Bunker Hill in “Abandoned”

Bunker Hill was, of course, featured in many a splendid noir picture. That (along with the Hill’s depiction in hardboiled prose) is the subject of Jim Dawson’s indispensable Los Angeles’s Bunker Hill: Pulp Fiction’s Mean Streets and Film Noir’s Ground Zero! (If you do not own this book, remedy that immediately.)

Once in a great while a heretofore unknown (to me, at least, and not in Jim’s book) example-of-Bunker-Hill-in-cinema pops up: in this case it’s Bunker Hill’s brief appearance in Abandoned, a 1949 Universal picture about black market baby rings.

I would never have known Bunker Hill made an appearance in Abandoned had I not dug up an interior shot of the Biltmore Theater squirreled away in my collection of Los Angeles negatives. When I looked up the Biltmore’s entry on Bill Counter’s wonderful Los Angeles Theaters blog, there was Gale Storm walking up Grand! (I have a particular fondness for Storm, since a poster from one of her pictures hangs in my upstairs hallway. Plus her name is Gale Storm, I mean, c’mon.)

Anyway, at 28:26 Storm and Dennis O’Keefe (click here) are walking north on Grand Avenue, between Fifth and Fourth:

See the sign next to O’Keefe’s shoulder? That’s a neon blade reading “Sherwood Apt’s” which can be seen at 10:59 in Bunker Hill 1956:

A return shot can be seen in 1955’s Target Earth:

Note in the Target Earth image above, to the north of the Sherwood (read about Sherwood resident, the doomed starlet Helen Lee Worthing, here), is a rounded tower and a scalloped parapet. That’s the Granada:

They then walk up to the Granada—

Then there’s this nifty return shot ↑ of Raymond Burr spying on the two. It was shot with rear projection: the actual across-the-street structure at 414 South Grand was an apartment house called the Boyd, which contained no commercial space: