Incredible New Court Flight Image!

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).

*****

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!