New Yorker Makes (Up) History! Yes, New Yorker Magazine - Likely, Totally Prints a Completely Made Up Fictional Story About Los Angeles History!

Here is a A Split-Screen Tour of Los Angeles, Seventy Years Ago and Today

Now, this a really great piece split screen film showing the new and the old Bunker Hill on the same screen, but the text that comes with it - is an, unforseen disaster  

        And I realize.  the writer likenyonlu just needed a short inseentroduction with a little excitement in it and while rummaging through - his or her mind - a number of possibilities came up.  Unfortunately, none of them had any relation to the  truth. And these are the 'incorrect statements'.

Bunker Hill, an area of roughly five square blocks in downtown Los Angeles, holds a place in city lore similar to that of the water wars or the construction of Dodger Stadium: beginning in 1959, it was the subject of a massive urban-renewal project, in which “improvement” was generally defined by the people who stood to profit from it, as well as their backers at City Hall, at the expense of anyone standing in their way.

The Bunker Hill Redevelopment Project was adopted in 1959 and somehow lasted an astonishing fifty-three years. 

       The unnamed, and still - totally annymois - writer/directer then states that  Bunker Hill 's 1960's razing and then . total redevelopment was actually a secret plot - by all the evil  developers -  who were eager to get the city to condemn and bulldoze the entire hill so they could extract immense amounts money for themselves.  And that they were ruthlessly doing this at the expense of anyone who got in their way! 

        Now in the over 50 years I've been personally involved - in one way or the  with Bunker Hil, first as a private citizen then as elected member (and I was opposed to the CotherRA project; my years were spent trying to save its Victorian houses), I have never  - once  -  heard or read anyone suggest anything remotely like that conspiracy theory. 

       The very simple reason for that is that - nothing - even resembling a giant giant land swindle ever happened.   And besides the fact it never happening, there  urban legends about it happening. Which is surprising since Bunker Hill has had more lies  and tall tales told about it than any other project in DTLA’s history.

          Now one of the ways to disprove this feleonous claim - other than the, simple fact it never happened – is that for over one hundred years - the City of Los Angeles, following the successful examples set by West Coast cities such as Seattle and Portland, had tried to better connect Downtown with adjacent areas by tearing down Bunker Hill.  That project - from its inception over one hundred years ago - was what used to be called a civic improvement that would benefit the nverall civic good 

         And even back in 1916, almost al of the owners of the buildings on Bunker Hill had realized tharttheir disconnection from the rest of the city was hurting their properties and so started tearing down their own buildings and regrade the hill themselve; the price tag, of 16,000,000 million dollars was too much for either the civic realm -  or the private realm -  to then afford.  

      Every few years, though, some new versions  of the older Bunker Hill projects were being proposed; first  in the 1920’s, and then in 1930's, and finally - in the 1940's and the early 1950's.  But the problems were always the same - the huge cost of the project - and the lack of any demand for the land.

So the huge1950's plan was just another revision of what had been, for many decades, a blockagethis time it had federal money to get the project done. And by the early 1960’s, finan new parcels were being created and they were slowly sold and equally slowly developed; a huge

And the reason the development went slowly was that the Bunker Hill project had always been a civic project designed to achieve certain civic goals.  It had never been a developer pushed project.

And not once in the project's one hundred year history had there had never anyone - much less a developer – eager to get their hands on that property. 

So the New Yorker Magazine should consider,  both remove and, retract that post -  before it validTWA one more lie to the history books.   Assuming, of course whoc I do0a – that the  New Yorker is interested in the truth - and that is something I do believe is true; which they can prove by running an important article - that they had commissioned - from one of their finest reporters - until they realized - he had chosen to tell a truth that was   - rather than tell