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Watch: Seventy Years of Los Angeles, Then and Now
The New Yorker recently commissioned filmmaker Kevin McAlester to recreate a 70-year-old drive through downtown Los Angeles. The resulting split-screen tour of the same streets in the downtown L.A. neighborhood of Bunker Hill in the 1940s and today shows how much the streets have changed and the city has grown.
By the 1950s, the neighborhood, which had previously featured some of the city’s most elegant mansions and hotels, had been turned into low-income housing, according to The New Yorker. The area was highlighted in several noir films as well as in The Exiles, the 1961 film which chronicled the lives of young Native Americans living in the Bunker Hill district.
