Los Angeles's Bunker Hill: Pulp Fiction's Mean Streets and Film Noir's Ground Zero!

When postwar movie directors went looking for a gritty location to shoot their psychological crime thrillers, they found Bunker Hill, a neighborhood of fading Victorians, flophouses, tough bars, stairways and dark alleys in downtown Los Angeles. Novelist Raymond Chandler had already been there exploring the real-life “mean streets” that his hardboiled detective, Philip Marlowe, prowled in the writer’s exacting prose. But the biggest crime was going on behind the scenes, run by the city’s power elite. And Hollywood just happened to capture it on film. Using nearly eighty photos, writer Jim Dawson enlarges the record of L.A. history with this grassroots investigation of a vanished place.

• The Raymond Chandler Map of Los Angeles
• Lost Los Angeles
• Bunker Hill in the Rearview Mirror: The Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of an Urban Neighborhood
• Los Angeles's Angels Flight (Images of America: California)
• Kiss Me Deadly (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]
• Bunker Hill Los Angeles: Reminiscences of Bygone Days
• Double Indemnity [Blu-ray]
• Chinatown [Blu-ray]
• Silent Visions: Discovering Early Hollywood and New York Through the Films of Harold Lloyd
• Miracle Mile in Los Angeles:: History and Architecture