Every Saturday morning for the past three and a half years, William Campbell, 61, leaves his home in Silver Lake and heads to the Angels Airlines station to catch the first flight at 6:45 a.m.
Campbell is one of the team of operators behind the proverbial wheel of two nearly identical cable cars (named Olivet and Sinai) that run up and down a 33% slope from Hill Street to Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles.
“You are part of living history,” said Campbell, wearing an orange and black vest and bow tie and a bowler hat with a monarch butterfly on it. There’s a reason for that, he said curiously.
Bunker Hill Angel Flight.
I’m the first rider today. Shortly thereafter, I joined a family visiting from Texas.
“We were looking at local tourist spots and we saw this cute little railroad,” said Michael Nguyen, who was with his mother and sister. “I thought, oh, this looks interesting. And then it turns out I can actually do it. I thought, OK, that’s pretty crazy.”
The brainchild of lawyer, politician, and engineer Colonel James Ward Eddy, Angel’s Flight’s “Hill Elevator” opened on New Year’s Eve 1901 as a way for people to get up and down Bunker Hill. Bunker Hill was the home of the city’s wealthy people at the time.
Starting in 1917, the journey continued to the streets and stores below Grand Central Market, with the first passengers paying just a penny for the 98-foot railroad billed as “America’s Shortest Railroad.”
When she’s not working her full-time day job investigating animal abuse and mistreatment during the week, Campbell spends her free time poring over online newspaper archives looking for information about Angels Flight.
It was originally located by the Third Street Tunnel, one block from its current location. This train, like Bunker Hill itself, has gone through several changes.
“All the rich people moved to places like Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Bel Air, and all their great Victorian mansions turned into boarding houses, attracting lower incomes and a more diverse population, which resulted in blight and crime — at least according to the city,” Campbell said of Bunker Hill’s transformation.
City officials authorized most of Bunker Hill to be demolished in the 1950s and 1960s, and Angel’s Flight was placed in what was promised to be temporary storage for one to two years, despite protests from singer Peggy Lee and others.
angels flight railway
351 S. Hill St., Los Angeles
Every day from 6:45am to 10pm
Round-trip tickets are orange and include a souvenir portion for $3. A one-way trip costs $1.75, or $1 for TAP cardholders.
William Campbell works there every Saturday and would be happy to talk to you if possible.
You can learn more about Campbell’s wildlife interests and win prizes by taking the Angel Flight quiz through Instagram.
The year was 1969. It took nearly 30 years to recover. Angels Flight welcomed passengers back to its current location in 1996 after a test run carrying 9,000 pounds of cases of beer and soft drinks. The cable car was rebuilt exactly as before, but Sinai was equipped with modern safety requirements, including space for wheelchairs.
A 2001 accident that killed one person and injured seven others led to another long closure until 2010, and a derailment in 2014 led to another short closure. But Angels Flight has been operating since 2017, aside from some odd mechanical issues.
Campbell describes herself as an Angels Flight cheerleader, and it’s easy to see why. During his workday, he pins up a 1904 photo of the cityscape taken from the 80-foot observation tower at its original location so people can compare it to today’s skyscraper skyline.
“At one time, you could see all the way to Catalina,” he said.
There’s also an exhibit about forgotten Bunker Hill folk artist Marcel Cavalla, and Campbell is giving away Angel’s Flight bookmarks, stickers, and maps, all of which he researched, designed, and printed at his own expense.
One of his projects, vintage advertisements from 1901 to the 1940s, displayed on panels above the seats, was installed several months ago.
There’s everything from old Market Basket supermarket advertisements to Barbara Stanwyck Schilling for Lux toilet soap, a standard power lawn mower manufactured by John Bean, and things from the Catalina Homing Pigeon Service, which operated from 1894 to 1902 and delivered messages from Avalon to Bunker Hill.
And the monarch butterfly on the hat? It has to do with his Angels Flight “holy grail” and the only question he can’t definitively answer is why it was painted orange and black.
With that, Campbell grabbed his binoculars to see if there were any passengers waiting to board, and I climbed into the Olivet and waved as we headed down Hill Street.
