Hostelry and History: Oh, the Suite Life of Bunker Hill

Some years ago, when we had house guests and the atmosphere was strained, I thought it best for me to move out for a while.

I checked into a fleabag hotel at 2nd and Hill; it was cheap and it was close to The Times. (The place has been completely renovated and is now respectable). The neighbors were noisy. The halls reeked of cooking cabbage. My room was directly across the street from a fire station. At 2 a.m. the fire engines came clanging out. I woke up in a panic, quite disoriented. My first night was my last.

The other day my wife and I paid a visit to the Inter-Continental Hotel above Olive Street on what is left of Bunker Hill. I had heard that they had commissioned paintings of several old Bunker Hill mansions, which now hung in their meeting rooms.

Except for a couple of relics transplanted to Heritage Square, oil paintings and photographs are about all that is left of those wonderful old gingerbread houses in which the city’s leading families once resided. (Leo Politi has preserved them wonderfully in his book “Bunker Hill Los Angeles” (1943) ).

Susan Bejeckian, the hotel’s PR director, showed us through a number of handsome meeting rooms, each named after an old Bunker Hill house and each containing paintings of that house by Gerald Brommer--the Crocker house, the Rose house, the Bradbury mansion, each with its turrets, domes, bay windows and stained glass.

My memories of the houses were not from their heyday, at the turn of the century, when elegant young ladies emerged from them to depart in carriages, but in the 1930s, when most of them had become seedy rooming houses, and worse, bordellos.

Ms. Bejeckian also took us to the 17th floor to show us the presidential suite. It was stately but not ornate. Adequate, it seemed to me, for Bill and Hillary and their guests. I was reminded of the suite my wife and I had stayed in at the Intercontinental Hotel in Geneva.

We had been driving through France and arrived rather late in the day. We couldn’t find lodging. Every room was taken. I finally pulled into the Intercontinental. I knew it would be expensive, but I thought, what the hell--so it cost a couple of hundred dollars. The clerk said he had only one room left and it was so many francs. I figured it at about $125. I couldn’t believe our luck.

A bellman put our bags on a truck and we got into an elevator with him and a dapper little man who turned out to be the assistant manager. I thought that was strange, the assistant manager going up with us. We went to the top. The assistant manager threw open a door and stepped back ceremoniously. I couldn’t believe it. It may not have been the presidential suite, but surely no guest under the rank of assistant secretary of state had ever stayed there.

“How much did you say this was?” I asked. The assistant manager gave me the price in francs. “How much is that in dollars?” I asked. He said, “Four hundred and sixty-five dollars.” (This was in 1983). He had been thinking Swiss francs, I had been thinking French francs.

I saw the dismay on my wife’s face. Dismay and embarrassment. I said, “We’ll take it.”

The Los Angeles Inter-Continental’s Angel’s Flight restaurant overlooks the California Plaza water court, a sunny lagoon that will be used in summer to mount various entertainments. A waterfall splashes down over a concrete platform that can be used as a stage. Two glass-walled skyscrapers rise above the plaza, looking like giant ice cubes. The city’s skyline, including the 73-story First Interstate, looms beyond them.

Down the slope, on Hill Street, we could see the tiny dilapidated arch and towers of Angel’s Flight itself, the historic funicular railway that ran up and down the hill from 1901 to 1969. The gateway arch had been moved from storage to its present location in October, 1991, after 20 years of promises that the railway would be restored.

“They’re going to put it back,” Ms. Bejeckian said.

“Do you believe that?” I asked her.

“Yes, I believe it.”

As Politi says in his book, “Several times the Flight has been the target of those who would demolish it, yet it has always been defended. Are we still strongly interested in preserving this unique landmark today?”

I’ll believe it when I see it.

The Inter-Continental is the first hotel built in downtown Los Angeles in 10 years. I think its gestures toward the Bunker Hill of old are commendable. There is little enough in the glitz and concrete of today’s Bunker Hill to remind us of the quaint old days.

If I ever find life at home too strenuous again, I know where I’m going to hole up. But don’t reserve the presidential suite for me.