Date of Award
2016
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelors
Department
Social Sciences
First Advisor
Goff, Brendan
Area of Concentration
Social Sciences
Abstract
The story of the Bradbury Building acts as my subjective lens in exploring Los Angeles’s urban development. The Bradbury Building is well known for its extensive cinematic history spanning throughout the last century. Built in the late nineteenth century, it is one of the oldest buildings in downtown Los Angeles. Specifically, this thesis seeks to chart how the Bradbury Building, a structure steeped in the city’s turn-of-the-century utopian aspirations, became a setting of urban decay in popular postwar film noirs. I present a brief history of Bunker Hill, a neighborhood adjacent to downtown LA and the Bradbury Building, in an effort to explain the dark depictions of the Bradbury Building in the mid-twentieth century. Bunker Hill, Los Angeles’s premier residential neighborhood in the late nineteenth century, would become a site of state designated “slum clearance” by the 1940s. I enlist popular urban imaginaries, or depictions of the Bradbury Building in popular culture, in order to acknowledge a fuller spectrum of factors shaping urban development in Los Angeles.
Recommended Citation
Plattor, Zane, "Constructing Utopia: Lost Futures and Imagined Pasts in Los Angeles" (2016). Theses & ETDs. 5259.
https://digitalcommons.ncf.edu/theses_etds/5259