The Bunker Hill neighborhood in downtown Los Angeles was once a fashionable area where the many of the city’s elite resided. By the late 1940s, the Victorian homes those well-to-do families had occupied had been transformed into boarding houses and apartment buildings, and the people who called them home were decidedly not high society.
Today, the neighborhood would be all but unrecognizable to those who lived there in either the good old days and the bad old days, as is demonstrated in this film by Keven McAlester, which juxtaposes 1940s footage (shot, we’re guessing, as background for some of the many films noir of the day that featured scenes shot in the neighborhood) with contemporary footage of the same streets that are captured in the earlier footage.
It may come as no surprise to you that, given the choice, we’d opt for the Bunker Hill on the left in a heartbeat.