WHAT’S THE LINK BETWEEN Horatio’s last words in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Harry Jones’s final misleading in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep?
This is the sort of thing that pops into my mind when I might be pondering more crucial matters, like where I left my keys.
It also arises from my reading habits, namely, having several books going at the same time. At the moment, for example, I’m enjoying George Baxt’s The Greta Garbo Murder Case, Michael Sean Mahoney’s Histories of Computing, Michael Palin’s Around the World in 80 Days, Jasper Fforde’s The Woman Who Died a Lot, Dennis Duncan’s Index, A History of the, and Raymond Chandler’s The Annotated Big Sleep.
I’ve been savoring this last one for several years now, enriched from time to time by watching the 1946 Bogart/Bacall flick yet again. The book’s extended reading is encouraged by Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Dean Rizzuto’s wonderful annotations. There’s always a footnote that compels me to learn more.
Like this one.
Up on Bunker Hill, at the Top of Angels Flight. I was in The Big Sleep’s Chapter Twenty-Six (where Harry Jones (aka Elisha Cook Jr.) gets nixxed by evil guy Canino; this, after giving Canino a false lead as to a girlfriend’s whereabouts: “up on Bunker Hill.”
Hmm…. The annotation cites, “At the time Chandler was writing, Bunker Hill was a crowded, impoverished residential area near downtown Los Angeles. From the 1860s through the First World War it had been an exclusive neighborhood made up of Victorian mansions. As the wealthy moved to Pasadena and the West Side, the mansions were subdivided into rentals and eventually fell into disrepair.”
It continues, “In the 1920s, Chandler himself lived on Bunker Hill, at the top of the Angels Flight funicular railway, with his mother. By then Bunker Hill had already gone into decline.”
Bunker Hill and Angels Flight in the 1920s. Image from The Annotated Big Sleep.
Angels Flight Today. Wikipedia describes, “Angels Flight is a landmark and historic 2.5 ft narrow gauge funicular railway in the Bunker Hill district of Downtown Los Angeles, California. It has two funicular cars, named Olivet and Sinai, that run in opposite directions on a shared cable. The tracks cover a distance of 298 ft over a vertical gain of 96 ft.”
Indeed, Wikipedia might have used the plural, as there have been two different sites for Angels Flight, the original “with trackage along the side of Third Street Tunnel and connecting Hill Street and Olive Street, operated from 1901 until 1969, when its site was cleared for redevelopment.”
The Angels Flight next to the 3rd Street Tunnel, 1960. Image by Jack Boucher via Wikipedia and available from the U.S. Library of Congress.
Sinai and Olivet operated as “a conventional funicular, with both cars connected to the same haulage cable and no track brakes in case of cable failure; a separate safety cable would be activated in a break. It operated for 68 years with a good safety record, with three notable incidents: a 1913 a derailment (with a single female passenger); a sleeping salesman was dragged several yards by a car in 1937; and a sailor walking up the tracks was killed in 1943.”
“The current location,” Wikipedia continues, “opened half a block south of the original location in 1996, mid-block between 3rd and 4th Streets, with tracks connecting Hill Street and California Plaza.” This second installation for Olivet and Sinai operated from 1996 to today, albeit not without serious complications. A fatal accident shut it down in 2001, a minor derailment closed it again during June and July 2010, refurbishing its 15-year-old wheels shut it down again during 2010–2011, and another derailment occurred on September 5, 2013.
This last was attributed to the cars’ non-articulation of wheel/axle assemblies and the slight turning “which allows the cars to pass each other. The axles did not turn to follow the track, resulting in the wheel flanges grinding against the rail, causing excessive wheel wear. This problem, combined with safety system problems which caused unwanted track brake deployment, resulted in a derailment.”
Note the bypass tracking. Image from angelsflight.org
In Popular Culture. Wikipedia includes several dense paragraphs detailing Angels Flight’s appearance in more than 100 films, numerous radio and television shows, and in literature, visual arts, and music dating from as early as 1927 to a 2019 dance scenes in ITZY’s music video “Icy.”
Angels Flight after reopening in September 2017; U.S. National Register of Historic Places and Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument No. 4. Image by Difference engine from Wikipedia.
And in Hamlet too? Well, sorta. In Act V Scene 2, Horatio says, “Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet Prince/ And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”
Gee, even Horatio realized there were more than a single Angels Flight. ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2024