The OTHER Angels Flight

It’s 1973. You wake up and as you blink through the smog, what do you see? Vietnam slogging on, Johnson’s “Great Society” in complete collapse, and various countercultural crusades have dismantled the social scaffolding that once provided you with clear roles and status. What do you do? Succumb to enervation and aimlessness in a fractured, filthy present, lurching toward a sterile, alienating future?

No! You go backward. The only bulwark against modern alienation is its wholesale rejection. Next thing you know, your local pizza parlor has player pianos and Tiffany lamps; Tiny Tim is tiptoeing through the tulips; The Sting has suffused the landscape with Joplin ragtime; and your cultural touchstones are The Waltons, Paper Moon, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Go outside, and girls are less go-go than they are Gunne Sax.

You think back on Bunker Hill as it existed just ten years ago. It wasn’t a bleak and blighted hellscape, yet; it was more Railway Children than it was Omega Man. As the reverie overtakes you, you realize what you truly miss: Angels Flight. The City scooped it up in 1969 and promised its return in “a couple of years.” It’s been four years now—how much longer will you have to wait?

But then, you get wind it IS back. Angels Flight! Reborn! Atop the new downtown Hyatt Regency! You conjure images of flocked wallpaper, Gibson Girl waitresses, and charmingly amateurish murals of Meredith P. Snyder shaking hands with Teddy Roosevelt.

But then you actually get there and it’s just covered in mirrors, reflecting not just your own weary face, but the inherent narcissism and cocaine use for which 1970s Los Angeles is so rightfully known.

Oh well.

ANGEL’S FLIGHT

Here, then, for you viewing pleasure, are some shots no-one has ever seen, of Los Angeles’ brand new revolving restaurant/cocktail lounge Angel’s Flight, in November 1973.

RECORD SCRATCH! Not long after this post went live, I got a message on my Instagram from Adsausage (presumably the esteemed Mr. Englender himself) hipping me to this link: https://www.adsausage.com/southern-california-in-print-paris-match#broadway-plaza and hooooooo boy!

Angel’s Flight revolving — in color!

Some scans of its menu (mailed to me out of the blue by the incomparable Chris Nichols):

Angel’s Flight spun and spun all through the 1970s and into the 80s. When and why did Angels Flight disappear? Tough to be certain. You could still spin into the New Year of 1988:

But the last known mention of the place was just a couple months later, in a Jack Smith column about how restaurants had become so annoyingly loud:

Maybe Nann Miller convinced them, because there are no further mentions of Angel’s Flight—and neither are there subsequent references to there being a revolving room atop the Broadway Plaza.

THE BROADWAY PLAZA

At this point you say, wait, what, so, Angels Flight bar and restaurant was in something called the Broadway Plaza? Which had a Hyatt Regency? And it was at Seventh and Flower? What the heck are you talking about?

In 1966, Broadway-Hale and Ogden Development began work on the Broadway Plaza, a massive project bounded by Seventh, Eighth, Flower, and Hope Streets. It is formally announced in February 1969: 500 room hotel, 32-story office tower, wrapping around a two-level shopping mall. All designed by Charles Luckman, head of Ogden Development.

On November 16th, 1973 the Philharmonic Affiliates held a “Promenade Party” to benefit the Philharmonic.

They sold 9500 tickets at $10 a pop and the event was the affair of the season:

The next day, November 17th, Mayor Tom Bradley was on hand for the official ribbon cutting:

Fast forward fifty-some years, and the mall has been blown out and opened to the elements, after the whole thing was remade as The Bloc (sorry, THE BLOC).

THE SPACE TODAY

At this point you are, undoubtedly, asking so what’s up there now? Does it still revolve? Can I get an Angels Flight Delight cocktail while spinning around in a circle? The answer is no, though the space has retained its amazing view. It is now the fitness center of the Sheraton Grand.

ANGEL’S FLIGHT RESTAURANT AND LOUNGE — THE REBOOT

Angels Flight was again reborn…in 1993. The Hotel Inter-Continental (Marsak’s Guide, p. 51) opened in December of that year, and included nods to Old Bunker Hill (naming the meeting rooms Bradbury, Crocker, Widney, etc.) up to and including a restaurant called Angel’s Flight:

Angel’s Flight Restaurant & Lounge opened January 1993 (read a review here), but did not survive long — Steve Harvey noted in August 1994 it had shut down “a few months ago.” In mentioning the late Angel’s Flight at the Broadway Plaza, and the demise of the Angel’s Flight at the Inter-Continental, but conversely noting the actual Angels Flight funicular was being returned to Bunker Hill, Harvey quipped:

ANGELS FLIGHT — THE CLOTHING LINE

As long as I’ve got you here, and we’re talking about “the other Angels Flight” and “another other Angels Flight” how about we cover one more:

And you’re like yeahhhhh…I’ve been in thrift stores and seen terrifying polyester outfits with this tag? What’s the deal with that?

Well, Tobias Kotzin (b. 1897) was a Jewish kid from, of all places, Covington, Kentucky (just over the Ohio River from Cincinnati). After wartime service as a corporal in the tank corps, in 1920 he lit out for Los Angeles seeking employment in the garment trade. He began the A-1 Manufacturing Co. on East Pico, became president of the Menswear Manufacturers of Los Angeles, and married into the prosperous Finkelhor family of Beverly Hills.

Kotzin, aged 78, dies in March 1976. Very soon thereafter, his company gets…weird. I know it was the 1970s and all, but even by 1970s standards, his apparel becomes downright prurient. And the name of the particularly salacious clothing line? Angels Flight, of course.

Why Angels Flight? Maybe there’s something suggestive in the trolley “rising up” … in any event, the first ads for Angels Flight clothing begin to appear in November 1976. Their raison d’être: Angels Flight trousers assist you in exhibiting your penis to random girls. Yes, that sentence is as accurate as it is disturbing.

Advertisments for Angels Flight clothing peter out (see what I did there) through 1985 and finally disappear altogether.

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Angel’s Flight — the revolving lounge, the posh restaurant, the manhood-shaping trouser — are gone, though we have had their namesake, Angels Flight, returned, of course. Remember, as well, that while we have lost our revolving Angels Flight restaurant, we still have the national treasure that is the Bonavista Lounge, the greatest revolving cocktail bar on planet earth, if not the greatest single interior space on said planet (St. Peter’s Basilica and Trinity College Library pale in comparison, yeah, I said what I said).

Our mission now is to remember the wild 1970s interior that was once the Broadway Plaza, and never forget the revolving wonder of what was once…Angel’s Flight.