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Posted on 12/31/2011 6:42:40 PM PST by BenLurkin
LOS ANGELES (CBS) — The Angels Flight Railway is expected to mark its 110th anniversary with a 1-cent fare promotion.
Riders will be able to take advantage of the special rate through 10 p.m. Saturday. Normally the fare is 25 cents.
The 298-foot inclined railway, dubbed the “shortest railway in the world,” operates mostly on a single track with a bulge in the middle to enable the two counter weighted rail cars to pass.
When the Angels Flight opened in 1901, commuters used the railway to climb the hill to what used to be one of the city’s fanciest neighborhoods.
Today, it is mainly used to shuttle those working in skyscrapers on Bunker Hill to the Metro Red Line’s Pershing Square Station.
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Angel’s Flight in arts and popular culture
Visual arts
• Angel’s Flight is the title of a famous 1931 oil painting by Millard Sheets that hangs as part of the permanent collection in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It shows two young women on the funicular’s upper platform looking down on the nearby houses of Third Street, but the funicular cars themselves are out of the frame.
• Edmund Penney’s 15-minute documentary, Angels Flight Railway, shot in 1965 and during the funicular’s last days in 1969, is a lyrical memorial to the landmark railway.
Movies
• The Angels Flight debut on film was probably Good Night, Nurse! (1918), but it got its first real close-up in a 1920 one-reel comedy of errors, All Jazzed Up, in which a bride honeymooning in Los Angeles can’t stop thrill-riding up and down on Angels Flight. Her husband leaps from one car to the other to reunite with her at the end.
• The opening scene of Impatient Maiden, directed in 1932 by James Whale of Frankenstein fame, is shot all around Angels Flight, including the Third Street steps and the Olive Street Station.
• A scene in Hollow Triumph (1948) features Paul Henreid escaping from pursuers on one of the cars.
• There is a scene in Robert Siodmak’s 1949 film noir Criss Cross where the gangsters are planning the armored car heist. Angels Flight’s cars can be seen through a window going up and down, first in daylight, then in darkness, to illustrate the passage of time.
• Joseph Losey’s 1951 film M features Angels Flight in several shots.
• Angels Flight appeared several times in the opening scenes of the 1953 color film The Glenn Miller Story in full operation.
• In Cry of the Hunted (1953), Jory (Vittorio Gassman), a prisoner being transported, escapes and rides the Angels Flight to evade capture.
• Angels Flight is shown in Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and The Indestructible Man (1956). It is also seen in detail in The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies (1965).
• Angels Flight is used several times in the 1961 Kent Mackenzie film The Exiles, which dramatizes the lives of several real Native Americans living on Bunker Hill in 1958 (when the film was shot).
o The DVD of The Exiles also includes a short film, The Last Day of Angels Flight, taken on and around Angels Flight on the day it closed in March 1969.
o The DVD also had the 1956 Kent Mackenzie short film called Bunker Hill: A Tale of Urban Renewal.
• Angel’s Flight is a low-budget 1965 film noir about a Bunker Hill serial killer, shot on and around Angels Flight in both the downtown and Bunker Hill neighborhoods.
• In the 1966 movie, The Money Trap, Glenn Ford rides down Angels Flight while tailing the daughter of a suspect, with the camera showing the view as a passenger would experience it.
• In City of Angels it is seen in the background when Seth (Nicolas Cage) walks through the market near the end of the movie.
Television
• Perry Mason (Raymond Burr) and Della Street (Barbara Hale) ride Angels Flight in the 1966 episode of Perry Mason entitled “The Case of the Twice-Told Twist” in which Mason’s car was stripped in a parking lot adjacent to the upper end of the funicular.
• Angels Flight was shown at the opening to an episode of Dragnet, with Jack Webb’s voice-over: “...for five cents, ride the shortest railway in the world.”
• The soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful featured Angels Flight in its closing credits.
• On October 13, 2010, Stephanie Forrester (Susan Flannery) and Brooke Logan (Katherine Kelly Lang) rode Angels Flight in The Bold and the Beautiful, .
• On November 23, 2010, NBC’s The Biggest Loser featured the ride in part of a challenge in which the contestants have to either walk the stairs for 5 points or take the train for 1 point. The winner, accumulating 100 points, won a 2011 Ford Edge.
• On January 4, 2011, it was shown in the opening minutes of the Season 3 premier of Southland on TNT, with the character Ben Sherman running up the stairs parallel to the tracks.
• On May 3, 2011, a foot chase in the NCIS: Los Angeles episode entitled “Plan B” featured Angels Flight.
Fiction
• There are at least five novels titled Angel’s Flight or Angels Flight, all with scenes that take place on the funicular and use it as a symbol of some kind.
o The first novel was Angel’s Flight by Don Ryan, published in 1927.
o Angels Flight was both the name and locale of the 1999 Harry Bosch crime novel by Michael Connelly.
• Raymond Chandler fictionally visited Angels Flight in the 1938 novella The King in Yellow and the 1942 novel The High Window.
• Among other novelists who describe and mention Angels Flight in their works are John Fante, and Linda L. Richards in “Death was the Other Woman” the 1990 private-eye mystery set in 1930’s noir Los Angeles.
• Angels Flight was in Piccolo’s Prank, the 1965 children’s book by Leo Politi.
• Angel’s Flight was mentioned in the video game “L.A. Noire” as a landmark.
• “Angel’s Flight” is the title of a 2009 Mercy Allcutt mystery by Alice Duncan.
I just finished reading the Harry Bosch crime novel by Michael Connelly.....quite good.
It's what is known as a funicular railway.
The two cars are linked by a common cable and act to counterbalance each other. As one car ascends the other descends
If you look closely, you'll see that the upper and lower sections have three rails while the center section has four. One car always rides the left and center rails on the 3 rail sections, while the other car always occupies the center and right rails. The 4 rail section allows the cars to pass.
The original Angel's Flight closed in 1969 and this incarnation opened in 1996. I visited LA a number of times from 1976 through 1994 so I was never there when either Angel's Flight was in operation, but I've been on one outside of Altoona, PA which takes you up to the Horseshoe Curve, One of the USA's most famous railroad landmarks.
Unlike the Angel's Flight, this one has just two rails on the top and bottom sections and movable rail sections, called points, to switch each car to its proper side on the passing section.
Everything by Connelly is good.
The last I heard of Angels’ Flight, after they got it going again in the 90s, was that there had been a fatal accident, and it was closed. My recollection is that when I was in downtown LA in 2001, it was not running.
Good to know that it is running.
“Perry Mason (Raymond Burr) and Della Street (Barbara Hale) ride Angels Flight in the 1966 episode of Perry Mason entitled “The Case of the Twice-Told Twist” in which Mason’s car was stripped in a parking lot adjacent to the upper end of the funicular.”
Also the only Perry Mason episode (before the later movies) filmed in color, I believe.
There was apparently a second, less famous funicular railway in the Bunker Hill section of downtown LA called Venus Flight or something like that.
Some have noted that Chandler wrote of walking along Court Street where “the funicular railway comes struggling up the yellow clay bank from Hill Street”, and say that Chandler was wrong, Angel’s Flight went up to Olive Street, not Court Street. But I read somewhere that Chandler might actually have been referring to the second one.
I’m just finding that out....discovered him recently....!
I remember taking the ride at the original just before it was torn down.
Off, I have never heard of any reference to Venus flight after a lifetime in LA. I may have missed it but ...
Googling only yields one reference: this thread.
Well, somehow I couldn’t find it after half an hour of searching last night, but after getting your post I found it on the first google search. Now I see that Nick Danger already found it — Court Flight.
Here’s a link to another site
http://onbunkerhill.org/node/130
I thought you said it was “venus something”, not court flight.
I did. I could not remember what it was actually called, which is why I used the phrase “something like” in my original post. Obviously I was way off on the name.
My point was that people on various websites have claimed that Raymond Chandler, in “The High Window”, had made a mistake by placing Angel’s Flight below Court Street.
The following passage is almost universally claimed (including by the LA Times in at least one article and Wikipedia) to refer to Angel’s Flight, notwithstanding that Angel’s Flight went up to Olive Street, not Court Street:
“I parked at the end of the street, where the funicular railway comes struggling up the yellow clay bank from Hill Street, and walked along Court Street to the Florence Apartments.”
The standard explanation for why Chandler said “Court Street” instead of “Olive Street” was that Chandler for whatever reason named the wrong street.
But there was a funicular that went up to Court Street. Also, if you look at this photo of Court Flight, you can see the exposed clay bank, which Angel’s flight in its original location wedged between a building and tunnel did not seem to have.
My point was that I had read somewhere (probably more than five years ago) that there in fact was a second funicular at Court Street, so that Chandler was correct, and it was likely a second funicular, not Angel’s flight, that Chandler was referring to.
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