(500) Days of Summer|Angels Flight & Angels Knoll — the bench where the city looked back

Tom Hansen loved one view in Los Angeles more than any other, and he made Summer Finn climb toward it. The grassy slope above Hill Street, with its single bench and its clear sightline across the rooftops to the Continental Building, is where he sketched the skyline for her, where he told her what he wanted, and where — five hundred days later — he sat with a pencil and a different woman's name.

The slope is Angels Knoll, and the little orange funicular beside it is Angels Flight, running 298 feet of track between Hill Street and the top of Bunker Hill since 1901. It has been dismantled, rebuilt, shut down and reopened more times than most railways survive. It runs today: a dollar a ride, cash or a tap card, about fifty seconds up. The cars are named Olivet and Sinai, and they pass each other halfway with a sound like a wooden porch settling.

Come knowing the hard part. Angels Knoll itself has been fenced since 2013, and the bench is gone — visitors report a bare patch of ground where it stood. You cannot sit in Tom's seat. What you can do is ride up, walk out onto the terrace at California Plaza, and turn around. The view he was pointing at is still there, unfenced and free: brick parapets, fire escapes, the Continental's white crown, the whole downtown that a greeting-card writer decided was worth loving out loud.

Stand at the top and the film's central joke lands physically. Tom's favourite place is a hill people ride a hundred-year-old machine to reach, and the thing he came to see was never the bench. It was the city, which does not care whether Summer calls.

Location photo: Wikimedia Commons, free licence.