Bunker Hill, Los Angeles

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all movies with Bunker Hill in them are better than others, that they are endowed by their creators to have lots of Bunker Hill in them, that among these include Angels Flight, Bunker Hill Avenue, and some pretty rare stuff once in a while.

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Let’s look at one of those “rare Bunker stuff in ’em” pictures, specifically, one I had no idea about — it is not, for example, in Jim Dawson’s book — heck, I’d never even heard of this film before Richard Schave sent me a link to it and asked hey, do you know the location of that place about an hour in? Boy, do I…

The movie is The Shadow on the Window.

It’s a 1957 picture about young thugs who kidnap a woman and traumatize Jerry Mathers in the process. You may watch the entirety of the movie by clicking here.

For our purposes, go to about fifty-six minutes in. Corey Allen (whom you remember as the gang leader in Rebel Without a Cause) has gone to his mother’s frowzy apartment to snag a gun and a car, but the cops are on his tail. They arrive:

And where is it they arrive, you ask?

Why it’s the Stanley Apartments, at the southeast corner of Flower and Second streets!

A bit about the Stanley: it began life as the La-Nel Apartments, built in 1913. Designed by Edward John Borgmeyer, it was a project of the Julius R. Smith’s Apartment House Building Company. Borgmeyer specialized in apartment houses, but was known to produce theaters as well (e.g., the Forum).

It was renamed The Stanley in 1921, after being purchased by Fullerton’s Charles Stanley Chapman (son of Charles Clarke Chapman, “Orange King of California” and founder of Chapman College). Charles Stanley Chapman kept his newly-monikered Stanley for just two years, giving it away in partial trade for the Commodore; nevertheless, the Stanley name stuck.

So anyway, it’s 1957 and someone on the Columbia lot says “go find us a down-at-heels tenement house to shoot at” and voilà—

Okay, THEN. Then something absolutely cuckoo-bonkers happens. Corey Allen drops off the fire escape and makes his way into the pedestrian passageway into the Second Street Tunnel. I have never seen a shot of this entrance.

I mean, I knew the railing was there—and I could see the entrance on aerials—

—but I despaired at ever seeing what the heck the tunnel looked like from the sidewalk. Until now. Not only that, they go through the passage where it turns, and emerges into the tunnel, and there’s gunplay! Plus lots of that famed shimmery-white Second Street Tunnel subway tile (imported from Germany, which caused a bit of consternation since we had just battled the Hun to end a War Against Mankind).

There’s even action on the south façade fire escape:

So much to see! When during the rooftop shootout, you’ll certainly wonder, what are those blinking neon lights in the distance?

And what became of the Stanley? The Community Redevelopment Agency got its demo permit in March 1966, and that was the end of the Stanley.

During the development of the Bunker Hill Towers, Flower Street north of Third was rerouted east toward Hope Street, and the Second Street Tunnel was extended west of Flower, almost to Figueroa; it can therefore be difficult to grasp just where the Stanley, at 210 South Flower Street, once stood…

The Stanley was perhaps not the most exciting structure on the hill, so I’m thrilled to give it and its little-considered architect E. J. Borgmeyer some notice.

Enjoy The Shadow on the Window! (Spoiler alert: the Stanley is the best part of the picture.)

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An addition:

My buddy Bryan is a cool guy. He sculpts busts of Edgar Allen Poe and Bram Stoker and H. P. Lovecraft, and then makes Lovecraftian films. Plus he has a giant African sulcata. Oh, and drives a 1961 hearse (the mark of greatness indeed! …or so says the man who drove one himself). Should you ever wish to theorize on the intersection of noir and the Luciferian ethos, buy Bryan a gimlet at Musso’s and he’ll bend your ear. Like I said, he’s a cool guy.

So it was no surprise when he wrote and told me you know, my great aunt lived on Bunker Hill during World War Two, want me to send you pictures of her there? Coolness is apparently set in DNA, because she lived not only on Bunker Hill, but in one of the coolest places on the Hill.

I don’t mean any of the great Victorian mansions cut up into apartments, or one of the Edwardian-era Corinthian-column’d apartment houses, which would be cool enough. No, she bucked Bunker convention and lived in some brand-new Streamline flats!

At which point you interject, that’s impossible, the very essence of Bunker Hill is that it was a place lost to time and frozen in place, where nothing new was built for decades on end, descending into a genteel and cinematic decrepitude!

Which I appreciate you saying, although that’s not entirely the case. You might recall the “Modern on the Hill” section of Bunker Hill, Los Angeles (pp. 146-53) wherein I dispense with the idea that all of Bunker Hill was absolutely antediluvian. And in that section, I devote an entire page (151) to the remarkable Avalon Apartments, built in 1938-39.

Thus, let me tell you all about the Avalon, and the awesome pirate who lived there.

I. The Avalon Apartments

The northeast corner of Second and Grand was laid out as part of the Mott Tract, lots 9 and 10 of Section G, back when Grand was still called Charity. Nathan Wilson Stowell, to whom we owe the growth of Los Angeles as much as anyone, bought the corner of Second and Charity and built a house there in 1884 (Charity Street became Grand Avenue in February 1887) . Nathan Stowell also married Florence N. Rivers in 1884. Florence’s uncle was Ernest Bradford Rivers, who worked for Stowell; EB Rivers worked with Stowell when Stowell sold part of his Second and Charity property to Robert Larkins, so that Larkins could build his magnificent Richelieu.

Los Angeles was scandalized when in 1905 Nathan Stowell, 53, abandoned his wife for a 22-year-old. Florence was awarded the house in the divorce, and it remained in Rivers hands, specifically, in the hands of Florence’s nephew Henry Edmund Rivers, son of her uncle Ernest.

Henry Rivers was in the real estate game, especially so after 1917, when he wed Mildred Strong, daughter of realty mogul Frank Raleigh Strong, who had subdivided dozens of residential areas in Los Angeles, including Silver Lake. (Frank Strong was known to go get drinking with Warren Harding at the Newport Yacht Club, and ironically, Newport Beach plays a large role in the latter part of our story.)

Henry Rivers — who was at the time president of real estate concern Rivers & Parmelee, Inc. at 510 West Sixth Street — had ownership of the old Stowell place, and approached the Department of Building and Safety with some plans in to add rooms to the thing in September 1938. Those plans came to naught, and a demo permit was pulled in November. Rivers had no architect proper, but used licensed engineer John H. Wilke to do the work for the new 24-room structure, built throughout 1938; it opened in late 1938 or early 1939.

We’re lucky to have any images of the Avalon. Nobody was going to go to Bunker Hill, as the looming shadow of death stretched over the charming old Victorians, to shoot something modern. The Avalon’s neighbors the Richelieu and Melrose were shot regularly, or a photographer would turn his back on the Avalon to shoot The Dome, on the opposite corner.

That said, we have a couple incredible captures from two motion pictures. One is via the process plate background film shot for the 1948 picture Shockproof — the car turns south on Grand from Second and we are rewarded with this:

And then there’s this excerpt, from Kent Mackenzie’s short Bunker Hill 1956, which he made as a USC undergrad before work on The Exiles.

So now you get it, right? That there as this amazing Modern apartment building on Bunker Hill at Second and Grand? Ok, well now let’s meet the crazy pirate that lived there!

II. Sally Brown

Sally Christine Glover was born to James Luther and Edna Ethel (née Lynn) Glover in Eula, Texas — a small community smack dab in the middle of the state — on May 8, 1914. Her people came to the colonies from England mostly as 17th century Virginia settlers, with some Ulster Scots emigrating to the Carolinas in the 18th. A number served in the Revolution, and through the 19th century they dispersed west, into Mississippi and Alabama, with some relocating to Texas.

James and Edna had twelve children (including Dorothy Louise “Dot” Glover, grandmother of the aforementioned Bryan, about whom I began this post). James and Edna move the family to Riverside in the early 1920s, and by 1930 are in Anaheim.

Sally meets Robert Leslie Brown, a Colorado boy who’d moved himself to Newport Beach. They get married in Yuma — Yuma being, like Vegas back in the day, a great place for a quick and easy wedding — on September 28, 1939:

In 1940 they lived at 1569 Miramar Dr. in Newport Beach; he was a clerk at the Balboa Fun Zone, and she worked as a switchboard operator for the telephone company.

One of the things they liked to do is be pirates.

Balboa Pirate Days was conceived of by the Junior Chamber of Commerce in 1935 as a way to bring business to town, and it was glorious. Tall ship battles, a boat landing and invasion, music and street dances, and a ball in the famed Rendezvous Ballroom where the Pirate Queen and her court were crowned. Residents who refused to dress like pirates were put on trial in a kangaroo court, thrown in a brig at the base of the pier (note the imprisoned gal, above), forced to walk the plank (or were just tossed into the bay), and fined (which went to charity).

The war began soon after, with Bob assigned to Lockheed in Northern Ireland, attached to Langford Lodge airfield in Belfast.

With Bob overseas, Sally moved from Orange County to downtown Los Angeles, now promoted to supervisor in the telephone company offices (either in the Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Southern California Telephone Company offices at 740 South Olive St., or its other offices, on Bunker Hill, at 433 South Olive).

As such, she moves into a place on Bunker Hill, said place being the Avalon Apartments. In August 1942, the Los Angeles Times supplement “Home Magazine” ran this piece —

— about how War Production Board orders regarding rubber rationing means nothing to the plucky, patriotic gal who lives and works downtown! It reads as a sort of proto-green, New Urbanist treatise on neighborhood live/work accommodations.

III. Postwar

Fighting ended, and Bob returned home. The Browns had daughter Barbara and son Robert Jr. in short order, and lived at 304 E. Oceanfront, then 211 East Central (now Balboa Blvd.) in Balboa.

The Balboa Pirate Days returned; here’s an image of Sally leaping ashore, in a news item from 1946:

But the pirate days would not last much longer. After the 1947 season, city fathers had grown tired of the drunken rowdiness and put a kibosh on the whole affair.

Sally gave up the telephone company and became a realtor, working many years in Newport and on Balboa. Here’s Sally and Bryan’s grandmother Dot on their Balboan bikes:

Sally’s daughter Barbara recounts how, in the 1950s, her mother would still go out for drinks with pals Pinkie and Renie (Irene) with whom she’d lived on Bunker Hill back in the day. I am deeply indebted to Barbara for the wonderful images of her mother! And of course to Bryan Moore who alerted me to the existence of his great-aunt and her amazing time on Bunker Hill.

And what happened to the Avalon? It had only just turned eighteen when the County came for the entire block bounded by First, Second, Olive and Grand, to be a parking lot for the new Courthouse and Hall of Administration project.

X marks the spot where the Avalon once stood, replaced by a parking garage:

If you have a relative who’s lived on Bunker Hill, don’t hesitate to contact me! See the “Contact” link at the upper right of this page. Thank you!

Part I is here.

Part II is here.

As a teen in the 1980s I sat through no small quantity of “youth culture” pictures. Most were terrible. Some were great (Repo Man); some were so-bad-they’re-great (Valley Girl); and some were objectively terrible, and yet absolute genius (Surf II).

Some were a cut above, like 1984’s Night of the Comet.

Night of the Comet has a lot going on. It’s a feminist treatise on the power of strong women and sisterhood. It’s a trenchant critique of Reagan-era consumer culture. It explicates the ennui of Late Cold War nuclear anxiety.

Me, I just like it ‘cuz it’s full of Bunker Hill.

NIGHT OF THE COMET

Let me mention at the outset, this was a really weird post to compile. Tuesday last I was busy command-shift-4’ing endless Comet screengrabs of an eerily still Los Angeles enveloped by a terrible reddish-orange post-apocalyptic haze. All of a sudden, wind roared like a freight train, and the power transformers exploded, plunging us into darkness. The next day, still no power — just an eerily still world outside, enveloped by a terrible reddish-orange post-apocalyptic haze.

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Night of the Comet, in a nutshell: the earth has passed through the tail of a comet, wiping out all the people. But teen sisters Regina and Samantha are so independent (having sex! fighting with mom!) they are spared obliteration. They then must navigate a post-comet world full of zombies and mad scientists, while dancing around in a mall to Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. It’s basically Day of the Triffids, but looks like Liquid Sky, plus it’s a Christmas movie, with Mary Woronov. Like I said, there’s a lot going on.

Much of which is going on on Bunker Hill. The filmmakers figured Bunker Hill, then in its nascent days of development, would be pretty empty and therefore useful in depicting a desolate, uninhabited world. They figured right.

Later, Reggie and Sam — raised by a military father — practice with their MAC-10.

There are a whole lot of “let’s find movie locations” websites, and many of them cover Night of the Comet. But I notice—as far as I can tell—none have ever identified the location of this target practice sequence. Well, here you go.

At this point you ask, what are structures behind them? Good question!

They then shoot the hell out of this poor defenseless ’75 Coupe de Ville:

Then there’s this incredible and oft-used image of the two gals atop the hood of a cruiser:

Oh, so, spoiler alert: at the end of the picture, with the death-dust washed away by rains, it’s up to Reggie and Sam to repopulate the world. Reggie becomes a suburban mom and Sam runs off with Reggie’s erstwhile videogame nemesis.

And in our parting shot, our new family plays football in the street —

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And that concludes our Bunker Hill-themed look at devoid-of-life, end-of-days LA. Shall it come to pass? Whither are we bound? I don’t know. But then, I never thought we’d live in a world without the McNally House.

My gut tells me Los Angeles’s dystopian future will look more than They Live than Return of the Living Dead, but I’ve been wrong before. God help us all.

Watch Night of the Comet in its entirety, here. A nifty music video that encapsulates the spirit of the film is here. Of course, if you want to learn more about the structures discussed in this post (the Bunker Hill Steps, Security Pacific Tower, Wells Fargo Center, etc. etc.) you might want to pick up the one-and-only guide to Bunker Hill, here.

Part I, detailing the evacuated, Venusian-menaced Bunker Hill of 1954 in Target Earth, is here.

People who own Marsak’s Guide to Bunker Hill have sometimes asked how did you get all those shots of Bunker Hill devoid of any sign of life?

In my years of architectural photography I have worked to shoot structures with as few cars and people in frame as possible, striving to depict buildings as standing alone, à la sculpture in a museum. That activity takes no small amount of patience and timing, but it produced some great shots for Marsak’s Guide:

That said, above and beyond the whole “patience and timing” business, the production of these images benefited greatly from a little thing called The Pandemic. Covid locked down the world, and told everyone to go inside; I, of course, did nothing but go outside, and revel in the newly-depopulated universe.

This is my roundabout way of saying pandemics are really useful for going outside, shooting architecture, or, shooting at pandemic-zombies with your S&W M76 (while wearing a safari jacket and driving a red 1970 Ford XL convertible).

The Omega Man

In Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend, a plague ravages earth courtesy of bats (not unlike, say, a certain earth-ravaging plague five years ago) at which point a guy named Robert Neville battles vampires, in Gardena of all places. The 1971 film The Omega Man, based on Matheson’s book, made the plague a result of biological warfare via some Sino-Soviet war, whereby Neville drives around greater Los Angeles, battling vampires (but fleshed out into “The Family,” a cult of mutant albinos bent on destroying technological prowess, like a bunch of freaky-deaky Ted Kaczynskis).

The opening few minutes of the picture are a marvel to behold. Omega Man‘s film crew took to Los Angeles’s empty Sunday morning streets in late 1970, filming Neville (Charlton Heston) driving around a sunlit downtown, while the photophobic zombie horde cowered in darkness. The first shot of the film, Heston heads east on Fifth Street, through the intersection of Figueroa:

In the image above, note the streetlights lining Flower between Fifth and Fourth—those are “Downtown Double” Model 1906 electroliers, custom designed for Los Angeles by Union Metal of Canton, Ohio. They were, of course, ripped out during the area’s redevelopment. But in late 2021 there were brought BACK—

Note this cool construction sign he drives past, with a rendering of the ARCO towers—

Then at about a 0:40 in there’s the most incredible thirty-second sequence of Heston blowing through three Wilshire intersections, shot from the top of One Wilshire. But since this is a Bunker blog and not an “L.A. locations” blog, you’ll just have to take that in on your own. And, again, I’m not going to go into all the other places Heston drives by (the movie is oft-noted for its inclusion of The Olympic theater), but I will point out that “Mikes Deluxe Burgers”—which is a 1946 lunch stand at 827 Santee built by one Alvin Jaines—is still extant, albeit enlarged by additions, and reborn as “Taco House #3.”

Then the credits come up and he’s back driving down Fifth Street, between the Union Bank and the under-construction ARCO towers—

Then, Heston’s all alone at the DWP building (which should remind you of this shot from here).

Lastly, there’s a collection of still images, showing a silent and empty city, among them being these two:

The opening scene of The Omega Man (Heston’s amazing 8-track music, btw, is Theme from A Summer Place as performed by the Ron Grainer Orchestra) is here, though you should really watch the whole movie; the trailer will convince you of that!

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Tune in next week, when I cover the post-comet Bunker Hill of valley girls and office towers in 1984’s Night of the Comet.

One of the benefits of loving Bunker Hill is seeing the area depicted on screen. Bunker Hill appeared in early comedies, and later, in television programs, but the Hill is best known for its supporting role in all those moody postwar films noir. Bunker Hill-in-the-movies is of course covered in Bunker Hill, Los Angeles, and in Bunker Noir! and also this post, featuring my compendium of Angels Flight in cinema. The definitive work on the subject is, of course, Jim Dawson’s Los Angeles’s Bunker Hill: Pulp Fiction’s Mean Streets and Film Noir’s Ground Zero! available here (check out Jim’s related website here).

For the next couple posts, though, I want to dig into Bunker Hill’s use, specifically, as a barren post-apocalyptic hellscape, as portrayed in three films: Target Earth (1954), The Omega Man (1971), and Night of the Comet (1984).

TARGET EARTH

Old Bunker Hill was, of course, no stranger to cinematic depictions playing up its empty streets. Consider Van Helfin’s mad dash through the deserted Hill in Act of Violence, or Jack Palance nefariously piloting his Oldsmobile through its desolate streets in Sudden Fear:

For example, Bunker Hill’s quiet community of live-and-let-live older folk allowed Roger Corman to shoot quick and cheap (and without permits) on the hill in December 1959 for his Little Shop of Horrors.

But only one film utilized Bunker Hill’s quiet neighborhood as the perfect setting for a deserted city menaced by sometimes-invisible death-ray-wielding Venusian space robots: Target Earth. It’s a cheapie made by indie outfit Abtcon Pictures in 1954, on the heels of successful 1953 alien invasion pictures like War of the Worlds and Invaders from Mars.

Granted, Target Earth‘s uninhabited Hill and empty LA wasn’t, I will admit, “post-apocalyptic” in the strict sense, as much as the city was voluntarily deserted…eh, so sue me. It was empty and spooky and that’s the point. Target Earth‘s film crew shot on the Hill on a Sunday morning in late July, when the city was still sleeping it off.

Target Earth begins with Kathleen Crowley (whom you might remember from seminal vampire western Curse of the Undead) waking from her failed suicide attempt to find the city abandoned; she opens her blinds and peers out the window to an empty world, specifically, upper Fifth Street looking toward Grand—

She then exits her pad at 109 South Flower Street:

Then Crowley looks down at the empty street she saw from her window:

Then, on upper Fifth, she walks past the Engstrum:

Still wandering about, wondering where everyone’s gone off to, on Third Street just the other side of the tunnel:

Next, she heads south on Grand toward Fifth, adjacent the Edison:

Lastly, at about 13:30, there’s this shot looking west on Fifth Street from atop the aforementioned retaining wall—

Want to watch Target Earth? Do so here (and, if you so like, colorized here). At 8:03 there’s a shot looking north on Flower across Wilshire, and immediately after, Crowley is seen running past the barber shop at 704 West 6th, at the southeast corner of Sixth and Hope. Around the 13:40 point was shot at the Dominguez-Wilshire and at the corner of Wilshire and Cloverdale; at 14:00 there’s a nice shot looking south on Beverly from Temple. Everything else seems like backlot, although the alien-shadow at 24:40 is against the Statler.

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Tune in next week, when I cover post-pandemic Bunker Hill (the cool 1970s pandemic, not the dumb 2020s one) in The Omega Man, and a post-comet Bunker Hill of valley girls and office towers in Night of the Comet.

Three years ago today, I published this post, Robert Frank Goes to Bunker Hill.

The most recent issue of photography ‘zine Dog Food is Robert Frank-themed, wonderful in general, but includes a particularly nifty spread called “Anatomy of a Shooting on Bunker Hill” excerpted from my post:

If you’re a completist and collect all things Bunker Hill, or just dig Frank and/or photography, might I suggest you pick up a copy. They are, after all, available free of charge.

Enjoy!

After Bunker Hill’s first inhabitants migrated west, the Hill became an enclave of bohemian writers, visionary artists, and vanguard spiritualists. Right? It was, after all, home to the likes of Anna May Wong, Leo Politi, and John Fante; the book Bunker Hill, Los Angeles has a whole section dedicated to its more famed denizens, including pioneering female photographers and trailblazing gay rights activists.

But let’s not forget that Bunker Hill was the refuge of Jew-hating fascists, shall we? Today we shall consider the life and times of former Hill inhabitant Ingram Hughes, head of the American Nationalist Party, who published judeophobic books, plotted to seize armories, and murder Jews en masse.

I. Ingram Hughes’ Early Life

Isaiah Ingraham Hughes Jr. was born to Isaiah Sr. (who was Ninth Illinois Cavalry, in the War Between the States) and mother Sarah Ada Abbot in Palouse, Washington, in 1875. At some point he develops his distaste for Jews, and it’s likely about that time he elects to go by a shortened-from-Ingraham “Ingram” (and abjuring Isaiah in toto, likely because it is a Hebrew name and all). He is educated at the University of Washington.

Hughes marries Nora Maude Tinsley (1869-1945) in King, Washington, in 1903. They move to San Diego in 1910, and Ingram Hughes is admitted to practice law before the State Supreme Court in 1914. Come 1920 they are separated, with Hughes (in the 1920 census as “Inghram”) living in Berkeley, and listed as a lawyer. They later reconciled and were living in Los Angeles in 1921.

There is some talk of divorce in 1928, and they separate (Maude moves with the boys to 1636 Lemoyne in Echo Park, where she lives for the rest of her days), but do not divorce until the mid-1930s. (Maude is listed as divorced in the 1940 census, and dies from stomach cancer in 1945.)

In 1932 Ingram moves to Bunker Hill:

Before we get into what Ingram Hughes did, let’s talk a bit about his home at 630 West Fourth St.

II. The LaBelle Apts., 630 West Fourth St.

Once, on the southeast corner of Fourth and Hope Streets, there were these three peas in a pod:

These three were all built in 1912, by Mrs. Frances Zahn and A. W. Ross. The first to go up was the Gordon, so named because it was leased by Mrs. W. C. Gordon. Then came the LaBelle:

And then, between the two, the Bronx.

Frances Zahn is also noted for having torn down the family home on Bunker Hill—a few doors south on Hope Street—and replacing it with an apartment house called the Rubaiyat. All of her buildings were designed by Frank Milton Tyler.

From the WPA drawings:

This 1941 aerial shows Hughes’ apartment house on the corner of Fourth and Hope, X marks the spot:

As long as we’re on the subject of the famous and funky folk of the Hill, here’s an annotated shot, showing some of the neighbors (Blackburn and Head lived there before Hughes’ time, but Chandler and Mather were Bunker Hill contemporaries):

III. Ingram Hughes Gets to Work

So, Ingram Hughes moves into the LaBelle at the corner of Fourth and Hope in 1932, and sets out to educate fellow goyim about the pernicious Hebrew. From the confines of his Bunker Hill apartment, he founds his own political organization, the American Nationalist Party. His intention was to expand the party nationally, under his leadership, incorporating regional leaders e.g., the Ohio/New York pamphleteer Robert Edward Edmonson.

In 1933, in his capacity as a printshop linotypist, Hughes publishes Rational Purpose in Government: Expressed in the Doctrine of the American Nationalist Party, AKA American Nationalism as Expressing the Rational Purpose in Government : Being a Declaration of the Principles of the American Nationalist Party.

In 1934 he publishes Anti-Semitism: Organized Anti-Jewish Sentiment, a World Survey. It can be read in its entirety here.

In 1935, Hughes authors and publishes this proclamation—

—calling for the holiday boycott of all Jewish-infested media. Hughes printed an untold number of these at the Los Angeles Printing Company, 1204 Stanford Ave., where he worked the linotype (LAPC printed the weekly Nazi-leaning German-language newspaper California Weckruf; shopowner Joseph Landthaler was treasurer-secretary of the local Friends of the New Germany). The flyer was distributed widely by the FNG, who ran the Aryan Bookstore in the Turnverein Hall at 1004 West Washington Blvd. (and the one at Deutsches Haus, 634 West 15th St.); it was also plastered on much of Los Angeles, and was surreptitiously inserted into copies of the Los Angeles Times in the warehouse before delivery.

From his home office in Bunker Hill’s LaBelle Apartments, Hughes corresponded with and sent literature to the likes of William Dudley Pelley, E. N. Sanctuary, Gerald Winrod, as well as European fascists like Arnold Leese and Ulrich Fleischauer.

In late 1935 Hughes planned a pogrom, involving the mass hanging of twenty Jews, including Samuel Goldwyn and Eddie Cantor. Unbeknownst to Hughes, his personal secretary, Charles Slocombe, was a spy for the Los Angeles Jewish Community Committee, and the LAJCC worked with the LAPD to bug Hughes’ Bunker Hill apartment. They decided the heavyset, balding, bespectacled, 60-year-old Hughes was more bluster than determination in such matters. Hughes was, and rightfully so, worried that Jewish spies had infiltrated—not his, of course—too many local fascist organizations, making his murderous plans too risky.

In 1936 Ingram Hughes published Ye Kynge Goethe to Towne, a Ballade of Shreddes and Patches AKA The King Goes to Town, A Metrical Romance in Ballad Form, a compendium of “pilfered, pillaged, and purloined” verse. The text was accompanied by late-Medieval woodcuts, as chosen by Ingram’s 24-year-old son Owen Rhys Hughes (1912-1994). It can be read in its entirety here.

As evidenced by Ye Kynge Goethe, Hughes eventually eased up on the antisemitic screeds, preferring to simply output more anodyne, albeit conspicuously über-European, material. Nevertheless, in 1937, he was hauled before the McCormack-Dickstein Committee and grilled about his possible Nazi links:

Hughes shows up again in the papers, mentioned in relation to the special House committee investigating subversive activities, in 1938:

It’s the final time Hughes is mentioned in relation to fascism. A year and change later, his Bunker Hill address is listed as that for “Ingram Hughes, Publisher of Fine Books”—

He is still listed at the Fourth Street address in 1942, according to voter rolls, as a member of the Prohibition Party:

In the 1948 and ’50 voter rolls, Hughes has moved to 203 South Bunker Hill Ave.—

—and here is a shot of 203 SBHA in 1945; for all I know, that’s Hughes himself hobbling home:

And then he passes on December 27, 1949. Although he is listed in the 1950 voter rolls at 203 SBHA, his obituary places him about three miles to the southwest:

And that is the story of how, in the 1930s, Bunker Hill harbored one of Los Angeles’s fascist publishers. Of course, fascists, isolationists, and other such ilk became witheringly unpopular come 1941, with the attack on Pearl Harbor, eighty-three years ago today.

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If you are interested in the greater story of prewar Los Angeles fascists, please see the books Hitler in Los Angeles and/or Hollywood Spies; and online, you may read Spies author Laura Rosenzweig’s thesis (Hughes is most prominently mentioned on pp. 206-240, and 280-289).

October is upon us—the time to celebrate all things dark, and weird, and similarly wonderful.

The perfect reading material for such times involves, of course, tales of murder and mayhem. And…Bunker Hill. Gosh, if only there was a publication about the twisted tales of terror from atop Bunker Hill…

Huzzah! Bunker Noir!

Bunker Noir! is a compendium of everything strange and terrible that came from the Hill, which I published in a limited edition, and I’ve sold nearly all of ’em at $30 a pop. I’ve got one box left, which are for a limited time 20% off! If you’ve got yours already, this is the month you buy another as a Hallowe’en gift!

That’s right, what was once $30 is now a paltry $24. They are available at this October-only discounted price through the month of October, here on Amazon and eBay.

However, should you PayPal or Venmo me the $24 direct, I’ll send you your new copy of Bunker Noir! and pick up the costs of packing and postage myself, saving you a few bucks. (PayPal is eckener@kingpix.com, as is the Venmo.)

For more information about Bunker Noir! click here and here and here.

Couple Octobers ago, I wrote this post about former Bunker Hill resident James Oviatt, because at the time there was to be a tour of the Oviatt Building’s famed Olive Street penthouse, focusing specifically on its spookiness.

Well, the time has come for me to inform you that this season is similarly graced by a tour of the former digs of “Bunker Hill Boy Made Good” James Oviatt:

I should mention as well that this time, there will be an incredible display of vintage Hallowe’en costumes, from the collection of that brilliant wife o’ mine, Nicole! Plus cocktails! Music! Don’t miss the event of the season!

Information and tickets may be had by clicking here.

Make sure you read Part One! Make sure you read Part Two!

And now, for your edification and delectation (and as a shameless plug for Marsak’s Guide to Bunker Hill, on sale!) may I present the third and final installment of Bunker Hill Then-and-Nows: The Modern Years—

I trust you have enjoyed these last three weekends full of Bunker Hill Then-and-Now photography.

If you’ve found these investigations of modern Bunker Hill interesting, might I suggest you buy the book! And again, I thank you for your attention.