BUNKER HILL

A note on Downtown, because that is all downtown Los Angeles deserves. This opinion will undoubtedly offend entrenched downtown interests, and historians who still feel that the development of the city must, in some way, follow consequentially from the foundation of the pueblo on a site somewhere on the northern fringe of the present downtown area. There is clearly a feeling that downtown has got to be important because downtowns are significant and important places in all selfrespecting cities, and there have been seriously-intended and massively-funded attempts to reactivate the area; hence the cultural «Acropolis» being created on Bunker Hill above City Hall, and hence also the cluster of new commercial towers around the area loosely referred to as «Broadway and Seventh». But quite typically, one of the most prestigious new cultural institutions, the County Art Museum, is seven miles away on the rival downtown of Wilshire Boulevard, and it is difficult in terms of the general style of the metropolis at large not to feel that this is a much more appropriate setting than that of the concert hall and theatre on Bunker Hill.
Reyner Banham
«Los Angeles-The Architecture of four ecologies»
1971

Thom Andersen

This film is screened together with <filmlink id=\"2798\">The Exiles</filmlink>
1958-61, Kent Mackenzie