Touch of the Old-Fashioned : Funicular trolley will be revived in downtown Los Angeles

Southern California’s emerging mass transit network has all the earmarks of 21st-Century technology. Yet sometimes old-fashioned technology is, if not best, certainly more enduring.

Work began last week on restoration of Angels Flight, the funicular railway that operated on Bunker Hill between 1901 and 1969.

Few people were on hand in 1969 when Angels Flight’s two cars made their last runs along the 315-foot railway, victims of declining ridership in a deteriorating central city. But many Angelenos nonetheless mourned the passing of Angels Flight, and, for decades, the Community Redevelopment Agency would promise restoration of the funicular.

Last week, as the old station house and archway were positioned at 4th and Hill streets in the first step of that long-promised restoration, hundreds watched.

City planners had been waiting for completion of the California Plaza project to revive Angels Flight. The line will link downtown’s shopping district with the growing forest of new office towers.

When the sluggish economy pushed the California Plaza project back, the CRA decided to move ahead with restoring the railway, now expected to resume operation in late 1993.

When Angels Flight was dismantled in 1969, this newspaper marked its demise as “the end of a dynamic era . . . (spanning) the history of the city from the day of horse and buggy to the high-rise towers now emerging on Bunker Hill.” Perhaps its restoration marks the beginning of another dynamic era for downtown, one in which the best of the old blends with the best of the new.