A collection of photographs chiefly documenting the Bunker Hill neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles before and during redevelopment in the mid-twentieth century. Also includes images of residents and adjacent districts of Los Angeles.

Theodore Seymour Hall (1880-1963) was born in Honolulu, Hawaii to William Wisner Hall and Elizabeth Archer Van Cleve Hall. He attended Berkeley High School, in Berkeley, California, and Harvard University. In 1909, he married Ruth Houghton, and they had two children: Houghton Seymour Hall (born 1910) and Winslow William Hall (born 1912). Hall worked in various managerial positions, and in 1920 was manager of the Standard Chemical Company in Alameda, and lived in Oakland, California. In 1925, Hall had settled in New York, working in industrial banking. He and Ruth divorced in 1929, and the same year, Hall married Edna Kofal Davison; they lived in Long Island while Hall worked as a bond salesman and sales executive. By 1938, the 58-year-old Hall was again divorced and living on Bunker Hill in Los Angeles, as a roomer at the Sherwood Apartments on South Grand Avenue. He took up photography and was befriended and mentored by Irving Haines, a local commercial photographer, and Haines' wife, Martha. Hall joined outings of Haines Camera Club, which met downtown on Olive Street. In 1952, Hall was living in the Cumberland Hotel on South Olive Street (Bunker Hill), which he later vacated because the building was scheduled to be torn down. In 1960 he was living at the Engstrum Apartments on West Fifth Street. Hall died in 1963, in Los Angeles, at age 83.The Bunker Hill neighborhood of Los Angeles was an enclave of wealthy residents and grand mansions at the turn of the century. By the 1920s to 1940s, it had transformed into a mixed-use urban residential area with a more transient population, and went into decline. The Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles proposed the Bunker Hill Urban Renewal Project, which was officially adopted by the Los Angeles City Council in 1959. The CRA acquired Bunker Hill properties, relocated residents and businesses, and began demolishing buildings and clearing land, changing the landscape dramatically.

16.3 Linear Feet (34 boxes, 7 binders)

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