Bunker Hill in its Victorian era was a neighborhood of middle-class ambition — families who had done well enough to afford a proper house on a proper hill, close enough to downtown to walk to business but elevated enough to feel apart from it. The architecture was High Victorian: wraparound porches, ornate gingerbread trim, turrets and towers expressing the era's confidence in decorative excess. As the 20th century advanced, the neighborhood's social character shifted. Residents who could afford to moved to new suburbs; their houses were subdivided into rooming houses and apartments. By the postwar period, Bunker Hill had become what city planners called a 'skid row annex' — which is to say, it housed the kind of people the city preferred not to see.

Before it was demolished, Bunker Hill was the preferred setting of Los Angeles noir fiction. Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe navigated its streets; John Fante wrote about its rooming houses in Ask the Dust. The hill's combination of faded grandeur and present poverty — Victorians turned tenements, Angels Flight shuttling people up and down the grade, the downtown towers visible below while the neighborhood itself decayed above — gave it the exact visual and emotional texture that noir required. Filmmakers used it too: the physical reality of Bunker Hill, before the bulldozers arrived, appears in dozens of films from the 1940s and 1950s.

The 1955 declaration of blight began a process that stretched through the 1990s. Approximately 22,000 people were displaced from Bunker Hill — mostly elderly residents, recent immigrants, and people with limited resources who had made their lives in the affordable housing the neighborhood provided. The city's Community Redevelopment Agency acquired parcels through eminent domain, demolished buildings, and prepared the cleared land for commercial and institutional development. The process was so prolonged that Bunker Hill existed for decades as a construction site, its former residents long gone and its replacement still incomplete.

The Bunker Hill that exists today is an institutional district of a particular Southern California ambition. The Museum of Contemporary Art, designed by Arata Isozaki, opened in 1986. Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall, commissioned in 1987 and opened in 2003, became one of the most photographed buildings in Los Angeles. The Broad contemporary art museum, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, opened in 2015 next to Disney Hall. The Grand, a hotel and residential tower designed by Gehry, completed the transformation of the hill's western face. It is, by any measure, a distinguished cultural district. Whether what was there before was worth what was sacrificed to build it remains a question the city has never fully answered.