Who will save Sunshine? The palm tree may be the last survivor of old Bunker Hill

Near the corner of First and Hill streets is a palm tree sitting all by its lonesome in a pot.

Sunshine is a scraggly 50-footer not unlike the region’s other queen palms. But to its biggest champions, it’s special and deserves a forever home.

"Sunshine is this storyteller, this witness, this survivor," said Kim Cooper, cofounder with husband Richard Schave of Esotouric — the sightseeing company that showcases the forgotten, hidden and weird sides of Los Angeles.

The two first learned about Sunshine from a friend who noticed the palm stood erect, all alone, in a patch of dirt at Second and Hill streets — its home for decades.

"I fell in love with her the first time I saw her sitting so proudly ... waving her palm leaves in the air with not a care," Annette Zilinskas, Cooper and Schave’s friend, said.

Corner of Second and Hill from a Google Maps photo taken in 2023. Sunshine the queen palm is on top of the grassy hill.

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Google Maps screenshot.

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Second and Hill streets in downtown L.A., where Sunshine the queen palm was before construction began.

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Fiona Ng

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LAist

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That patch of dirt will be the site of the expanded Colburn School of Music, which broke ground last year to construct a new building at that corner.

" And she said, 'Well, what's gonna happen to this cool tree?'" Cooper recalled.

That patch of dirt also happened to be hallowed ground of sorts, according to architecture historian Nathan Marsak, author of Bunker Hill Los Angeles: Essence of Sunshine and Noir and a longtime friend of Esotouric.

Marsak, in a blog post from 2008, had identified that very bluff of dirt as a last "remnant" of a bygone Bunker Hill, a leftover chunk of a bona fide hillside that was razed to make way for parking lots at around 1935.

"That was the last bit of untouched earth on old Bunker Hill," Cooper said.

A corner of First and Hill streets in downtown in the 1953.

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Courtesy Los Angeles Photographers Collection / Los Angeles Public Library

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Bunker Hill, of course, is an area of downtown that has made and remade itself since the 19th century — from a tony enclave of Victorian mansions, to a working class district of boarding houses by the 1930s, to the site of eminent domain land seizures and evictions of thousands of low-income residents in the late 1950s. It continued to transform and later became what we know today — a hub of office towers, cultural institutions and pricy condos.

"Trees really serve as living monuments that anchor a community's identity, anchors their history and connect generations," Marsak said. "Here's this wonderful tree that has somehow survived everything being torn down around it."

That makes saving Sunshine a no-brainer.

"She is one of the last living things from old Bunker Hill," Schave said.

Sunshine the queen palm at its temporary location near First and Hill streets in downtown.

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Fiona Ng

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LAist

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Sunshine, the queen palm

"It might be as young as 50 years and as old as 70 years," said Donald Hodel, a tree and palm expert who was recruited by Cooper and Schave for the campaign to save Sunshine.

The tree is in fair condition, he said, remarkable since it doesn’t appear to have been cared for — receiving no water other than rainfall.

As to its provenance, Hodel said, there's no real way of knowing how Sunshine got there in the first place. But the very fact that it's still standing, he said, "suggests the palm had excellent care for a long time to allow it to develop an extensive and deep root system making it more resilient to the recent years of neglect."

Those facts alone don't confer historical value, Hodel said, given how common queen palms are in Southern California.

"Nonetheless, Esotouric assured me of its other attributes, primarily its significance of survival on Bunker Hill and the history of the site," Hodel said in an email. "I came around to appreciate this palm and the need for its continued survival in an appropriate place."

Saving a piece of old Bunker Hill

Plans to redeveloping the Bunker Hill area started in the mid-1950s. Displacement of residents soon followed. Construction started in earnest around the 1960s.

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Courtesy Herald Examiner Collection / Los Aneles Public Library

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Bunker Hill redevelopment architectural models.

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Courtesy Herald Examiner Collection / Los Angeles Public Library

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Since first finding out about the Colburn school's expansion plans, the crew of Sunshine evangelists has been trying to find her another home. They enlisted Colburn and the construction company behind the expansion project to agree to pot the queen palm, and to move it to another part of the construction site near the intersection of First and Hill.

"I had really hoped that they would find a spot for her on their property," Cooper said. But, "they want to do their own thing. I think it's wonderful that she was saved and she was not killed."

Potential new digs have been identified at a small plaza next to the base of Angel's Flight at Fourth and Hill. The DTLA Alliance, a business coalition, told LAist it was facilitating communication to relocate the palm there temporarily.

But the organization says the details of relocation and long-term placement are outside its jurisdiction.

For that, Schave and Cooper said they hope Council District 14, which includes parts of downtown, can help.

The two said they have been in contact with the office of Councilmember Ysabel Jurado to save Sunshine, but the conversation fell off earlier this year. (We are awaiting a response from Jurado's office).

 "I really, truly believe this could happen. Sunshine could be put on a flatbed, laid flat, and brought two blocks down to Fourth and Hill," Schave said.

Trees on trunks

Apparently Sunshine wouldn’t be the first. In 1981, a Moreton Bay fig was to be moved from Bunker Hill a few hundred feet to the Angelus Plaza senior housing complex. The towering giant was believed to be 90 years old at the time, according to the Los Angeles Times in July of that year, and it was the last one of its kind to remain standing after redevelopment began in the neighborhood.

Whether the tree really made the trek is up for debate, as Schave was never able to nail down documentation of the move. Still, Hodel the horticulturalist told him the big fig tree sitting at said courtyard fits the size and age.

And they want nothing less for the queen palm.

“You got to save what’s left of old Bunker Hill. There’s so little left on this hill,” Schave said. “So we are not going to lose Sunshine.”