Bunker Hill, Los Angeles

Greetings, faithful Bunker Hill blog reader! Having perused my posts here, you know I criticize incompetent “journalists” who befoul the mainstream press, and routinely malign those propaganda-pushing “historians” who infect the internet with their mortifying twaddle. But then I’m sure you roll your eyes and say “well, Nathan, anyone can deride AI, or pick on TikTok; if you think you’re so smart why don’t you actually take to task some real scholarship?” Well…okay then.

There are two books about Chavez Ravine — one is Eric Nusbaum’s Stealing Home, which I rather like, and have mentioned in passing. Nusbaum’s a sports journalist who based much of his book on oral histories. The other book, though, isn’t journalism, it’s scholarship, built on a framework of academic rigor and intellectual elbow grease.

Thus I trembled with trepidation as I approached the REAL book about Chavez Ravine, it having been penned by a bigshot UCLA history professor with a PhD from Oxford. Certainly a bigshot UCLA history professor with a PhD FROM OXFORD will marshal historical fact with erudition and insight!

Ha ha, nah.

I speak of the late John Horace Michael Laslett and his Shameful Victory. I took a look and, um, ooof. In an effort to understand how and why do people believe what they do about Chavez Ravine? the proper response to Laslett’s book should be a page-by-page, line-by-line refutation of its poor research and fanciful claims, à la Larry Harnisch’s takedown of Donald Wolfe’s The Black Dahlia Files. But I don’t have time for that. I glanced at Shameful Victory and, from my admittedly extremely limited exposure to Laslett’s work, I can say the book certainly appears to be garbage.

The fact that a professor emeritus at UCLA’s History Department wrote garbage — garbage subsequently published by the University of Arizona Press…garbage published in part with your tax dollars — should surprise absolutely no-one.

Hey, maybe the book is not garbage: I don’t actually know, because to be honest, I didn’t read the book. (Having already penned 40,000 words on the subject, I’m not sure an exhaustive takedown of Shameful is the best use of my time, and certainly not of yours.) Instead, I read the prologue, which is on books.google.com — and that told me everything I needed to know.

Ergo, in lieu of dissecting all 218 pages of the entire book, we’re going to go through the introductory opening salvo of the book’s prologue line-by-line (something I’m woefully known and prone to do):

I’m willing to concede that if and when I actually read Laslett’s book, I may very well exclaim “holy carps Laslett is a genius and I’ve had my beliefs about Chavez Ravine totally remade!!! This isn’t garbage AT ALL!!!” …but until I do so, let’s content ourselves with Shameful‘s six opening paragraphs, whose nineteen sentences spew a gusher of nonsense:

Paragraph 1.

a) there was a barrio in Chavez Ravine “for almost a hundred years” before 1962. No: from 1862-1913 the area was empty, save for industrial plants, and a pest house/cemetery on its southern ridge. It was settled, sparsely, after 1913, though the vast majority of settlers arrived in the 1920s, especially after the 1926 closure of Chavez Ravine’s industrial plants. It was thus “home to a barrio” for about thirty-five years, a far cry from “almost a hundred.” To be accurate, the barrio existed a scant twenty-five years, because the area was depopulated and demolished not in 1962, but in 1952.

b) said barrio was “one of the largest and most celebrated” before its demolition by the Housing Authority. That’s a ludicrous assertion. There were 115,000 Mexican Americans in Los Angeles in 1960, in barrios much larger than Chavez Ravine. And “most celebrated?” CR is certainly celebrated now, but definitely not during its actual existence. One of the very few mentions of the place, during its limited lifespan, was in this 1928 Evening Express feature. There were also a few newspaper stories about the area as it was being demolished in the early 1950s, and news accounts of the 1959 Chavez Ravine eviction, but those were hardly celebratory. Perhaps Laslett is attempting to connote, in a convoluted way, “it was home to a barrio that was celebrated forty-some years after 1962” but that’s definitely not the way it reads.

c) “…they called it their ‘Shangri-La’.” Nope. There are no accounts and zero evidence “they” did anything of the sort. Yes, one person said it one time, but that was a white guy from Seattle, who wrote—fifty years after the fact—that when he first saw it, he “began to think he had found a poor man’s Shangri-la.”

Paragraph 2.

a) “few people today remember…” Ugh. When I moved to Los Angeles in 1993, I constantly heard tales (tall and otherwise) about Chavez Ravine, while chatting up the local barflies; Mechner’s documentary came out in 2003, as did Culture Clash’s play; then came Cooder’s album in 2005; and the “Battle of Chavez Ravine” Wikipedia page in 2006; and let’s not forget the many news articles (e.g., this and this and this and this and this) let loose on the world well before Shameful Victory‘s publication in 2015. I’m willing to accept that people-at-large may be more Chavez-savvy now, in 2026, than they were when Shameful Victory was published in 2015, but given Chavez Ravine’s indisputably prominent cultural place before the publication of Laslett’s Shameful Victory, I totally reject Laslett’s “few know and few remember” shtick.

b) “public housing promise not kept, resulting in scandal” No, because there was no scandal. The people of Chavez Ravine didn’t want to live in public housing, promise or not. They weren’t going to be made to, although, they would have had first crack at life in the projects come their completion (five? ten?) years down the line. That said, the homeowners who bought new houses, and the renters who were relocated, were perfectly content not being placed in the high-rise projects.

c) “…left many former residents homeless” Noooooo, no-one was left homeless. NOT ONE PERSON. Each and every person was relocated, in accordance with the law. Somehow we’re supposed to believe that the Housing Authority of Los Angeles—staffed by starry-eyed leftists, who had been handed huge sums of Federal money—rather than relocate people, elected instead to break the law, for no reason, in a concerted effort to make poor people homeless. We’re supposed to accept that — despite there being a relocation office in Chavez Ravine, staffed by Spanish-speaking city employees with a long record of relocating people — they broke federal, state, and city law in not relocating people, AND not one person complained? No-one mentioned it to the newspapers, or during the month-long 1953 investigation of LA public housing by a House of Representatives Subcommittee, during whose hearings residents and activists aired their grievances in no uncertain terms?

d) “not building the public housing project = anger and unease among Latinos” Nah. I reject the notion that residents were angry they didn’t get to live in public housing, because, on the contrary, we do have contemporary accounts of residents saying they didn’t want to live in public housing. Moreover we have zero accounts of residents being angry because of the cancellation of Elysian Park Heights. If the Latino community had anger and unease just because they were removed for the project (which is not what Laslett is saying), well, with that I would agree completely. I’d be angry too. But that doesn’t make Chavez Ravine special. I’m sure the greater Hispanic community felt that way about eminent domain when it was used to expand the Civic Center in the 1950s (for which thousands more Latinos were removed than for Chavez Ravine) or the dozens of other times people were removed for slum clearance/public housing, not to mention all the roads, schools, fire stations, and other governmental “takings” involving eminent domain.

Paragraph 3.

a) “…they sold their homes in good faith but then protested when forced out” This doesn’t make any sense: yes residents protested, but, the way Laslett frames this with “having sold their homes to the city in good faith” he thus connotes that residents were protesting the subsequent cancellation of public housing. Which never happened. Rather, there were resident protests in the spring/summer of 1951 because they didn’t want to lose their homes to a public housing project (e.g., this and this) which was two years before the cancellation of the project.

Again, it just doesn’t make sense that they “sold their homes in good faith” and then were “forced out.” It shocks me that University of Arizona Press doesn’t have an editor on staff (jk, the buck stopped with Kristen Buckles, who ignored said buck).

b) “because the people involved were poor and Mexican, the scandal was buried and their complaints disregarded” Not true. Laslett has constructed a narrative here that CR residents complained/there was a scandal due of the cancellation of a public housing scheme (for which they had “sold their homes to the city in good faith”). First of all, that didn’t happen, and then he plays the race card, saying they were ignored because they were poor and brown. In actuality, the opposite of Laslett’s contentions was the case. The people had complaints about the odious public housing scheme, and these complaints were heard. Residents packed Council chambers and the mothers staged a sit-in. They didn’t want public housing because they liked fresh air and having chickens, and, believe it or not, working-class Mexican Americans didn’t like socialism. Point being, this sentence, and most of Paragraph 2 before it, are about how sad and angry residents were, because they didn’t get the public housing they were promised. Which is nonsense.

Note Laslett goes on to say there was a “scandal” when again, there was no scandal involved when City Council voted to nullify the public housing contract with the feds in December 1951, and more to the point, there was no scandal when the people of Los Angeles voted to nullify the public housing contract in June 1952. In fact, the district that included Chavez Ravine voted overwhelmingly to do away with the public housing contract.

While Laslett says the cries of “poor Mexican Americans” were disregarded by the politically powerful, let’s remember who turned their backs on the aforesaid poor Mexicans: the politically powerful Mexican-American lobby of civic groups like El Congresso, and Asociación Nacional México-Americana. They were the ones who aligned with the progressive Housing Authority, and against small homeowners who wanted to be left in peace.

c) “Walter O’Malley got the land for a suspiciously small sum” Oh dear, this again. So, no: Walter O’Malley had, in 1957, purchased Wrigley Field, bounded by Avalon, 41st, San Pedro, and 42nd. It was valued at $2.25 million. O’Malley transferred that land to the city in exchange for the Chavez land, which was valued at $2.2 million. (Someone always asserts “but the Chavez land should have been worth more, because it was bigger“, until they are reminded the Wrigley Field land was flat, in an urban area, and fitted with modern infrastructure; the Chavez land would require a princely sum before ground could be broken for anything.) The even swap was made with the proviso that O’Malley fund construction of the ballpark out of his own pocket; the city didn’t have an extra $23 million ($2.65 billion USD2025) in their coffers to spend building a ballpark, a major city improvement that cost the city nothing (and has since generated nearly a billion dollars in property taxes).

d) “in the rush to bring a baseball team, this Mexican community’s needs were brushed aside” Ugh. So, regarding the “largest and most distinctive” community to which Laslett refers: they were told of their fate in 1950. They had their day in the sun to argue said fate, but lost, because one always loses to paternalistic, progressive, publicly-funded government agencies who “know what’s best for you” (and who, I might add, never thought one whit about a baseball team). The community then had its needs met, in being relocated, save for handful of stragglers, by mid-1953.

The “rush” to which Laslett refers conveniently ignores the rest of 1953, all of 1954, plus all of 1955, and 1956, and much of 1957. So the only “rush” began in 1957, and was composed of two solid years of Dodger-related scrutiny and debate through 1958, and into 1959. During this time the matter was hashed out in the courts up to and including the Supreme Court, and during this “rush” the City Council voted on the matter, and during this “rush” the citizens of Los Angeles voted on the matter. More importantly, no “community needs” were “brushed aside” at that time, since the community in question had been dispersed five years before.

Paragraph 4.

a) “this scandal” Jeez, again: The asserted scandal, as outlined by Laslett in Paragraph 2, is that there had been a plan to build public housing, which was, however, not built. Not a scandal. Laslett may not like it, and he clutches his pearls and is positively scandalized by this happening, which doesn’t make it a scandal, nor was it ever considered a scandal. “No,” I hear you say, “the scandal is that after the public housing contract was cancelled, the residents didn’t get their homes back.” First of all, that’s not what Laslett was saying. But even if he was, still not a scandal. The people were paid for their homes. They were 80% demolished by the time Poulson killed the housing contract in mid-1953, so there was nothing to give back, plus, 99% of its residents had already been relocated, with government help.

b) “3,300 Mexican Americans” Noooooooooo. As has been conclusively and repeatedly demonstrated, there were a total of about 350 structures in the Chavez Ravine area. Of those (after subtracting stores, schools, churches, garages, chicken coops, and other outbuildings) approximately 275 structures were residential. Figure about four persons to one dwelling, and we’re looking at 1,100 people. Well, would you look at that:

(What needs to happen is the production of a spreadsheet of every house with every person. I am more than willing to take on this formidable research task, but, I’m tired of doing this stuff for free.)

So, where does Laslett source this “3,300” number? Likely from Drew Pearson. Pearson — a famously slimy, unscrupulous Washington DC rumor-monger, whose scurrilous attacks always contained absurd falsehoods — dashed out a piece about Chavez Ravine in December 1957, and needed a number…and in classic Pearson fashion, he just made one up, when he asserted the city had removed “3,300 families“…which it would appear Laslett downgraded to 3,300 people, which is still about three times too many. (Fun fact: the only other time Pearson [who lived in DC and never set foot in Los Angeles] spoke about Chavez Ravine was a couple weeks after the Watts Uprising; on September 3, 1965, Pearson stated the riots happened because the city had torn down the “Negro shacks” of Chavez Ravine and relocated all the Negroes to Watts. Now that’s journalistic excellence!)

Also, Laslett stating we only removed “Mexican Americans” directs us away from the fact that 3/4 of Chavez Ravine residents were born in the United States; it’s natural to assume CR residents were of Mexican birth, rather than Americans with Mexican ancestry, but the facts are more nuanced. And, of Chavez Ravine’s small foreign-born population, even they weren’t overwhelmingly Mexican-born; nearly half were European-born (mostly from Central Europe, Germany, and Italy).

c) “forced to sell at below market…had to move in with family or become renters in some far-flung part of the city” Omigod for the last time, people, NO. First of all, the majority of residents were already renters. 60% of Ravine residents were renters, according to a study by Eduardo Obregón Pagán. And of course, there was the aforementioned relocation office in the Ravine, helmed by the Victoria Alonzo, who kept a file of everyone’s needs, and worked to relocate them nearby. And of the people who sold their homes, they stayed in their homes until the relocation office found them somewhere to their liking.

Here’s a point I have to stress: you will frequently hear that the homeowners of Chavez Ravine were robbed of the ability to build generational wealth. This is BS, and in fact, the opposite is true. They were taken from a rural area with high disease and crime rates, with substandard services and substandard housing, and relocated into areas with grade-A housing and proper urban infrastructure. So yeah, you may have listened to your grandparent’s tales of the wonders of Chavez Ravine, but the reason you inherited your grandparents’ two-million-dollar house in Echo Park is because they were relocated to a better area.

Laslett starts this sentence with the old “forced to sell at below market” which is, again, a fantasy. The Housing Authority—city—had federal money and had to abide by state court strictures, so they had the unholy triumvirate of local, state and federal oversight into their means, methods, and adherence to legalities. Because the feds were involved, if the HA had tried any funny business, you know who would have gotten involved? The FBI. And you don’t mess with 1950s FBI.

In short: redevelopment law requires any redevelopment agency to buy at the very highest end of fair market value. Fair market value is determined by independent appraisers. The redevelopment agency is required by law to pay you the highest appraisal. If you and the agency still do not agree, you file an appeal with the court, who will make a determination. I won’t bore you with the intricacies of Sacramento v. Heilbron 156 Cal. 408, or Eachus v. City of Los Angeles 130 Cal. 619, but suffice it to say, when “assemblydems” or whoever say there was “little or no compensation” they are either stupid or lying. Or both. But I expect mendacity from politicians and people who spew on the internet. I would like to think university professors, like Laslett, held themselves to a higher standard.

Paragraph 5.

a) “….the last holdouts were dragged from their homes….” Dramatic nonsense. If by holdouts you mean one family—the Arechigas—and by dragged from their homes you mean one member of that family who, I might add, never even live there, and showed up after the sheriff deputies had arrived and camera crews had set up, only to run up and into the house for no other reason than to be hauled out for the television cameras.

And…. “last holdouts?” There were actually a bunch of other holdouts, with names like Contreras, Lopez, Caranza, Carrillo, Longoria…and they stayed in their homes all the way into the spring of 1960. Because they, unlike the famed Arechiga family, had gone through proper channels, and got hefty payments. The Arechiga family—well, a small slice of them, since it was just Manuel & Abrana who lived at 1771 Malvina and daughter Victoria who lived in her parent’s house next door—were removed because they considered themselves above the rules. Then they left, and went to some of the many other homes they owned outside of Chavez Ravine.

b) it was a “heartless act” Oh dear. Laslett makes it sound like the Arechigas were poor people who had no idea this would happen to them, and/or had nowhere to go. But they hadn’t held legal title to their house for over seven years; they hadn’t paid any property taxes during that time. They’d been in and out of the courts repeatedly. They’d weathered and stalled previous evictions. And all during this time they’d been buying up other houses around Los Angeles…like, lots of them. The final straw against them was the judgement Arechiga v. Housing Authority of City of Los Angeles, 159 Cal. App. 2d 657, 659-60 (1958). They were told in March 1959 they were absolutely going to be out in April 1959, but their lawyer still managed to stall another month, so come May 1959, yes, sheriff’s deputies got them out.

Was it “heartless?” Sure, maybe. Eminent domain is a bitch; consider Kelo v. New London or Berman v. Parker or the odious Hawaii Housing Authority v. Midkiff or, more to our point, Cascott v. City of Arlington. But the two Arechiga dwellings were ordered demolished by the Board of Public Works after the Department of Building and Safety declared them unsafe, having been built of substandard building materials. After losing their homes in 1953 were they heartlessly removed? No, they were allowed to occupy them for another five years.

c) “scandal” God, there’s that word again. You know what the scandal was, Professor Laslett? Not that the Arechigas had to be presented with a Superior Court Writ of Possession and moved out and their house torn down, though that certainly scandalized the nation at the time.

No, the scandal was that the Arechigas claimed to be homeless, when they owned a bunch of other homes. The scandal was that a man named Jim Donnell very nicely brought them a 19-foot trailer in which to live, but indignantly reclaimed it (and told the papers he “felt like a boob”) when the world found out the Arechigas owned eleven other homes.

Paragraph 6.

a) “…mass evictions and shady deal” Welllll... “mass evictions” certainly sounds terrible, but let’s remember, total Chavez Ravine evictees number barely one-third of the number displaced by the County for the Civic Center in 1949-50, and about a tenth the number of people displaced by the CRA on Bunker Hill in 1961-64. Government’s primary function is, apparently, to displace people constantly.

But let’s talk about the “shady deal” that allowed Dodger Stadium to be built. Pretty simple, actually: the City spent years trying to figure out what to do with the land (cemetery? zoo? music center?) until they decided baseball stadium. The City didn’t have the money to build a baseball stadium, but this Walter O’Malley character did (to the tune of about a quarter billion dollars, adjusted for inflation). Was O’Malley given the land in a sweetheart deal, as folks often assert? No. He owned Los Angeles property worth $2.2 million, and the Chavez property was worth $2 million, so, he and the City swapped. Still, if something smelled funny about the deal, it could have easily been nixed by the City Council, who instead voted to approve it. And yet still, it went before the voters, and it didn’t seem shady to them, who also approved it. Because the deal was endlessly hashed out by the media, the courts, the voters, it was in fact the most transparent and scrutinized deal in freakin’ history, but it’s fun to call things “shady” nevertheless, isn’t it?

Laslett says the “mass evictions and shady deal…raise many questions” and these are they:

b) “why did the City Council suddenly change its mind?” Dun dun DUNNNN! Laslett states they “suddenly” changed their mind and “refused” to build public housing…. ooooobviously there’s something fishy here…something suspicious! Except there’s not. So, the City Council approved the sites of multiple proposed public housing developments on November 22, 1950, and on June 26, 1951 the City Council upheld the site selection when the City Planning Commission wanted it reduced. At that point the council was pretty evenly divided between pro-and-anti public housing, with a slant toward public housing proponents, however, the scales were tipped when Charles Navarro, a public housing opponent, assumed the seat of pro-housing councilman G. Vernon Bennett (Bennett had been found guilty of lewd conduct with another man in a Lincoln Park restroom, which killed his career). Then, at year’s end, councilmen Harold Harby and Ed J. Davenport changed their minds on public housing, which meant an antihousing bloc had a majority in the Council. Of course, many people allege conspiracy! and collusion! because it’s somehow inconceivable that Harby and Davenport could change their minds. But change their minds they did, even in the face of tremendous political opposition: the mayor, all the labor unions, all the church organizations, all the progressive ethnic and civic organizations, all who desperately wanted to confiscate Chavez Ravine homes and relocate CR’s residents into high-rise concrete filing cabinets.

I know we all like to believe that a councilman will only change his mind about something because he’s being blackmailed (e.g., the freeway in LA Confidential is approved when a councilman is blackmailed via compromising photographs) or they’ve stupidly fallen for ludicrous red-baiting (Harby switched his vote, he said, to combat “the creeping cancer of Socialism”) but in any event, on December 3, 1951, the Council voted 8-7 to rescind the fed contract.

c) “…did the City cheat the public by selling the land at a knockdown price?” Um, no, because that didn’t happen. See above.

d) “…was there a secret conspiracy by a business elite?” Ugh. Well of course, the 98-degree Masons and the Elders of Zion conspired with J. Paul Getty to gain control of Chavez Ravine’s oil deposits, drilled in secret by the Lizard People’s COO James Jesus Angleton.

e) “…what happened to the evicted tenants who lost their homes?” Again, it’s called relocation assistance. The relocation division of the Housing Authority was fresh off of moving 3,000 people from Bunker Hill. Their Chavez Ravine relocation office worked with the residents — for example, those who had sold their dwellings remained in their dwellings until a satisfactory place had been found for them. Those who were renters were found satisfactory units nearby … only, you know, up to code and with toilets.

Don’t get me wrong, the question of “what happened to the residents of Chavez Ravine” is intensely fascinating. In early 2024, when Wendy Carrillo floated the Chavez Ravine Accountability Act/AB 1950 reparations bill, part of its demands included a database identifying all the area’s landowners and renters. I was hoping I’d be thrown into the mix, so I could spend my days entering 1950 Census information into a master list, and digging through Housing Authority records at City Archives in hopes of ascertaining the exact payments and resident movement and the rest. I’d still like to do that, of course, but I have so few years left to realize so many projects. (Though if you pay me, I’ll start tomorrow!)

**********

And that, faithful reader, is my thorough review of Shameful Victory: The Los Angeles Dodgers, the Red Scare, and the Hidden History of Chavez Ravine, if by thorough you mean a rigorous review of the opening part of the prologue. Seriously though, if the mere prologue is that full of absolute crap, what’s the point of reading further?

Of course, I may still recant everything I’ve said above. Should I actually read Shameful Victory, there exists the possibility I will be so won over by Dr. Laslett’s assiduous arguments, and so convinced by his scrupulous source citing, that I will be forced to make a point-for-point retraction of what I’ve said in this post. Stranger things have happened.

However, I’m not going to spend $25 on a copy. If you’d like to send me your copy, please feel free, and I’ll read it and make a follow-up post allll about it. Drop your used copy in the mail to Nathan Marsak, PO Box 412636, Los Angeles, CA 90041.

Veritas numquam perit!

For reasons now lost to me — I spend way too much time falling down internet rabbit holes — I came across the 1964 Loyola High School yearbook, on classmates.com. Their theme that year was “Communication” and as such begins with this sterling image:

Which is, of course, the tower atop the Bell Telephone building at 420 South Grand Ave. Isn’t this an incredible shot? In LIVING COLOR!

And you’re like oh, yeah, when I’m in and around Bunker Hill I gaze up at that thing —

— but today you are in fact gazing up at the later second tower atop that building.

You know this, of course, via your copy of Marsak’s Guide to Bunker Hill:

Some notices about the tower’s evolution —

In the early-’60s era of enthusiastic Bunker Hill demolitions, most structures were about sixty years old. With our beloved microwave touchstone now reaching that age, let’s begin thinking about the recognition and preservation of this absolutely important landmark.

The other day I did a post about Artificial Intelligence. In the comments on the accompanying Instagram post, CC DeVere of Frenchtown Confidential hipped me to this commiserating post of hers, wherein she’d asked ChatGPT about French influence in early Los Angeles, and was rewarded with a bunch of nonsense.

Apparently that sort of thing is pretty common. Don’t worry, though, because we’re told when ChatGPT is “hallucinating” the absurdly counterfactual claptrap it produces accounts for only a mere 40% of its output. Mankind’s relationship to ChatGPT is thus:

Inspired by CC’s post, I gave ChatGPT a whirl, and, um, wow. Actually, a mere 40% of its output being nonsense would be a huge improvement.

I asked it some stuff about Bunker Hill, which spat out answers that — if I’d written them? If I’d written them as satire, attempting to lampoon how bad ChatGPT is? — you’d be like “Oh, Nathan, stop hating on ChatGPT with your hyperbolic, preposterous, melodramatic depictions of modernity’s decline!“

So, I’m just going to provide you some screengrabs, and you be the judge. I asked ChatGPT about Bunker Hill’s houses, and architecture, and some of its history, and … well, when wee Timmy and Sally have a report to write, they’re going to receive a big fat “F”, should they rely on ChatGPT…oh wait, since teachers are uniformly terrible (well, regularly terrible; my apologies to the good ones) and use AI for their confirmation bias “research,” I’m sure Timmy and Sally will get A+s and gold stars. And so the cycle continues.

And since I have previously delved into Chavez Ravine and Cooper Donuts and the Great American Streetcar Conspiracy, I ChatGPT’d in that muck too, being awarded more ludicrous falsehoods, proving ChatGPT is an equal opportunity fabrication machine.

Anyway, let’s begin with—

Bunker Hill

First I asked ChatGPT about some of the families who settled the Hill. Let’s see what it had to say!

Now, there were some fine families on the Hill; they had names like Brunson and Rose and Bradbury and Crocker. So, who the hell are these people? Well, William Workman was a real person, but he lived out in the Rancho La Puente. But then there’s…John MacArthur? For whom the “nearby park” is named? The MacArthur Park Mansion on Bunker Hill? If you’re on this blog in the first place I’m going to assume you know that’s all manner of crazy business. And as long as we’re taking crazy pills, what about “Henry Slauson”? Do they perhaps refer to famed L.A. developer Jonathan Sayre Slauson, who lived down among the mansions around 23rd & Figueroa?

It goes on:

Again, a mixture of real people (Griffith J. Griffith and William Mulholland, neither of whom ever lived on Bunker Hill; while the chatbot admits this, the song and dance about their influence on Bunker Hill is silly, e.g., in the mid-80s when Bunker Hill blossomed, Mullholland was a mere superintendent at LA City Water Co.) and completely random made-up people, like “William G. Perkins” and “Eugene Spence.” So then I moved on to architecture:

Damn, that’s some wild hallucinatin’. There was a Mills family on the Hill, but their house at 327 South Olive was a Queen Anne. The rest is just…weird.

Holy cow I love ChatGPT so much. I shouldn’t have to tell you that City Hall and the Bradbury Building are not on Bunker Hill, but the Huntington Hotel? Yes there’s a Huntington at 8th & Main but … tremble! at the authority with which it states Cal Plaza (Grand to Olive, 2nd to 4th) now sits on the site.

I asked it some other general questions, about the history of redevelopment, much less hallucinatory, but still flawed. ChatGPT kept telling me Bunker Hill’s redevelopment began in 1955, though its redevelopment began in 1949 and there were dozens of major milestones between 1949 and ’55; it also kept telling me Bunker Hill’s redevelopment disproportionately impacted the “notable population” of Black families, making it “an important chapter in the history of housing injustice” despite there being no African-Americans displaced from Bunker Hill.

I could have gone on and on with Bunker Hill, but I was eager to head over to

Chavez Ravine

Less “hallucinatory” overall, but still wrong. (You’ll note that ChatGPT gets much of its information from Wikipedia; as I’ve demonstrated on this blog a dozen times, Wikipedia is pathologically unreliable.)

People believe, and will repeat, that on May 8th 1959 Aurora “Lola” Vargas was dragged from her home, a belief that persists largely due to this photograph:

It is one of the most influential, if not the most influential and widely-seen images in all Los Angeles history. But Aurora “Lola” Vargas wasn’t dragged from her house because she didn’t live there — and in fact never lived there. In the 1940 census (before her parents even moved to 1771; they were renters on the next block north through the 1920s and ’30s), she lived with her husband Porfidio at 1201 Curtis Street. After Porfidio died in the war, Lola remarried Eliason Escobar Colón and moved to his place at 1841 Malvina. Lola Colón & family were at 1841 in the 1950 Census, but soon moved out of Chavez Ravine and bought a house — in fact, two houses — on Simmons Avenue, about midway between East Los and Montebello. Come May 1959 it was from her East LA home, ten miles away, that she drove to her parents’ house in Chavez Ravine, on this famous day. She arrived late, after all the media circus had arrived and announced to all in earshot “You’re going to have to carry me out!” and ran up into the house.; the deputies just shrugged and got on with it, while the television cameras gleefully whirred. It may seem a small and trifling point that her parents’ 450-square-foot house was merely “in” her family and not hers, but, given the absolute media saturation surrounding the belief she was carried from “her” home, I think it’s an important point to make.

So, we’re told that after the elder Arechigas and daughter Aurora had their house demolished (though, again, Aurora never lived there), the elder Arechigas lived in a tent “for several months” because “the eviction made them homeless.” ChatGPT further informs us that this fact fuels important discussions about displacement and housing justice, but don’t worry, ChatGPT can help you phrase your parroting of these points so they don’t sound romanticized or misleading.

The problem being, of course, said statements are in fact romanticized and misleading, because they’re not true. Don’t get me wrong: after the May 8, 1959 eviction and house demolition, Manuel and Abrana did pitch an old army tent in the ruins. But why? They weren’t homeless: like their daughter, they also owned two very nice houses elsewhere. And they weren’t camped in the Ravine for “months”; rather, it was ten days before they folded up their tent and decamped, after losing all public support when it was discovered they owned more property than literally 98% of Angelenos. When they left Chavez Ravine, they made a beeline straight to one of their other homes, specifically, the one on Ramboz Street, a house they’d bought brand new in 1956, and which, by 1959, they’d already paid off more than half the mortgage; that’s why they’re listed here in the March 1960 phonebook. (As long as we’re on the subject, daughter Victoria, living in her parents’ other Chavez Ravine home at 1767 Malvina, wasn’t made homeless either: she just went to one of her three houses on Allison Ave.)

The Chavez Ravine story has about a million moving parts, and I could go on, but instead let us move on to —

Cooper Donuts

Did you know ChatGPT can actually draw maps for you? Neither did I, until it offered to, and I said yes please! Here’s one:

Ummm. So if you’re familiar with the streets downtown, you’ll know this makes no sense whatsoever. I mean, it doesn’t make sense a lick of sense regarding the Cooper Donut story, specifically: because if we’re at the corner of Second & Main, we’re nowhere near any drag-friendly or hidden gay bars, least of all Harold’s and the Waldorf, which were some blocks south. But more to the point it doesn’t make a lick of sense geographically in general: if you run north from First Street there’s no Second and Third, rather, it’s Temple and then the freeway. That’s all the Land of City Hall north of First.

This ChatGPT-provided timeline is even more fanciful. Remember, there’s only one person — John Rechy — who ever claimed to have been a witness to this event. His tale and his alone sets canon, because there exist neither contributing stories, nor contributory bits of evidence. Not surprisingly, ChatGPT’s timeline contradicts Rechy’s account. Rechy stated the event occurred on Main between Fifth and Sixth, which is like six blocks from Main and this mythical AI-concocted “Second Street north of First Street” in the timeline. Rechy said it happened after 2:00am, after the bars had closed, not at midnight, thus there were no “quiet streets” at 1:30, especially after, canon instructs us, LAPD kept the area under heavy police lockdown till dawn. And of course, I hope I don’t have to mention, Rechy said it didn’t happen at a Cooper’s.

ChatGPT seems to be under the sway of the post-Rechy apocrypha, from which we have the sanctification and hallowing of Second and Main as part of Cooper Canon. The City of Los Angeles’s June 2023 consecration of Second and Main is based wholly on apocryphal texts — these apocrypha regarding Cooper Donuts are rife with doctrinal errors (analogous to, say, in 2 Maccabees and the Additions to Daniel) and historical inaccuracies (like in the books of Judith, and Tobit) … sorry, I can’t help but use this analogy since the Cooper Donuts at 215 South Main was right across from St. Vibiana’s. Point being, we can argue whether post-Rechy apocrypha is noncanonical or deuterocanonical (which would at least put the Tony Hoover narrative in an appendix) but we can at least all agree that ChatGPT is crap. Seriously, now I wonder if ChatGPT also eagerly endorses other hoaxes like the Donation of Constantine, the Vinland Map, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and those 1983 Hitler Diaries. I’d check but instead I’ll move on to:

The Streetcar Conspiracy

Auuuuuugh ok. I know you know where I’m going with this: it’s all baloney-wrapped malarkey. I could write a 5,000-word response to ChatGPT’s assertion here but, you know what, I already did, so go read that.

*******

Bottom line, of course, is you should rely on primary sources, not an OpenAI hallucinator, which is a symptom of tech’s arrogance, not a tool for truth. I’m sure I surprise no-one when I assert ChatGPT is useless for research and poisons education, accelerating cultural decay by making nonsense authoritative.

Having made my point repeatedly many of you may, of course, roll your eyes and spit “way to pick at the low-hanging fruit, lazybones!” so this will be the last of my “shooting fish in a barrel” attacks on Artificial Intelligence. Rather, at some point in the near future I’ll combat John H. M. Laslett’s Shameful Victory. It’s written by a PhD! From Oxford! And published by a university press! And holy hell in a handbasket — spoiler alert — it’s crap. See you then!

James Oviatt lived on Bunker Hill, before he became the greatest haberdasher in Los Angeles history, and before he built Los Angeles’s greatest building. I talk about him at length here, but, in a nutshell:

Even if James Oviatt wasn’t a Bunker Hill boy, you’d still really, really want to go to the Oviatt Building a month from now to see Marc Chevalier deliver his lecture about the man and his monument.

We are blessed to live in Los Angeles, where there exists no lack of lectures and tours related to Old L.A. and her built environment. But if you go to one lecture this year, make it this one.

I say this not (only) because Marc is a dear friend, but because he’s a crackerjack historian. I’ve watched him obsessively uncover and document secrets about this building for decades now! The tale involves French culture, celebrity clientele, stolen artwork, attempted demolitions, and so much more. Marc gave this talk at the World Art Deco Congress in Paris a few months ago — were you there? No? Well guess what, the only better place to see the talk than in Paris is in the actual building!

This will sell out! Get your tickets! Click here:

https://artdecola.org/events-calendar/deco-go-west-oviatt-2026

See you there!

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here to make us smarter — which we know to be true, because when I asked an AI chatbot if that were true, it said yes. I’m glad that in the future we’ll all have 200 IQ and shall live in peace and harmony, our giant AI-augmented intellects having solved all the world’s problems.

Before that happens, please be advised that AI is a galling, tiresome cesspool. There are untold reasons why, but in this case, I’m going to focus on the fact that I was willing to look the other way (first they came for the…) until, of course, they messed with Bunker Hill.

The other day I saw this —

— which has, as of this writing, 67,000 views. It is breathtakingly stupid trash; heck, I’ll go further and say it’s breathtakingly evil trash. Of course, the magic learning box that is the internet keeps us supplied with no lack of irritating nonsense, whether it be fraudulent fabrications about Chavez Ravine or some counterfeit history of Disneyland.

But this one is a fulsome festival of AI, dealing with not only Bunker Hill, but the built environment of Victorian-era Los Angeles in general. You may recall I recently published an entire book about just that subject, so, forgive me if I find this AI escapade of absurd and foolish drivel especially irksome.

Full disclosure: I have used, and enjoyed using, AI. A couple years ago, when I learned of Bing’s Image Creator, I concocted a whole slew of goofy Christmas pictures and a few months later, made a mess of Easter images. Their manufacture provided me no small amount of giggles. Of course, no-one is going to believe there exists an actual photograph of a shotgun-toting Santa Claus standing in a swamp full of blood, or of a mad scientist Easter Bunny reanimating corpses. Harmless fun, I reasoned, because while I was told AI steals food from the mouths of actual artists!, I wasn’t going to hire an actual artist to produce these images anyway. And when told the more you use it, the smarter it grows, and Skynet will get sentient and kill us all!, I figured bring it on, because our wholesale slaughter by robots will at least be preferable to the morass of civilizational collapse into which we currently sink. But, now that AI has come and defiled my beloved Old L.A., I’ve got some pointed things to say on the matter.

Before I pontificate further about AI, though, let’s set the stage, and see what in particular the shoddy sloppers makin’ shoddy slop have been up to. Few months ago a new YouTube channel emerged, called Stone & Script.

OH LOOK they did one! Lace up your olde-tymie boots because we’re going to walk the streets of yesterday. (I embedded it above, but should you want to watch it in another window, click here.) Here are some screen grabs; be advised I’m only showing you a mere fraction of the nonsense.

The “Los Angeles 1880 Reconstruction” commences with this image:

Uhhhh, that doesn’t bode well. Leave aside an inability to depict vintage Los Angeles, they couldn’t even figure out modern Los Angeles. Yes, this shot has the Library Tower and the Wilshire Grand Center (and, vaguely, Cal Plaza), but aside from that and some requisite mountains-in-the-distance, this opening image bears no relation to Los Angeles geographically or topographically (or even geologically, since the mountains are in the west?). Seriously, if you can’t source a picture of Los Angeles taken yesterday, maybe Los Angeles of 140 years ago is best left to the grown-ups. Well then, let’s see how they proceed.

We’ll start with the one above. First thing to note about the dozens of images Script & Stone use, they give zero attribution for the shots they’ve stolen off the internet. Par for the course, I know, but still, bad form, old boy, bad form. Here, while “you can see the PICO House” you can not, in fact, see the Pico House. (And why is Pío Pico’s name in allcaps? Did they check his FICO score? Did he have a RICO indictment against him?) Stone & Script stole this image from the LAPL and if you read the metadata it clearly states that the large building is the Sisters of Charity at Macy & Alameda.

It’s odd because this video had shown the Pico House, which then morphed into this —

There are no end to these goofy “here’s a picture of Old Los Angeles” in this thing. I could go on and on, picking at each one individually, but you get the point. Here’s a grouping for your edification:

Needless to say, none of these images depict structures that existed.

This being a Bunker Hill blog, here’s an image of Bunker Hill, from a postcard produced by the Melrose Hotel. It’s a fairly common image, found all over the internet. Script & Stone decided to put it into one of those “image-to-video” apps, so that we cruise south “down the street”—

— at which point we see the Melrose’s neighbor to the south. I mean, what the hell is that supposed to be? Those porches conjure up the Mesmer house (about which I wrote here), sure, but this ain’t that. I wouldn’t find the wholesale invention of the Melrose neighbor so objectionable if I hadn’t written so damn much about the actual house that stood there.

And now, folks, if you don’t agree that this video is the most insultingly useless excrement you’ve ever seen, may I present, Bunker Hill!

Yes, they actually used this, 3,000 miles away, to represent downtown Los Angeles.

Hey, you say, lighten up dude, that’s actually pretty hilarious! I don’t disagree. I chuckled, but it was a dark chuckle.

Made me wonder, is there ever an opportunity to meld Bunker Hill and AI for the good of mankind? The answer is…maybe? I gave it a shot. You might remember this image from the last post I did:

I figured, what’s the harm if I “bring it to life?” Ergo:

Still left a bad taste in my mouth. Yes, making two ladies talk to each other is about the most anodyne thing ever. Yes, colorizing/animating Nadel’s photo might just interest new people in Bunker Hill…because God forbid they have to look at a static, black-and-white image. Ugh, now the taste in my mouth got worse. Which brings us to —

Final thoughts, as Jerry Springer used to say.

After being criticized for using AI, I’ve given the subject considerable thought.  Most of my friends, being artists and musicians, decry the harm it has done to their work.  I’d like to address its troubling relationship to historical revision.

AI is an unprecedented tool for manipulating information and rewriting history on a massive scale.  It now produces many of the patently fictitious “historical” narratives found online, with apparent coherence, consistency, and at an industrial scale unmatched by human capacity.  Historical revisionism is being automated — bad actors fabricating entire historical events.  The millions of variations on false narrative makes fact-checking nearly impossible; the erosion of consensus reality creates an environment where people retreat into tribal information silos, unable to agree on basic facts.  I fear human judgment will be no match to automated deception.

I titled this post “The End of Intelligence.”  By that I mean AI could potentially make authentic human intelligence obsolete in key areas.  Why master complex skills when AI can generate code, write papers, or solve problems instantly?  Cognitive offloading will result in a population technically “educated” but functionally incompetent without AI assistance, and worse, devoid of critical thinking skills.  As our information ecosystems are flooded with algorithmically produced artificial content, how will we distinguish it from either truth or simple humanity?  History is about struggle — the struggle to understand through research, weighing evidence, making mistakes, and arriving at understanding.  Intelligence may involve processing information and  “knowing things” but those things are useless without a vast quantity of wisdom, judgment, and character.  Those are human qualities no algorithm can replicate.

The other day my buddy Bryan Moore (whose aunt you’ll remember from this post) sent me a link to a 1957 episode of Official Detective called “Pork Pie Hat.” Hey, he said, sure looks like Bunker Hill to me, but I’ll leave that up to your expert eye.

Holy-freakin’ heck.

It isn’t every day something turns up that isn’t in Jim’s book — though it can happen, as was recently the case with Abandoned — especially not something with this much Bunker Hill. Seriously, it’s almost too much Bunker Hill (jk, that would break all the laws of physics.) Plus, Harry Dean Stanton as a knife-wielding psycho! (I grew up on Alien/Escape from New York/Paris, Texas and especially Repo Man, and used to go see HDS play guitar in various local watering holes.)

So settle in and watch “Pork Pie Hat” (which is set in Milwaukee, and weirdly, features zero porkpie hats), and follow along below with a recounting of Bunker Hill’s appearances therein:

And there we are! Proving once again that there are still sources for vintage Bunker Hill-on-film lurking out there in a vast and untapped mediasphere!

If you know of any of which I might be unaware, don’t hesitate to contact me — oldbunkerhill@gmail.com

Until that time, God bless us, everyone!

Greetings! Though this is a Bunker Hill blog, I will on occasion cover tangentially-related subjects (like Chavez Ravine or Cooper Donuts, or even Disneyland), especially if there’s debunking to be done. Today’s debunking, though, is altogether unrelated to Bunker Hill. After being told for the millionth time that Roger Rabbit is a documentary, I’m finally giving in to my overpowering, long-fermented urge to douse the fervid, fervent flames of the “Los Angeles Streetcar Conspiracy” narrative.

*****

Los Angeles has a dark and hidden history, and here’s part of it you should know: we once had the largest, best run, most efficient, most beloved, most profitable, publicly owned streetcar system in the world. The Red Cars! But! The bloated plutocrats and greasy oligarchs said NO! Profits over people! A cackling cabal of big oil, big tire, and big auto conspired to buy up all the Red Cars and destroy them! Which they did! Then they needlessly replaced them with horrible nasty busses which people disliked so much they all went out and bought cars! And that, my friend, is the reason we now live in a dystopic autopian hellscape of traffic and smog and sprawl.

Not only that, but it was such a grand and shameless conspiracy, that Standard Oil and General Motors and Firestone Tire actually got taken to court and were found guilty of conspiracy and had to pay huge fines! But the damage had already been done to the poor beloved streetcars. All of America’s streetcars had been tossed in the sea by General Motors, and the corporate fatcats puffed contentedly on their cigars and just laughed.

Of course, none of that is true. “But Nathan,” you say, “the GM Streetcar Conspiracy is a real thing! Literally everybody knows about it!” Sorry to burst your bubble but no, the entire tale is twaddle and hogwash. Not even, like, there was a conspiracy but it wasn’t that bad. I’m saying no, it’s literally not a thing that ever existed. Don’t believe me? Read on!

***

Every time someone says “big auto and big oil ripped out the efficient streetcar in a freeway-building conspiracy, you know” they give you this look like “and now I’ve imparted to you secret knowledge they don’t want you to know, for it is the dark suppressed history of LA, be careful with knowledge so powerfully arcane” even though it was the plot of a movie that made $350 million and won three Oscars.

Seriously, during my 30+ years in Los Angeles I haven’t gone three weeks without someone saying “Who Framed Roger Rabbit, that’s a true story, you know!” If you don’t know the story, Roger Rabbit‘s premise is that Judge Doom — who looks so cartoonishly evil he makes the Indiana Jones Nazi meltingfaceguy look like Mister Rogers — has a plan to force people onto the roads, wherein he buys up the streetcars to destroy them and build freeways:

But none of that happened (it being, after all, a movie about people interacting with cartoons) but the event it’s purportedly based on did not, in fact, occur. The streetcar: not beloved, not efficient, not a public utility, not profitable, and most of all, not the victim of — or even involved in — a conspiracy in any way, shape, or form.

At this point pearl-clutchers exclaim “oh Nathan how dare you! You just hate rail! You obviously despise trolleys, and rail travel, and the people who use it!” Hey, do you know what I do all day when I’m not writing essays like this for you? I operate a railway. If I could go back and time and do one thing it would be ride the trolley around downtown and then out through some orange groves. But people like to mythologize and fetishize that which has been lost to time (e.g., Chavez Ravine; I cover that phenomenon a bit in the first three paragraphs of this) and to be honest I don’t blame them. I’ve been guilty of that too, a billion times, over the course of my life. But as a historian we must side with facts over anemoia and hiraeth. In any event, here we go…

*****

I will spare you the complicated early history of the streetcar in Los Angeles, and how it was formed, but what you basically need to know is that there were, in twentieth-century Los Angeles, two main streetcar networks, the Pacific Electric, and the Los Angeles Railway:

The Pacific Electric (PE), whose red-painted cars thus dubbed it the Red Car, was the larger and faster of the two, and was more interurban than intraurban, taking people out to Pasadena, Long Beach, Santa Ana, and the like. The Los Angeles Railway (LARy) had yellow-painted cars, hence its common name The Yellow Cars; its lines were concentrated around downtown, but branched out into some suburbs. (Disclaimer: I am far from an authority on streetcars, and I know juicefans [known for loving that sweet, trolley-powering electric current] are understandably fetishistic when it comes to the topic. I am quite certain I will say something to annoy you [“he didn’t even mention that PE ran standard gauge and LARy was narrow gauge!”] so let me apologize in advance. Trust me, I get it. You can only imagine how I feel when people say Angels Flight is “Victorian.”)

The Pacific Electric Red Car, in brief: Henry Huntington began the Red Car in 1901. He didn’t do so to earn money from fares, or to make a great navigable city; it was just a tool to get people out to his new subdivisions.

After having done so, it could have been Hungtington’s right and due to simply dismantle the whole shebang; it was his property, after all. Instead, in 1910 he sold PE to Southern Pacific Railroad, who made it a subsidiary. Pacific Electric Red Cars reached peak ridership in the mid-1920s and began its decline, and though streetcars were losing money, Southern Pacific kept it so they could run freight on the tracks. Busses, though, were the future — in 1923 Pacific Electric began a joint bus venture with Los Angeles Railway called Los Angeles Bus Lines, to connect rail lines and expand service. Pacific Electric began switching their Red Cars to busses in 1925. In 1936 Pacific Electric bought an entire bus company, the Motor City Lines, to facilitate the switch to busses.

And the Los Angeles Railway Yellow Car: not started by Huntington, but he did purchase it in 1898. Same deal: ridership declined, and LARy began converting to busses in 1930. The Huntington estate sold the entity, in 1944, to National City Lines. They renamed Los Angeles Electric Railway to Los Angeles Transit Lines, but the yellow cars remained the Yellow Car. (If there are times I refer to the LARy post-1944, and you’re tempted to exclaim “but it was called LATL then!”, please accept my apologies in advance.)

*****

Now you know the two main streetcar players, and — before we get into the conspiracy weeds — here are some building block truths about streetcars: they were not a public utility, they didn’t make money, they were in fact not efficient, and people didn’t care for them much, and their being replaced by busses was a simple natural progression.

Four reasons the owners didn’t like streetcars:

Government price regulation. Despite being privately-owned, government regulators forbade streetcar owners from engaging in European-style zone pricing. That is, if you hop on the streetcar for five cents, you could ride as long as you wanted, as far as you wanted. Even when wartime inflation eroded that five cents to half its value, local government forced the PE and LARy to maintain the fare. (Turns out that much of Los Angeles’s much-derided sprawl has less to do with the oft-blamed automobile, but is because of the streetcar system, in that because of a lack of zone pricing, it was just as cheap to trolleyride to and from your suburb as it was to live near the city center.)

Government road upkeep regulation. The Los Angeles Public Utilities Board, besides prohibiting necessary price increases (despite the streetcars not being a public utility, but that’s your local government at work), also caused the streetcar companies to bleed money in that they charged them for pavement upkeep on the adjacent roads — pavement the railcar companies didn’t even use. Local bureaucrats literally forced streetcar owners to subsidize their competition, including jitneys, which were primitive road-using busses that poached waiting streetcar customers.

The unions. Trolleys were labor-intensive, as opposed to busses: there were two crewmembers on each trolley, the motorman and the conductor, as opposed to a lone bus driver. Labor unions were forcing streetcar companies to pay above-market wages, which is why the companies cut so many positions, leading, again, to busses. Ergo, many cars were converted (at some expense) to one-man crews in the late 1930s, but streetcar wages being above market still stung operators.

Forced service. Local government required streetcars to provide service on all the routes they owned, and thus forcing them to run on unprofitable lines. Naturally they turned to busses, which are cheaper to operate, and allowed them to revamp the lines.

Moreover, streetcars required expensive, dedicated rails, rails which required ten times the engineering time and expense of bus lines. And if a streetcar breaks down, that line is down until the trolleycar is removed/repaired/restored. If travel patterns change, the rail stays there (and again, the government forced owners to run your streetcars on every rail, even in the face of financial loss).

Conversely, busses cost less, carry more passengers, and could change routes with ease. No wire, no tracks, no catenaries, no electrical power plants, and no private rights-of-way to maintain.

But let’s not forget, people didn’t like streetcars, or at least not as much as we’re led to believe. At the peak of ridership in the early-mid 1920s, people were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with overcrowded streetcars, poor service, and slow gait. This led to the voters passing the Major Street Traffic Plan of 1924, which allocated city money to widen and improve streets, allowing more people to have cars (which had recently become within the buying power of the working man) and thus an alternative to streetcars. Streetcars were noisy, slow, uncomfortable, and had no air conditioning (yes you could roll down a window, but busses had actual AC) and so it’s no wonder people were abandoning them. Sure, there was an uptick in streetcar ridership during the WWII gas rationing/tire rationing era, but post-1945, hot damn did people want the freedom and comfort of their own Plymouth.

*****

And now we address the whole “conspiracy” part of our program. But before I do, just as an introductory aside, do you know who was, historically, all hot n’ bothered to destroy streetcars? Progressives. “Traction ring magnates” were considered as evil as the “railroad octopus” and Progressives considered the private streetcar entities to be capitalistic kleptocrats, remnants of the Gilded Age to be destroyed (The Nation magazine, for example, was not a friend of mass transit). And long before you had National “Streetcar Conspiracy!” City Lines in the picture, Franklin Roosevelt and his Works Progress Administration — closest thing we ever got to socialism in America — looooved tearing out streetcars: FDR’s WPA was crucial to subsidized road building, and began ripping up streetcar tracks all over America. And let’s not forget progressive New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who in the 1930s worked tirelessly to dismantle the city’s streetcar system: “bus operation in place of trolleys is not only a boon to the citizenry of New York in that it provides faster, more flexible and more comfortable transportation, it also reduces noise, keeps traffic moving faster, and eliminates the danger of wet rails…” said the man himself. Anyway. Just something to remember when you’re pitching stones at those evil streetcar foes.

The Conspiracy. The story goes, there was a company called National City Lines. They were a “front” for big oil/tire/auto. They conspired to destroy the streetcars, which they did, but got caught, and were found guilty. And…scene.

National City Lines is formed in 1936 and — hold up: first, a quick and important sidenote about the PE Red Cars: So, National City Lines bought the LARy Yellow Cars (we’ll get to that). So why is the common narrative always about the Red Car? That’s largely due to Roger Rabbit —

— thus the Red Car is remembered than the yellow-garbed LARy system, so when the “conspiracy” is discussed these days, the tale invariably involves “the Red Car.”

Ladies and gentlemen, If you take one thing away from this entire post, have it be this: National City Lines (ergo by extension General Motors & their fiendish oil-pumping, tire-peddling friends) never touched one single Red Car in any way, shape, or form. Not one. NCL didn’t so much as look askance at a Red Car. So what was the conspiracy that destroyed the Red Car? Sorry to burst your bubble, but there was none. Southern Pacific, PE’s parent company, began abandoning rail service in large swaths because it was prudent to do so, and running streetcars was not part of their business plan in the first place. Eventually, come 1953, SP sold the works to Metropolitan Coach Lines, which was run by old Pacific Electric guys (particularly Jesse Haugh, a former PE executive) and these PE guys converted much of their rail transit to bus service (click here and here). Red Car’s nail in the coffin, though: Metropolitan Coach Lines/the Red Car was subsequently acquired by the government. In 1958 the (taxpayer-funded) Metropolitan Transit Authority, in league with the California Public Utilities Commission, took over and killed the Red Car. It was the California Public Utilities Commission — whose commissioners were appointed by the Governor and confirmed by the State Senate — who officially pulled the plug on the Red Car. Please never forget that, and don’t forget to to tell it to the next person (perhaps one of the 70,000 who “liked” this typical and falsehood-packed post) who says “big oil killed the Red Car.”

Anyway, back to the reason you’re here today: You have been told that National City Lines, who was really General Motors, bought the streetcar system, and killed it to replace it with busses and autos, and there was a trial, and they were convicted. Big Auto was convicted, you will be told, of conspiring (in Judge Doom-like fashion) with Big Oil and Big Rubber to destroy the streetcar. And that’s why America no longer ha streetcars.

Except that’s all hooey, the lot of it:

National City Lines is formed in 1936. In 1939 the president of NCL approached — not General Motors — but a company called Yellow Truck & Coach Manufacturing, for financial assistance. The money NCL got from Yellow Truck — Yellow Truck being a subsidiary of GM — meant that money came a requirements contract. Standard stuff, and altogether legal: it said that NCL needed to use GM’s money to not go and purchase equipment from competing companies. That’s it. People have dug into NCL’s records and GM’s records from here to Timbuktu and there is zero evidence that GM held sway over National’s management; no evidence of managerial control, nor did they have any say regarding National’s movement from streetcars to busses.

In 1945, National City Lines bought the LARy Yellow Cars. NCL bought a lot of lines in the United States, about 10% of the lines in the country. In some areas NCL began to convert to busses, and in other areas they actually expanded electric rail. But all we hear about is their conspiracy to destroy all of America’s rail.

Before I get into the particulars of why that’s not true, let me state something nobody ever mentions: there were 600 major metropolitan areas in America with streetcars. National City Lines got their hands on about 60 of them, so, again, only ten percent of America’s rail is thus tainted by some sort of “streetcar conspiracy.” If it required a conspiracy involving General Motors and Standard Oil to demolish those 60 rail centers, what happened to the other 540? Seriously, tell me. 540 urban areas had streetcars, and they ripped out their streetcars. Without the involvement of National City Lines, without being tainted by a nefarious streetcar conspiracy. (Yes, I’ve been on the old trolleys in New Orleans, San Francisco and Boston, and yes, I’m aware that there are some places like Pittsburgh and Philadelphia that run modern light rail on their old streetcar-dedicated right-of-ways; so subtract those and a few others and tell me why the other 530 or so major American urban streetcar areas abandoned their streetcars without the input of National City Lines.)

So: was National City Lines brought up on charges of conspiracy to destroy streetcars? No, they were not. Defendant National City Lines — and by extension the old bugaboos of GM, Standard Oil and Firestone Rubber, via Yellow Truck & Coach — were brought up on two counts:

Count One: Violating Section One of the Sherman Antitrust Act (the SAA is Gilded Age legislation that prohibits monopolies; it famously broke up Standard Oil. Read more about it here). NCL were accused of trying to secure control of transit-providing companies, which they were not trying to do, ergo, they were acquitted. As in, found not guilty and absolved of wrongdoing regarding accusations of restraint of trade. Got it? Ok.

Count Two: Violating Section Two of the Sherman Antitrust Act. They were accused and found guilty (upheld in appellate court, U.S. v. National City Lines, 186 F.2d 562 [7th Cir. 1951]) of selling busses to themselves. Literally nothing to do with streetcars. When NCL was laying out new bus lines, they committed the “crime” of using their own busses. For example, who were some of the witnesses for the prosecution? Pacific Ford Motor Coach, and Twin Coach Company, who testified that they lost out on business when NCL (who, again, had a tying agreement with GM) bought GM busses. But Pacific Ford and Twin Coach said that just wasn’t fair. The government thus brought NCL up on charges, because being your own customer is illegal under antitrust law.

So the jury said awwww and found GM guilty of selling itself its own busses.

Let me sketch a rough analogy for you. Let’s say you had a restaurant — you open a vegetarian restaurant, and you have a plot of land out back so you grow your own vegetables. Farm to table kinda thing. But the government comes in and says you can’t feed people your own vegetables, because that’s not fair to your competition. You have to buy your vegetables from your competitor (and tough luck if those vegetables when not as tasty and more expensive). You can’t use the ones you grew yourself, but must buy someone else’s, because that’s fair.

NCL was fined $5,000. “That’s an outrage!” screeches literally everyone, “they got a slap on the wrist for conspiring to destroy the streetcar!” First of all, again, the accusation and judgement had absolutely nothing to do with streetcars, but point being, $5,000 was the absolute maximum fine they could get for selling busses to themselves. The government set that fine long before the trial began; it wasn’t a slap on the wrist imposed by some pro-Big Oil judge, or whatever conspiracy theory you have.

I feel like this cannot be stated often enough: In the court’s opinion, there were, certainly, damaged parties — competing bus manufacturers. But there was never a mention of electric railways.

And again, there were hundreds upon hundreds of cities who never had a smidgen of GM/NCL influence, and they dismantled their streetcar systems just fine on their own (American cities, heck: the UK, Japan, and countless other nations have but a fraction of their original tram systems, and GM/NCL wasn’t there, either).

So, after National City Lines was convicted of the very non-streetcar-related crime of selling busses to itself in 1949, you’d think that would be the end of the story, right?

Nooooo.

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Enter Bradford Snell. It’s 1974, here comes Snell, he’s an antitrust attorney from San Francisco. Snell had been bankrolled by the leftist Stern Fund to write a paper about how General Motors was eeeevil, and had destroyed America’s streetcars. This was the genesis of the streetcar myth. Snell became a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly and there testified to the Senate that Pacific Electric was forced by National City Lines to convert to busses and then, because people would be so horrified by the busses, they’d buy automobiles. Yep.

Seriously, that was actually his argument—here is a direct quote from Snell, that Pacific Electric’s plan was “to convert its electric street cars to motor busses — slow, cramped, foul-smelling vehicles whose inferior performance invariably led riders to purchase automobiles.”

Let that sink in: Snell said National City Lines forced PACIFIC ELECTRIC to do this. As you know, NCL never had any dealings with PE. Ergo, Snell is an idiot, a liar, or both. (Spoiler alert: it’s both.)

Snell’s argument also hinged on the “truth” that busses were inferior to streetcars. Of course busses were more flexible, easier to run, cheaper to run, and actually profitable. (But hey, this is government! They don’t care about the owners of things.) What about the ridership? Well the streetcar was louder, slower, it jerked you about on less comfortable seats compared to the cushy bench seats of 1950s busses (yes, I am aware that many streetcars had upgraded from wooden to upholstered, but still), there was heating and air-conditioning, etc.

Most importantly, Snell testified to the Senate that back in 1950 GM had been convicted of a “criminal conspiracy to monopolize ground transportation” — which, of course, they hadn’t. Like saying NCL worked to destroy Pacific Electric…was he consciously lying, or just making stuff up with all the best intentions? Oh wait, it’s the same thing.

Anyway, there were hearings about this through 1974. They made the news largely because San Francisco mayor Joseph Alioto testified to the Senate that GM was “a monopoly evil” and LA mayor Tom Bradley (quite incorrectly) testified “GM scrapped the Pacific Electric” — of course, it turned out SF and LA both had lawsuits against GM and Alioto and Bradley had financial interests in screwing GM, so naturally they lied to the Senate. Yay!

Then in 1987 60 Minutes picked up the tale and said our streetcars were “murdered by conspiracy.” It’s absolute trash, but it’s a fun watch for the vintage streetcar clips. Between the 60 Minutes piece and Roger Rabbit, every Gen X’r in the world ardently argues the conspiracy narrative.

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And now to wrap up. We know that natural forces sickened the Red Car until your local government pulled its plug. But what of the Yellow Car? If General Motors didn’t rape and murder it, as you’re so constantly told, what happened to it, exactly?

So LARy is bought by National City Lines. The Yellow Cars are largely converted to busses through the 1950s — (and before you say yeah! evil GM busses! they actually replaced most streetcars with ACF/Brill electric trolleybusses) until by 1958 only five (of the original 25) streetcar lines remained in operation — the J, P, R, S and V. These were sold to the Metropolitan Transit Authority (today LA Metro). Just as a public agency had destroyed the whole of Pacific Electric Red Cars, it was a public agency that destroyed the last of the LARy Yellow Cars. Between 1958 and 1963 it was your tax dollars (well, your grandparents’ tax dollars) that sent all those Yellow Cars to the National Metal and Steel Corporation junkyard at Terminal Island, where they were broken up for scrap.

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Let me reiterate, I love rail. I would have loved riding the streetcars (I love riding them in Perris) just as I love running an Edwardian-era electric train in downtown Los Angeles, so, count me among the juicefans. Plus, L.A. streetcars began with a Bunker Hill connection — in that the first line, the Sixth & Spring line, was founded in 1874 by Judge Widney, who resided on Hill near Fourth.

That said, I’m not going to allow you to believe things that aren’t true. Also, you’re not allowed to complain about losing our old streetcar system if you’re not willing to ride the 114 miles of rail transit we currently have in Los Angeles (including, I might add, the longest light rail line in the world). That’s right, even after destroying the streetcar, Los Angeles still has the largest light rail system in the United States.

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Oh, one other thing: if you raise an eyebrow at my use of “busses” rather than the more traditional “buses” that’s because one of the objects in my greater “old LA” collection is this —

— and if that says busses, then, so be it!

Remember how I recently had the good fortune to uncover some previously unseen Astoria images? Well, something similarly rare and unknown just bubbled to the surface again, and it’s a doozy. An image was posted by famed Angels Flight operator Will on his saturdaystationagent Instagram account; you might remember my shout out to him and the good work he was doing posting oodles of Angels Flight clips.

Point being, he posted this ca. 1935 image:

HOLY CARPS! A vintage interior of Court Flight!

Of course we all know and love Angels Flight, of which there exist vintage interior images —

But until this moment I’ve never seen an image inside Court Flight.

Court Flight, of course, was Bunker Hill’s other funicular. It was built by the Observation Tower Company in 1904/5 and ran until 1943. The best online account of its history is by Christina Rice and can be found at the OnBunkerHill site, and naturally it gets a full page in the book Bunker Hill, Los Angeles. See the esteemed Ms. Rice discuss Court Flight in this video at 5:08 —

But have you ever seen an image of the interior of Court Flight? NEITHER HAVE I.

Where did this image come from? I don’t know! I wrote Will and he said he got it off the internet, but forgot to note where, and now, should you perform a reverse google image search, nothing comes up.

Did you look at the Court Flight image and immediately think “huh, what, huh? that’s Angels Flight” — can’t blame you if you did! Here’s a comparison of the Court Flight car to the Angels Flight car.

Nearly identical; that’s because both cars are from the able hand of the same man: Leopold Suck.

Leopold Suck was born in in Chicago in 1857 to his German-born parents Justus and Theresa (Ruttencutter) Suck. He came to Los Angeles about 1885 and worked as a carpenter and contractor. In 1903 he built a one-story brick building at 316 East Second Street, which served as his place of business, from which he did all sorts of small homes, façade remodelings, and building additions. He died in 1944 (possibly from heartbreak, having seen Court Flight go up in flames in 1943).

The Angels Flight cars are obviously his work, given their similarities. While there’s no contemporary smoking gun proving he designed the Angels Flight cars, his daughter’s testimony is pretty convincing:

“Wait,” you say, “he built the Angels Flight cars about 1900 but built some more in 1904? Huh?” Fair question. So, a quick history of the Angels Flight cars, as long as you’re here:

The first cars, from the Flight’s debut on Dec. 31, 1901, were basically an open box with a wee roof atop —

But then in November 1903, when the grade was made uniform via lifting the flight up onto an elevated trestle — Angels Flight got new cars, which looked like this:

I would assert that these 1903 cars are the cars we use today. The waters get muddied a bit because the papers inform us, in August 1910, that the Flight got “new cars.”

I am of the opinion that the Herald is wrong. There was a lot of newness in 1910, to be sure: a brand new arched waiting station at the bottom, a large new station house up top. I believe Eddy hired someone — possibly, and probably Leo Suck — not to build new cars, but to give the existing cars a redo. The windows were made into ovals (I think this was via a cutout applied to the square glass, since the oval window treatment didn’t last through the end of the ’20s, and the windows were returned to their original square) and the top end of each car was extended to add an open-air “smoker’s seats.”

My favorite part of Court Flight interior image are the wonderful mirrors. Naturally you’d need to check your hair and makeup before alighting the vehicle!

Today those mirrors wouldn’t last two minutes before being carved up by jerkweeds (in the manner of an Angels Flight window, for example).

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Hope you have enjoyed this post! Many thanks to the mysterious Internet for providing the Court Flight image, and to Will for posting it. Here’s to many more Bunker Hill finds!

Ok, I know this is really off the topic of Bunker Hill, and I am well aware there is zero reason to get worked up about something posted in the reeking cesspool that is TikTok. But I write about Chavez Ravine because of Bunker Hill, so now I’ll write about Disneyland because of Chavez Ravine, making Disneyland the dopey, ungainly cousin of Bunker Hill. And away we go:

I began writing about Chavez Ravine (e.g. this/this/this) because the story shared similarities with Bunker Hill (government removes the poor and disenfranchised “for their own good” etc.). I kept at it largely because the Chavez story gatekeepers were so shameless in their continued production and promulgation of lies.  The Influencer Class and their agenda-setting, narrative-shaping output factory simultaneously repels and fascinates.

Ergo, I’m going to harp on another Chavez-flavored example related to, of all places, Disneyland. This TikTok —

@erasedcalifornia

They called it progress. But in the 1950’s, entire Latino families were forced out to make room for Disneyland- no compensation, no justice. This is what they don’t teach you in history class. #californiahistoryunfiltered #erasedhistory #latinohistory #ushistory #californiahistory #mexicanamericanhistory #thisisamerica #disneylandtruth #anaheim #tiktokhistory

♬ A ballad with piano and strings, inspired by ghost towns and abandoned buildings(1206646) – Yasu

— has had 150,000 views, with nearly 15,000 likes and 11,000 shares. It got shared on Instagram and garnered another 3,000 likes. It involves the story of how, before Disneyland, a bunch of land in Anaheim was a “thriving Latino neighborhood” until “the city seized the land through eminent domain” after which “entire communities were bulldozed without any compensation.” So yes, I’m here to talk about it today, because it’s the exact same (purported) story as Chavez Ravine.

The Chavez Ravine story, though, at least has a kernel of truth at its core (progressive politicians did, in fact, use eminent domain to extirpate the communities there). But the Disneyland story, as shoehorned into the Chavez narrative, is just stupidly, laughably false. 

If you chose not to watch the video, here’s a transcript:

They built the happiest place on earth by destroying someone else’s. Before Disneyland, a thriving Latino neighborhood existed here. It was filled with homes, families, and orange groves. These were passed down through generations. But in the 1950s, the city seized the land through eminent domain. They claimed it was for public use, but then sold it to Walt Disney. Entire communities were bulldozed without any compensation, no memorial, and no plaque in the park. Families who once lived there now buy tickets to walk on the land they lost. Today, millions visit the park, yet almost no one knows what was here before. This story isn’t just about Disneyland; it’s about how American progress continues to erase communities of color. Disneyland calls itself the happiest place on earth, but for the original residents, it marked the day everything changed. Comment if this was never included in your history class. Follow for the stories they attempted to bury. Share if someone needs to hear this. 

This is all a con. A fraud. The deceitful contentions are as real as their adjoining images, which were spat out in AI — here for example is a “photo” of the now-destroyed “thriving Latino neighborhood” —

— and again, yes, I know that attempting to counter TikTok’s perfidy-peddling propagandists is a fool’s errand (so I’ll try to make this quick and we can get back to the posting of cool Bunker Hill stuff). Anyway:

Come with me back in time and examine the land through aerials. Here are today’s boundaries of Disneyland, as bordered by Walnut, Ball, Harbor, and Katella —

And here’s Walnut/Ball/Harbor/Katella in 1960, five years after the park opened:

And the same area in 1953, two years before the park opened:

What do you notice? It’s all orange groves. Nothing remotely related to “neighborhoods” and “entire communities” as erasedcalifornia so sternly states.

“But but but,” you say, “the families who owned those orange groves were Latino and they had their land stolen!” Nope. We actually know who the families were who voluntarily sold their land to Disney (selling the land being the exact opposite of erasedcalifornia’s narrative that “the city seized the land through eminent domain. They claimed it was for public use, but then sold it to Walt Disney. Entire communities were bulldozed without any compensation“) and here are their names:

“Ok yeah but” you say, “all the owners were of European descent but LOOK! Dominguez! THERE’S a Mexican name! THEY definitely had their land stolen! Then their farmhouse was bulldozed!” Nope again. The Dominguez family had a ten-acre lot (which is 6.25% of Disney’s 160-acre purchase) and on that lot was a farmhouse:

And not only did the Dominguez family sell their land voluntarily, but Walt Disney saved their 1,300 square-foot 1920s farmhouse, where it stands in Disneyland to this day.

Oh, and it gets better. So not only did the sole Latino people involved in Disney’s Anaheim land deal not have their house seized, and not only was it not bulldozed, but their palm tree was saved, too:

This Canary Island Date Palm was planted in 1896 by Timothy Carroll, Anaheim’s first horticulturalist, for that ten-acre tract’s landowner, Wyran Knowlton. In 1920 Knowlton’s daughter Laura Irene Knowlton married Pablo Vincent Dominguez, which is how the ten acres “became” a Dominguez property. Pablo (who went by Paul) & Laura built the little house in 1925, in which their son Ronald Dominguez was born in 1935.

And it gets better still: not only was the young Ron Dominguez not “run out” of his property in 1954, but after the park opened he walked into the personnel office and applied to be a ticket-taker. Over the course of an illustrious 40-year career there, he was promoted to the position of Executive Vice President of Walt Disney Attractions. So while “erasedcalifornia” insists they are being “erased”… the only Hispanic folk (well, half-Hispanic, since the Knowltons came from England and helped settle the Massachusetts Bay Colony) that could have possibly been erased sold their land to Disney, who kept the Dominguez home, kept the Dominguez tree, AND honored Dominguez with a window on Main Street, when he retired in 1994:

So, if the entirety of erasedcalifornia’s story is such easily disprovable poppycock, why did they put time and energy into making the video? Apparently it was just to fan the flames of racist hatred. Among the thousands of comments on the Instagram and TikTok post are many like these —

The comments go on an expand from there, into anti-American, anti-capitalist invective. Hey, you wanna be a racist communist that hates America, you do you, baby. Knock yourself out. But piece of advice, try to have an argument that’s at least based in some minuscule semblance of fact.

Perhaps it’s less that people need to be America-hating racists, than it is some people’s need to crap on anything fun. I’m sure that’s enormously psychologically gratifying, though in the end being a toxic gaslighter does one more harm than good. So hey, erasedcalfornia and your ilk, along with finding some stories with truth to them, get some therapy.

There’s two weeks till Hallowe’en and it’s time to put your Hallowe’en gift-giving into overdrive! (Yes, I know, you’re mostly buying things for yourself, but who better deserves them?)

Might I suggest a copy of Bunker Noir! It’s a true crime compendium replete with murder, suicide, bootleggers, serial killers, bar brawls, deadly fires, lizard men, and most terrifying of all, building demolitions!

And it’s ON SALE! Regularly $30, it’s now a scant $20. Buy it on eBay, or on Amazon, but bear in mind you’ll be paying taxes and shipping that’ll send it north of twenty bucks. However, toss me $20 via Paypal (marsakster@gmail.com) or Venmo (@Hugo-Eckener) and (please make sure I have your mailing address) I’ll eat the taxes AND the postage!

Here are some SATISFIED CUSTOMERS!

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As long as we’re on the subject of spooky stuff, might I further suggest you purchase some ’tis-the-season sundries from Morguewear? They carry all the whatnot you need in life — shirts, pillows, coffee mugs, candles, notebooks — but conveniently emblazoned with vintage graphics advertising caskets, hearses, embalming fluid, and other fun stuff.

Take a look at their wares, here: https://www.etsy.com/shop/Morguewear