Angels Flight
— two orange cars passing halfway up the hill.
Not only on a wall.
“Two small orange cars on the side of Bunker Hill, passing each other halfway. They run on a single cable, counterweighted, so one comes down when the other goes up. Built in 1901 to spare downtown clerks the climb from Hill Street, taken apart in 1969 during the Bunker Hill redevelopment, and brought back in 1996 a block south of where they used to be. The ride is about ninety seconds. People come out of Grand Central Market with sandwiches in paper and take the cars because they're still there.
Angels Flight, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Angels Flight is a narrow-gauge funicular railway on the eastern face of Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles. The lower station opens onto Hill Street, directly across from the 1917 Grand Central Market; the upper station opens onto California Plaza, above Olive Street. The track runs 298 feet at roughly a 33 percent grade. The railway has long been called the shortest in the world. Colonel J.W. Eddy, an engineer and lawyer, opened the line on December 31, 1901, to carry Bunker Hill residents down to the commercial streets below. The railway is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and operated by the Angels Flight Railway Foundation.
The current cars are not new. Colonel Eddy's funicular ran from 1901 until May of 1969, when the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency dismantled it as part of the Bunker Hill clearance, a redevelopment project that flattened the Victorian neighborhood at the top of the hill and replaced it with the towers along Grand Avenue. The cars and the lettered entrance arch were placed in storage. After a public campaign led by the Los Angeles Conservancy, the same agency reinstalled the funicular in 1996, half a block south of the original site. The cars themselves are Sinai and Olivet, named for biblical mountains, and they returned to service in their 1901 orange livery.
The lower station sits at 351 South Hill Street, directly opposite Grand Central Market between Third and Fourth. The upper station opens onto California Plaza off Olive Street, near the Museum of Contemporary Art. The current cash fare is one dollar each way, with a small discount for riders using a TAP transit card. Operating hours generally run from 6:45 in the morning until ten at night, seven days a week, with closures for rain and for occasional maintenance. The ride takes about ninety seconds in each direction. The nearest Metro stop is Pershing Square, three blocks east on Hill Street.