A Walk Around The Bunker Hill District, Downtown Los Angeles

Bunker Hill is a historic prominence that traditionally separated Downtown Los Angeles from the rest of the city to the west before the hill was tunneled through at Second Street in 1924.

In the late 20th century, the hill was lowered in elevation, and the entire area was redeveloped to supplant old frame and concrete buildings with modern high-rises and other structures for residences, commerce, entertainment and education.

Many of the older buildings and the early high-rises surrounding Bunker Hill are undergoing adaptive reuse from commercial to residential. This trend began in 2000, when the Los Angeles City Council passed an Adaptive Re-Use Ordinance, allowing old unused office buildings to be redeveloped as apartments or "lofts". Developers realized there was a high level of pent-up demand for living in or near downtown, by both artists and employees of various firms in the financial district and government workers in the Civic Center, and that they could profit by supplying housing to meet such demand.

Because of the popularity of the New Urbanism in California, the city has required developers to build mixed-use residential buildings as much as possible. This means that the first floor of such residential developments are devoted to commercial retailers, so that residents do not have to constantly drive around for all their shopping trips and buildings present a more welcoming facade to passersby on the sidewalk.

Contributing to the resurgence of Bunker Hill has been the construction of public venues, such as the Walt Disney Concert Hall and Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, and the Museum of Contemporary Art. In February 2007 $2.05 billion was approved for the Grand Avenue Project, which over the next 10 years will bring in over 2,000 new residential units, over 400 of them being affordable units for all degrees of low-income families; 1 million square feet (93,000 m²) of office space; a Mandarin Oriental hotel; 600,000 square feet (56,000 m²) of retail and entertainment space; and the Grand Park, connecting City Hall to Bunker Hill. Office space and residential units will be in several skyscrapers ranging between 35-55 stories each. Nearby planned projects include L.A. Live on Figueroa Street and Olympic Boulevard in South Park (the southern end of the Bunker Hill area). A new major modern art museum, The Broad, is currently under construction next to Disney Hall.

The Angels Flight tramway, which was rebuilt in 1996 near where it was originally located and shut down after a fatal accident in 2001, reopened on March 15, 2010 to provide a link between Bunker Hill and the revitalized downtown area. One sign of the success of the downtown renaissance is that the office vacancy rate for the fourth quarter of 2004 was 16%, compared to 19% for 2003, and 26% for 1999.