selection of photographs from his archive, or to license images for reproduction or other use, see http://www.akg-images.co.uk/_customer/london/mailout/1004/georgemann/
First, kudos on a wonderful blog. I’m a forth generation Angelino who’s just starting to explore the history of what I consider to be, as any Angelino would, ‘my city.’ As I look around, it’s easy to picture my great-grandfather making his way in and out of some of these forgotten places.
My question:
You say above that the Hill Crest was demolished before the Sunshine; Mann’s photograph certainly seems to support this.
But when I visited the americanfilmnoir.com page, the caption to the photograph at the bottom of the page says we’re looking at the demolition of the HIll Crest, and that the Sunshine had already been torn down. Mann’s picture is a fantastic view and clearly shows an empty lot above the Sunshine, so I’m guessing the filmnoir people got it wrong. So what, then, is the building on the bottom right of the latter photograph, and is that actually the Hillcrest being torn down by the crane?
Thanks so much!
Well thank you so much for your kind words! It isn’t every day we (or anyone) runs into someone who’s been in town for as long as your family has. And doubly cool that you like the City’s history.
Lemmee tell you what happened over on this page.  First of all, let me say I think Phil is a total genius and I always get a kick out of turning people on to his site; I have learned much from it. However, I can see how he got flummoxed with the pic and it wasn’t until you called attention to the image and I really had to look at it that I went — aha. Â
The image is reversed. Wherever he got it from, he got confused, as anyone would, because they’re tearing down stuff on the east side of the Flight, right? But check it out:
Where we are, y’see, is inside the bottom of the Elks Lodge, that is to say, that’s where the crane is. Below that there’s Clay Street. The half demolished building next to Angels Flight is the Hulburt. The big building still standing is the Ferguson.
Here’s a slightly later image (the crane and its damage done on our side):
See, at the corner, below the McCoy House (the Victorian with the steep gables) there’s the St. Helena Sanitarium AKA the later Royal Liquor, the Belmont is the tall one next to it — the fenestration is the dead giveaway in both pictures; same parking lot across Hill, Pan American Bldg across the parking lot, etc.
The Hillcrest started demolition in September of ’61; the Elks started demolition in September of ’62 — given the advanced state of demolition in the pic, with the Hulburt mostly wrecked too, I’m guessing this image dates to, what, January ’63? The image Jim posted last Saturday of the Sunshine was from late November of ’62. Don’t know exactly when the Sunshine came down; I do know that the second photo I posted is no later than June of ’65, and the Sunshine (which would have been above the McCoy next to the Flight car) is gone…
Anyhow, hope that answered your question, it’s always our pleasure to help. Thanks again for your interest and keep checking in!
Hi
I lived at 345 Clay Street when I was 5 years old (1949). We used to play under the Angel’s flight and on the hill. One building that sticks in my memory that is not mentioned in your article was the “Vendome” I think it was a hotel or apartment. Thanks for the memories.
-Vic
Hiya Vic! 345 Clay, huh? Wonderful! We love hearing from folk who have had a first-hand relationship with the Hill. Here’s a shot of 345 about that time, when it was called the Glenn. Is this how you remember the place?
This fellow is walking up Clay; the steps to 345 are just ahead of him, and the fire escape is above.
Here’s an interior shot, Unit 108, from about 1955.
(Seems that the images look tiny, but if you click on them, they enlarge. So make sure and click on them! Here are some more.)
A shot looking at the other side of the street, where the tree is on the right, that would be where 345 was.
And then the other way—you mention playing under Angels Flight—well there you are!
Now, you also mention the Vendome, the only Vendome I’m aware of is the hotel down on Hill next to the fire station, a big old 188os place at 231, demolished in the fall of ’63.
…is this the one?
Again, thanks for contacting us and please don’t hesitate to write back with more memories, we’d love to hear from you and hopefully add more info and pictures! Best, Nathan
Hello, Nathan
I have one photo of the same buildings you show taken from the first floor fire escape at 345 Clay street. How can I get it to you” (I’m not a facebook or twitter user).
A UPS truck had a parking brake failure and crashed into the older house in my photo, causing a lot of damage. You list the movies that used the hill. I remember a film crew working on Clay street one evening under the Angel’s flight It was a Joan Crawford vehicle called “Sudden Fear” When I saw the movie years later, there didn’t seem to be any scenes from that location.
The fire escape was attached to our apartment and I played on it a lot. The apartments didn’t have their own bathrooms, instead having two rooms with bathtubs and toilets in the hallway on each floor.
My friends and I would go the big department stores (Bullocks, Broadway, May Company). They had separate floors for each product family and we would head to the toy floor, tell the guy our parents were downstairs shopping and we would have the run of the place. My first job at 5 years old was hawking newspapers at the corner of 4th and Hill, in front of a drug store (Owl or maybe Thrifty). I couldn’t count yet and I let the customers get their own change from my pouch. There were a couple of movie theaters (Cozy and Roxie, I think) on Broadway near Third Street across from the Million Dollar. At that age, it cost us 9 cents to get in. The movies were old (Frankenstien, Dracula & the Wolfman), but for us it was great. It wasn’t until later, in high school, that I discovered the Follies on Main Street.
I loved going to the Grand Central Public Market. Their displays of fish and seafood and meats taught me more about biology than I ever learned in school. Do you remember anything about Enderle Hardware, further down Third Street?
While living on Clay Street, I went to Fremont Elementary, and watched them building the 110 freeway next to the school (1951).
Good memories!
-Vic