Los Angeles's Bunker Hill

When postwar movie directors went looking for a gritty location to shoot their psychological crime thrillers, they found Bunker Hill, a neighborhood of fading Victorians, flophouses, tough bars, stairways and dark alleys in downtown Los Angeles. Novelist Raymond Chandler had already been there exploring the real-life mean streets that his hardboiled detective, Philip Marlowe, prowled in the writer s exacting prose. But the biggest crime was going on behind the scenes, run by the city s power elite. And Hollywood just happened to capture it on film. Using nearly eighty photos, writer Jim Dawson enlarges the record of L.A. history with this grassroots investigation of a vanished place.”