Where Angels Tread

Not all angels are equipped for winged flight. Some go on foot, and for them, and for visitors to the heart of the City of Angels, there is Angels Walk, a new self-guided stroll among the extraordinary landmarks, vintage and modern, in downtown Los Angeles.

The tour, created by the nonprofit Angels Walk LA to highlight history and art hidden to the motorist, officially opens with a ribbon-cutting at 10 a.m. on Monday, at the foot of Angels Flight.

When the first phase is complete in January, 15 illustrated bronze tableaux positioned throughout downtown will tell the stories of 15 landmarks of urban art and architecture that span more than a century of the city’s history. The project is sponsored by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Los Angeles Department of Transportation and Community Redevelopment Agency.

Two more stretches of the walking tour are planned for downtown, and another in Hollywood. The next segment will continue north on Spring Street over to Union Station and will open before the end of next year.

Modeled on Boston’s Freedom Trail, the urban amble moves from a Victorian interior to a vista of Beaux Arts buildings, along a symphony of orchestrated fountains to a football field-sized modern mural. Visit these 15 sites and visualize what life was like when downtown was the cultural, residential and financial center of Los Angeles:

1. Spring Street, 333 S. Spring St.

The financial backbone of newly prosperous Southern California was Spring Street, “the Wall Street of the West,” centered on the stock exchange, its facade bearing the figure of Finance flanked by a bull and a bear.

Tycoons set up shop in splendid Beaux Arts buildings that still draw movie makers for the authentic period settings. The dozen stories of the 1904 Braly Building, the city’s first skyscraper, dominated Spring Street’s skyline until the 26-story City Hall opened in 1927.

Famous guests stayed at the elegant Alexandria Hotel. Sarah Bernhardt, Enrico Caruso and Theodore Roosevelt slept under its roof--separately. It was in the Alexandria in 1919 that Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks formed their own movie-making organization, United Artists.

E.O.C. Ord, the 19th century surveyor charged with laying out and naming city streets, was wooing Trinidad de la Guerra. He bestowed his nickname for her on the street: “mi prima-vera, my springtime”--Spring Street.

2. The Bradbury Building, 304 S. Broadway (marker at this spot will be installed in January)

Lewis Bradbury was a mining tycoon whose name is remembered in the superb building he built in 1894--”a fairy tale of mathematics,” one critic called its red sandstone exterior and soaring brick and wrought-iron-lace inner spaces.

Bradbury paid for the five-story building, but it was George Herbert Wyman, a $5-a-week draftsman, who designed it. He did it, he later said, because a Ouija board message from his dead brother advised, “Take the Bradbury assignment. It will make you famous.”

Wyman never again designed anything so lovely, but after the Bradbury, he didn’t need to.

3. The Million Dollar Theater and Grand Central Market, 307/317 S. Broadway (January)

Two landmarks opened one year apart. At the head of Broadway, a street bejeweled with lavish movie houses, is the Million Dollar Theater--named for its cost. Showman Sid Grauman opened it in 1918, a model for his later theaters, Hollywood’s Chinese and Egyptian.

By 1939, the Churrigueresque-fronted theater was showing Spanish films and stage acts. Plaques on the sidewalk in front honor such Latin American stars as Cantinflas and Lola Beltran.

A year before the Million Dollar opened, Grand Central Market set up shop. Its open-air stalls were an instant hit. In one month in 1944, 1.3 million people shopped there. It was a must for political campaigners, among them Richard Nixon and John and Bobby Kennedy.

4. Angels Flight, 351 S. Hill St.

The world’s “shortest railway” debuted on New Year’s Eve 1901, journeying 325 feet each way up and down the heights of Bunker Hill. Four hundred times a day, seven days a week, the two cream-colored wooden cars hauled people from the smart Victorian hilltop mansions down to the flatlands and back up again, at a penny a ride.

In 1935, when the city planned to replace Angels Flight with a nondescript elevator, Angelenos balked. The city backed down until 1969, when, in the name of urban renewal, it was dismantled. Officials swore that Angels Flight would be back in “a few years.” But it was nearly three decades of red tape, real estate wrangles and money woes until, in 1996, the cars began rolling again, a half-block south of the original path.

5. California Plaza/Water Court, between 250 S. Olive St. and 350 S. Grand Ave. (January)

Computer-choreographed fountains at the Watercourt at California Plaza contrast with the western adage, “Whiskey’s for drinkin’ and water’s for fightin’ over.”

For decades, the city’s population was limited by the flow of its river. By the late 19th century, that was not enough for a growing city. Engineers and lawyers set to work and in 1913, water czar William Mulholland opened the 233-mile aqueduct that funneled water from the Owens River north of Los Angeles. Mulholland declared, “There it is. Take it.” The water wars of the 1920s began when Los Angeles further siphoned Owens Valley water.

The city can still feel the parched hand of drought. In the 1970s and ‘80s, mandatory conservation included shutting down decorative fountains that did not recycle.

6. Grand Avenue, 355 S. Grand Ave. (January)

Bearing the name of a famous hill in American history, Bunker Hill is in fact a long mound that has divided downtown physically and even politically for decades. Nowadays, Grand Avenue and its parallel street, Hope, unite the two downtowns, the streets abuzz with commerce and culture. At the head of Bunker Hill stands the Performing Arts Center, its buildings embracing a Jacques Lipchitz fountain. Across the street, the Disney Concert Hall designed by L.A. architect Frank Gehry is a work in progress.

The Bunker Hill culture corridor continues with the Colburn School of Performing Arts and the Museum of Contemporary Art. Outdoor artwork in Bunker Hill’s courtyards and plazas include Alexander Calder’s red-painted steel “Four Arches” in the Arco Plaza and Michael Heizer’s geometric series titled “North, East, South, West,” which makes its home at 5th and Flower streets. Elsewhere are artworks by Louise Nevelson and Alexander Liberman.

7. Bunker Hill, 350 S. Hope St., below Wells Fargo Center

Skyscrapers symbolizing the city’s towering ambitions are a modern incarnation of Bunker Hill’s first buildings--millionaires’ gingerbread mansions.

Prudent Beaudry bought 20 hilltop acres in 1867, but the $517 he paid didn’t appear to be a bargain; newspapers derided the land as a “howling coyote wilderness.”

In 1875, Beaudry named the place Bunker Hill, for the centennial celebration of the Revolutionary battle in Boston. Quickly it became the neighborhood. Its scroll-frilled Victorian mansions, its gardens and stately trees, all accessible by Angels Flight cars, soon were home to the city’s leading families.

In 1961, after the city had designated all 136 acres as blighted and bought out or pushed out the last 9,000 residents, bulldozers sliced 30 feet off the hilltop, and smashed the last haggard skeleton of Victorian chic, the 1904 Hillcrest Hotel.

8. Bunker Hill Steps, where South Hope Street dead-ends at 5th Street

Once christened “Cardiac Hill,” the climb now has 103 steps (and escalators) to let visitors easily ascend five stories among downtown vistas and green terraces. The Bunker Hill Steps, based on the Spanish Steps in Rome, opened in 1990, part of a redesign that included the revamped Central Library and the Library Tower. From sculptor Robert Graham’s “SourceFigure,” a statue of a woman at the head of the stairs, a waterway flows down the middle of the staircase in a river-rock-like stream bed.

The stairs, with their “resting spaces,” popular for midday loungers and lunchers, were made possible by tragedy: the 1986 arson fire at the Central Library. A complicated agreement helped to fund library restoration and allowed developers to build both the Library Tower--73 stories high, the West Coast’s tallest building--and the Bunker Hill Steps.

9. The Central Library, 630 W. 5th St.

One of the great losses and great triumphs of civic life is the April 1986 arson fire in the aging Los Angeles Central Library--a blaze that hit as city fathers were considering tearing it down.

In the original building, architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue crafted in 1926 a pyramid-topped design that mixed the ancient cultures of Rome, Byzantium, Egypt and Spain. Inside, proportioned spaces, textures and light, and murals of history and children’s stories enchanted patrons.

Author Ray Bradbury wrote fondly of educating himself from its shelves, but by 1986, the place was dangerously outdated. Proposals were put forward to sell it or tear it down. The arson fire changed that. Angelenos volunteered to save what remained and to raise money to bring back the old building and add a new wing. Ironically, the grime that had long coated the fabulous murals protected them from smoke damage.

10. One Bunker Hill, 601 W. 5th St.

Fifth Street at Grand Avenue focuses power and energy in two buildings, classic and modern: the Southern California Edison building and the Gas Co. Tower.

The terra-cotta and limestone Edison Building, now One Bunker Hill, was the West’s first to be all-electric. Over its doors are allegorical figures representing light, power and hydroelectric energy.

A mural joins fabled titans of electricity like Thomas Edison and Benjamin Franklin in the building’s superb 12-story lobby, its marble columns set beneath a lofty coffered ceiling. Filmmakers shot scenes here for both “Arthur” and “MacArthur.”

Across the street, the Gas Co. Tower’s 52 stories reflect the blue of a natural-gas flame, but the see-through lobby flooring makes visitors feel they are dancing on water. Through the glass walls visitors can see the 40,000-square-foot Frank Stella mural “Dusk,” commissioned in fulfillment of the city’s public art requirement.

11. The Regal Biltmore Hotel, 506 S. Olive St.

“The Host of the Coast” was the largest hotel west of Chicago when it was built in 1923. In its ballroom, in 1927, Cedric Gibbons sketched the design for the first Oscar on a hotel napkin; four Oscar ceremonies subsequently would be held at the hotel.

Its pillows have been plumped for assorted royalty and six presidents. In 1964, the Beatles, on their first U.S. tour, were dropped by helicopter onto the hotel rooftop.

The hotel is a favorite for films, notably “The Sting,” “Beverly Hills Cop” and “Vertigo,” in which director Alfred Hitchcock used the 11 flights of wrought-iron backstairs to create dizzying scenes in 1958.

12. Pershing Square & International Jewelry Center, 550 S. Hill St.

Los Angeles’ first public park is one of the few pieces of real estate that has not changed title since El Pueblo de Los Angeles was founded in 1781.

Pershing Square was so named after the 1918 armistice in honor of Gen. “Black Jack” Pershing, who led the black 10th Cavalry Regiment in the Spanish-American War and the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe.

More than 40 years before, St. Vincent’s College, the city’s first, opened on 6th Street. Students played baseball across the street at what was called St. Vincent Park.

In the 1930s and ‘40s, when the tropical look was in vogue, banana trees and birds of paradise were planted along Pershing Square’s brick-paved walks. But the cool downtown oasis was eventually sacrificed to discourage crime.

The site that was once home to a college named for St. Vincent de Paul, patron saint of the destitute, became the St. Vincent Jewelry Center, renowned for precious gems.

13. The Oviatt Building, 617 S. Olive St. (January)

The largest collection of glass by French Art Deco designer Rene Lalique was made for the Oviatt. Haberdasher James Oviatt, bowled over by Art Deco at the 1925 Paris Exhibition, enlisted Lalique to ornament Alexander & Oviatt, the city’s most exclusive men’s store, whose clientele included Cecil B. DeMille and John Barrymore.

More than 30 tons of art glass were shipped from Paris in 1928, more Lalique glass than in any other single building in the world.

Oviatt lived above the shop in an Art Deco penthouse even more luxurious than the goods he sold. Atop the 12-story building was a three-faced neon clock, and Oviatt’s private retreat, with his private “beach,” which included imported French sand for sunbathing.

The shop closed in 1969, but Academy Awards revelers have sometimes celebrated in the chic ground-floor restaurant--two blocks north from where, in 1907, “In the Sultan’s Power” was shot--the first dramatic film ever made entirely in Los Angeles.

14. The Pacific Center, 523 W. 6th St.

The Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Co. was founded in 1868 by three of California’s Big Four merchants, bankers and railroad owners. Fed up with with Eastern insurance companies’ high premiums for frontier living, the trio opened the first life insurance company west of the Mississippi.

In 1906, Pacific Mutual moved here. Weeks later, its just-vacated San Francisco headquarters were dynamited to stop the spread of fire after the great earthquake.

The new headquarters were housed in a six-story glazed-white terra-cotta building at 6th and Olive. Decades of Angelenos checked the time by glancing at Pacific Mutual’s rooftop clock, which warned in neon, “Time to Insure.”

In spite of Depression-era claims that threatened it, Pacific Mutual was soon wielding great influence again, due in part to its CEO, Asa Call, the “Mr. Big” of state politics, one of the “millionaires’ group” that propelled Ronald Reagan into the governorship.

In 1972, the company--in whose building both Laurel and Hardy and Richard Nixon had occupied offices--became one of the first big firms to go south, to Orange County, and shortened its name to Pacific Mutual.

15. The Fine Arts Building, 811 W. 7th St.

During the booming 1920s, one downtown building was devoted to arts other than commercial ones: a dozen stories of Romanesque Revival called the Fine Arts Building. Some 27,000 people showed up when it opened in 1926 to marvel at such medieval touches as the arched entrance, guarded above by a bestiary of fantasy animals.

Figures on the third-story cornice honor “Sculpture” and “Architecture,” and legend holds that their ailing creator, Burt Johnson, rigged up a lift to raise his wheelchair so he could finish his labors. The interior tiles are by Ernest A. Batchelder, whose Pasadena kilns were turning out the nation’s premier decorative tiles.

Seventh Street, for decades Los Angeles’ plushest shopping district, is rich in fine buildings, such as 818 7th, the original 1929 flagship of the now-vanished Barker Brothers furniture store. In the early 1980s, the Fine Arts Building was minutely restored to its place as a jewel in downtown’s crown.

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Times staff writers Patt Morrison and Cecilia Rasmussen researched and wrote the texts on the Angels Walk historical markers.