Back when Bunker Hill really was a hill and Pershing Square was packed with lush palms, the young writer John Fante roved through downtown Los Angeles in search of stories and fame.
He struggled to write his first fiction in a cheap room in the hillside Alta Vista hotel, clambering down the nearby Angels Flight stairs to explore the city and rub shoulders with its charming, seedy characters.
For those who revere the work of the acclaimed novelist, Bunker Hill is sacred ground.
A troupe of Fante readers gathered Saturday at the intersection of 3rd and South Hill streets, gazing west at what should have been a steep hillside topped with the Alta Vista and other run-down hotels.
Instead, they faced a wall of gleaming office towers.
"This used to be where Angels Flight ran," explained tour creator and guide Richard Schave. But the hill was decapitated decades ago; the Wells Fargo Center now rises where the impoverished Fante wrote draft after draft of his first published short stories.
As 38 participants learned this weekend, a literary walking tour in Los Angeles poses special challenges compared with, say, a tour of James Joyce's Dublin or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Cambridge.
This is an ephemeral city, just as Fante portrayed it in "Ask the Dust" and his other novels.
The Red Car trolley system he rode was removed long ago. The Marcus bar where he once worked as a busboy is now a parking garage. The beaux arts-style Pershing Square that he frequented has vanished, replaced by a concrete-and-grass park that hides a parking garage.
But for some who know Fante's work, images of his 1930s world persevere amid the skyscrapers, freeway off-ramps and dingy office buildings.
Joshua Darlington, 37, an aspiring film writer who works in the business law section at Paramount Studios, where Fante was once a screenwriter, is among those who has read every novel Fante wrote.
"He did such an amazing job of describing the emotional roller coaster of it all, of trying to write," Darlington said.
Some barely knew who Fante was. Evan Burge, 56, of Irvine, whose son gave him tickets for the tour for Father's Day, said he had never read anything written by Fante. But he used to ride on the Angels Flight funicular as a boy with his grandfather.
"We're seeing the city as it once was," he said as the tour paused at Grand Central Market, a former Fante haunt bustling with shoppers.
