The massive metropolitan-scale reconstructions of this downtown intersectional site displaced but did not defeat Joseph Guajardo, who grew up within sight of his under-freeway home, in a house built approximately 1900, razed as part of a 1980s scheme to clear the land for a major development.   After clearing several city blocks, hundreds of former homesites were left fallow, their broken foundations and retaining walls protruding from the hillscape rising gently from Beaudry St, just west of the mighty Harbor Freeway.

The four-level interchange in downtown Los Angeles is where the Hollywood-Santa Ana (U.S. 101) and the Harbor­Pasadena (U.S. 110) Freeways intersect. It marks the point where the name of the 101 changes from the Hollywood to the Santa Ana Freeway, and where that of the 110 changes from the Pasadena to the Harbor. The Four-Level is thus the original downtown freeway intersection, and the freeways gain their names from their destination outward from this point.[4]

The first high-speed freeway interchange in the world, Los Angeles’s four-level interchange opened fully for traffic on 22 September 1953, and made its cinematic debut that same year in the Paramount Pictures classic War of the Worlds, based on H.G. Wells’s novel of 1898.[5] When the four­level opened, it fulfilled the visions displayed at the General Motors “Futurama” exhibit, designed by Norman Bel Geddes for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The exhibit was a nineteenth-century diorama recast as a futuristic movie set. Bel Geddes, until then primarily a Broadway set designer, depicted elevated freeways on which commuters could rocket from home to work and back without stopping at scores of stoplights, pedestrian crosswalks, or other ­street-­level annoyances. Futurama visitors were given a pin that read “I Have Seen the Future.” That future was supposed to be 1960. Bel Geddes was projecting the modernist aesthetic of planned urban landscapes conceived to accelerate movement and cleanse the old built environment of its irrationality.[6]

In 1939, visitors to the Futurama exhibit hovered in guided cars above a giant model of the future, presented as serious entertainment. In that same year, planners and designers converged to build a giant scale model of Los Angeles into which the modernist vision was soon to be inserted by another set of ­designer-­planners, including the architects William Pereira and Hal Pereira (brothers), who were also motion picture art directors for Paramount Pictures.

Adjacent to the freeway icon of late modernity stands Bunker Hill, about two hundred feet lower in altitude than it stood in the 1950s, before bulldozers began (in 1961) to scrape it clean and top it off to make way for the proudly sterile assemblage of office towers (Wells Fargo Tower, IBM Tower, Library [First Interstate] Tower, Arco Tower, Bank of America Tower, etc.), condominiums, and cultural centers (Ahmanson Theatre, Mark Taper Forum, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Museum of Contemporary Art, Disney Concert Hall) that stand there today.[7] The Roman Catholic Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels is only the latest, and also the most unfortunate, addition.[8] Mike Davis writes:

“With historical landscapes erased, with megastructures and superblocks as primary components, and with an increasingly dense and self-contained circulation system, the new financial district is best conceived as a single, demonically self-referential hyper-­structure, a Miesian skyscape raised to dementia.”

Analogous to San Francisco’s Nob Hill, Bunker Hill had been a prime location for the wealthy to roost during the boom cycles of the 1880s and 1890s. Soon, however, the noise and tumult of the rapidly expanding city below, along with the allurements of estate-style living in the developing peripheral districts, drew the ruling class away. By the 1920s and 1930s, these Bunker Hill homes were primarily used as rental properties, catering to immigrants from Mexico and Europe. Business leaders, straining to expand the central business district northward, first looked covetously at the immigrant-mixed-race neighborhood in the 1920s and refined an audacious plan to level the entire hill. This “Bigelow Plan” was completed only weeks before the Crash of October 1929, and then lay dormant.[9] The actual conquest was not begun again until the late 1940s and early 1950s, the years of modernism’s apogee. Scientific planners created, in Gaston Bachelard’s words, “indifferent space subject to the measurements and estimates of the surveyor.”[10]

During the New Deal, state bureaucracies coldly abstracted the social space around them, officially classifying millions of persons by racial or class categories during an era of massive redevelopment that did not slow down until the late 1970s.

In his radio script for the 1938 broadcast of ‘War of the Worlds,’ performed by Orson Welles for Mercury Radio Theater On the Air, Howard Koch registered a protest against the modernist invasion of living spaces, linking it to the fascist threat abroad. The panic of so many listeners can only indicate that they felt that threat very close to home.[11]

Yet across an immense ethereal gulf, minds that are to our minds as ours are to the beasts in the jungle, intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.[12]

What did the modernist planners regard with “envious eyes”? The daily heart of a once-thriving neighborhood is re­imagined in the series of nostalgic images by Theodore Hall.

This montage juxtaposes the 1940 Works Progress Administration (WPA) model of downtown Los Angeles with documentary photographs made in 1957 by Theodore Hall, an amateur photographer who lived on Bunker Hill. The area he documented here –Third Street between Olive and Grand—was the central shopping block for residents of this neighborhood from the late nineteenth century through the late 1950s, a place where residents made their daily rounds to the grocery store, newsstand, and dry cleaner.

Hall knew full well that redevelopment plans were under way to raze the sites he photographed. He consciously simulated a hypothetical resident’s point of view as he strolled, camera in hand, toward the Budge Basket Complete Food Market. The sequence begins with a long shot of the corner of Third and Grand, which Hall titled “The Hill’s Business Center.” The next, titled “Street Scene,” is shot from the north side of Third Street, looking toward subjects depicted in the frame below, which Hall annotated as “’Red,’ well-known newspaper vendor on West 3rd, near Grand.” Finally, Hall entered the Budge Basket and held his camera low, behind the back of a young girl buying milk from a seasoned liquor dealer. The contrast of the little girl on a milk errand surrounded by so many commodities of adult vice may be read as Hall’s sympathetic but bittersweet, noir­-influenced understanding of this neighborhood. For, as Hall made these images, a furious debate was raging over the desirability or necessity of razing it. When the bulldozers finally began their work in 1961, nearly ten thousand persons called Bunker Hill their home.

While Hall’s nostalgic images are paeans to a fated neighborhood culture, the 1940 WPA model is an artifact of bureaucratic giantism and the machinery of redevelopment that located targets for massive structural eradication, human displacement, and expropriation. Thousands of ­house-­by-­house, block-by-block drawings by ­WPA-­employed graphic artists became patterns for model builders, and the model became the planning base for a vast apparatus of design firms; federal, state, and local planning authorities; the city engineering department; and construction firms.[13]

The three-dimensional WPA/LA Bureau of Engineering Model of the City of LA stands for other ‘models,’ or representations, of many different genres that together constituted the social distance explored here. Creators of 1930s crime fiction, New Deal ­home-­refinancing bureaucrats, and real estate agents worked together with city planners, often without really knowing it, to alienate whole populations (and ultimately themselves). Far from annihilating these aliens, however, this collective agency embedded them into the landscape.

To evict and destroy Bunker Hill, planners needed to constitute it as a worthless place with people to match, and this representation is nowhere more succinctly drawn than by the master of detective fiction, Raymond Chandler, in his 1942 novel the High Window. He calls it an “old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town...In the tall rooms haggard landladies bicker with shift tenants. On the wide cool front porches, reaching their cracked shoes into the sun, sit old men with faces like lost battles.”[14]

The Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) had the authority to demolish whole neighborhoods, but only if they could successfully designate them as ‘slums.’ Was Bunker Hill a slum? The Apartment Association of Los Angeles (composed of apartment owners, not dwellers) vigorously opposed the Bunker Hill Redevelopment Project and specifically contested the “slum” designation in 1956, in a counter study showing that out of a total of 142 buildings, only 21 had a “questionable” future.[15] Even as plans to raze Bunker Hill crystallized in the mid-1950s, some developers were rehabilitating the sturdy Victorian and Edwardian homes, boasting that the tall stone foundations and first-growth redwood timbers had preserved the structural integrity of the buildings.”[16]

A remarkable "data map" made by the LA City Housing Authority and the WPA, for the each block of Bunker Hill in 1940, directly contradicts the racist reporting of the US Government's Home Owner's Loan Corporation "Area Survey," which slanders the neighborhood as "thoroughly blighted." in 1939.

For several decades, Paramount Pictures had planned to produce War of the Worlds as a world­-war and then cold-war allegory.[17] The movie was eventually produced by George Pal, the great founder of stop-action animation, who had escaped from the path of the invading Nazis in 1939. In Pal’s 1953 production, the Martians reach Earth inside huge cylinders containing streamlined, manta-ray shaped flying machines, which immediately and without any explanation begin destroying Los Angeles. “The inhabitants of Mars, it seems,” reads a review of the movie’s premiere in Cue, “having run out of lebensraum on their own dying planet, cast about for a nice new world to settle.”[18]

Pal’s Martians were clearly informed by his personal experience fleeing Nazi destruction. He had created the “Puppetoons,” carved wooden puppets that were animated by replacing thousands of premade body parts between frames, in Holland, wisely accepting an invitation from Walt Disney to decamp to Hollywood just before the Blitzkreig. (He subsequently made a series of satirical/tragic shorts called the Screwball Army,” in which Nazis nuts and bolts invade an idyllic Holland). But Pal was not the only maker of War of the Worlds who had a personal experience with the subject matter. The War of the Worlds art directors were Albert Nozaki, who invented the Martian spaceships, and Hal Pereira, who created the miniature model of Los Angeles so convincingly destroyed by the ‘heat rays’ of the invading spaceships. Nozaki had been fired by Paramount the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor and was interned at Manzanar concentration camp for the duration of the war. After the war, he got his job back, but the emotional scars of his own racial alienation must certainly have accompanied him to the Paramount studios each day. Nozaki was a target of racial cleansing again in 1949 when Nozaki was expelled by the purportedly left-progressive Crestwood Hills development because of a racial covenant to the property deed.[19]

Hal Pereira’s story is somewhat more complex. He had succeeded his brother, ­award-­winning architect and filmmaker William L. Pereira (1909-1985), as Paramount’s chief art director. William Pereira, who massively transformed the urban landscape of Los Angeles, was equally at home designing movie sets as he was planning cultural centers and campuses. By the early 1950s, while Hal Pereira was building and destroying the cinematic model of Los Angeles, William, then head of an international architecture and planning firm, was using the WPA’s 1940s model of Los Angeles to plan the destruction of Bunker Hill.

These worlds of creation, destruction, and creative destruction came together when the Four-Level interchange made its cinematic debut in Pal’s War of the Worlds, as (alienated) Angelenos flee the invading aliens across the freeway’s newly completed spans. In all three versions of the work—the 1898 novel, the 1938 radio broadcast, and the 1953 film—Martians bridge immense spatial distances, which stand for the vast social distances that allow one species or nation or racial group remorselessly to annihilate or expropriate another.

William Pereira, whom we have also met directing the wartime camouflage of the aircraft factories, was the quintessential cold-war architect of aerospace-­age Los Angeles. In 1950 he joined Charles Luckman, then the young president of the Lever Soap Company, and “the wonder boy of sales promotion,” to establish a global architectural firm specializing in huge projects. While designing the new modernist landscape for Bunker Hill in the 1950s, Pereira and Luckman master-planned the Cape Canaveral missile base and the $300 million NATO air and naval base in Franco’s Spain.[20]

The private dwelling that Pereira designed for himself is perhaps the most sincere self-portrait: A steel-and­-glass Roman villa, complete with a bust of Caesar Augustus reflecting in the dark pool made ominous and equally prominent with the house in Julius Shulman’s remarkable photograph.

Standing under the spaceship-inspired Theme Building on 25 June 1961, during the Berlin Wall crisis, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson ominously began his dedication of Pereira and Luckman’s new Los Angeles International Airport with a stern warning to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev not “to underestimate the United States’s determination to honor its pledges to the brave and freedom-loving people of West Berlin.” William Pereira later fittingly chose a landing spaceship as the defining icon—a landing spaceship-for the Los Angeles International Airport, completed in 1961. Calling this “the first terminal area specifically designed for the jet age,” Federal Aviation Agency Najeeb E. Halaby predicted at its opening that the new airport “may well achieve some of the worldwide renown...as—who knows—Disneyland.”[21]

Meanwhile, in the previous month, the Community Redevelopment Agency had accelerated its use of a $42.7 million loan from the federal government to purchase all the private property on Bunker Hill. Eviction of the more than nine thousand Bunker Hill residents had finally begun.[22] They joined the thousands already displaced by the construction of the harbor and Hollywood Freeways in the previous decade. Not long after the celluloid Martians destroyed the aging structures of Bunker Hill, bulldozers and wrecking balls began to accomplish the actual task. Guajardo has been fleeing ever since, ironically taking up residence under the very freeways that destroyed his original home.

All institutions, no matter how global, ideological, or imaginary, and regardless of the countless and unrecorded acts that replicate them, must be anchored somewhere in space and time. The four­level and Bunker Hill redevelopments both anchored and embedded a phase of alienation that “still radiates disaster triumphant” from those very sites a full half-century later, forming an ‘interchange’ between the great forces of history and the banal movements of daily life.[23]

Ghost neighborhoods haunt these ruptured landscapes and torment their houseless residents. The haunting resides in the failure to recognize the social Other, and the torment is fixed in the concrete. Torn from the social fabric, these remnants defiantly stand their ground and confront the ‘citizens’ with their ‘homeless’ souls.

[1] This essay is drawn largely from Ethington, “Ghost Neighborhoods: Space, time, and Alienation in Los Angeles,” in Charles Salas and Michael S. Roth, eds, Looking for Los Angeles: Architecture, Film, Photography, and the Urban Landscape, (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2001

[2] Quoted in Dimendberg (1995): 123.

[3] Actual names used by permission. Ron Wells, an unemployed plumber and native of New York City, is a community leader. Joseph Guajardo was born in 1947 and raised in a house, now demolished, within sight of his current home under the freeway. Interviewed by the author, 24 January 1999.

[4] The full story of the four-level interchange lies primarily in the massive and mostly untapped Los Angeles City Archives. For a brief account, see Roth (2000: 24); and Arthur Krim, “The Four Level Stack as Los Angeles Icon” (paper presented at annual conference of the Society for Commercial Archeology, Los Angeles, April 1996).

[5] California Highways and Public Works 33 nos. 1-2 (1954): 8-9.

[6] On Bel Geddes, see Dimendberg (1995), on the 1939 New York World’s Fair, see Benedict (1983): 13-16; and Jackson (1995): s.v. “world’s fairs.”

[7] Davis (1990): 229.

[8] Ethington (2000).

[9] The original “Bigelow Plan” was conceived by C.C. Bigelow, president of the Southwestern Investment Corp. of Los Angeles. By 1928 Bigelow had produced a complete engineering report. This early plan is summarized in “Razing of Bunker Hill, Los Angeles,” Western Construction News, 10 July 1929, 339-40.

[10] Bachelard, (1994): 14.

[11] Denning (1997): 262-402.

[12] Howard Koch, “War of the Worlds,” original radio script, Mercury Radio Theatre, CBS Broadcast, 30 October 1938. In Hadley Cantril (1940).

[13] Jack Bivash, head of Pereira and Luckman’s Bunker Hill project, remembers using the 1940 model of Los Angeles as the basis for the 1950s redevelopment plans. Interviewed by the author, 22 October 1999.

[14] Raymond Chandler, The High Window (1942; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1992), quoted in Klein, History of Forgetting, 51-52.

[15] Western Housing, July 1956, p. 10.

[16] “Sixty-Five-Year-Old Bunker Hill House Converted into Modern Apartments,” Western Housing, January 1954, p. 8.

[17] Roy J. Pomeroy, film treatment for War of the Worlds, 15 November 1926; Harold Matson and Pat Duggan to H.N. Swanson, 31 October 1938, telegram; and synopsis of War of the Worlds, 28 November 1940, all in Special Collections, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles. Conscious intent to allegorize the Cold War and the atomic threat is confirmed by the film’s director, Byron Haskin, in Haskin (1984): 202-3. See also Hickman (1977): 56-77.

[18] “War of the Worlds,” review of War of the Worlds (Paramount Pictures film) Cue, 15 August 1953.

[19] Zellman and Friedland (2001).

[20] William Pereira’s filmography includes the following credits: As Producer: From This Day Forward and Johnny Angel (both 1946); for Art Director, Aloma of the South Seas and New York Town (both 1941); for Production Designer, Since You Went Away and Jane Eyre (both 1944); for Special Effects, with Cecil B. DeMille, Reap the Wild Wind (1942). Biographical information from Los Angeles Examiner, 4 May 1942 and 13 August 1950; Los Angeles Times, 6 and 7 April 1959.

[21] Johnson and Halaby quoted in Los Angeles Examiner, 26 June 1961. 

[22] “Bunker Hill Purchases Speeded,” Los Angeles Examiner, 17 May 1961.

[23] Horkheimer and Adorno ([1944] 1972): 3.