Bunker Hill's 'Last Children' Finally Saw Leo Politi's Drawings of Them

Two sisters and their cousin found about 15 unseen Politi renderings of their razed home in Central Library's Special Collections.

The first drawing out of the box showed 221 S. Bunker Hill Ave., and the women huddled around it had grown up inside.

Sisters Vicki Rodriguez and Ruby Besing and their cousin Julie Lendt are in their 60s and 70s now. In September, LAist reported, they went to Central Library downtown, blocks from their old street, to see what the painter Leo Politi made of their childhood before Bunker Hill was bulldozed. Politi's name for them was "the last children on Bunker Hill." They thought he'd painted their house twice. The library had a lot more than that.

"To our knowledge, there were only the two paintings in the book," Rodriguez told LAist. Instead, she said, the library held something like 15 sketches and paintings of the house "we'd never seen before." He'd even drawn Ruby's cat, Poncho.

Back then, the girls just knew him as Mr. Politi, a friendly man with an easel who set up outside while they played. They had no idea he was famous. His picture book Song of the Swallows had won the 1950 Caldecott Medal, according to the Los Angeles Public Library.

Politi had lived on the hill himself, and he knew what was coming. "I saw these beautiful mansions being torn down," he told a KCET interviewer in 1987, in an interview LAist cited, "and I says, 'I just got to start drawing them and recording them.'"

What was coming had been decades in the making. The city's Community Redevelopment Agency was formed in 1949, according to the library's history of the neighborhood, written for a 2015-16 Central Library exhibit. Bunker Hill became the agency's first target for mass redevelopment. Residents and landowners fought the evictions and lost. Most of the hill's buildings came down starting in the early 1960s, and for decades many of the cleared acres sat as parking lots.

Thousands of people were pushed out through eminent domain, LAist reported, and most of them didn't own their homes and got no help moving. The Bruce family did own theirs. The parents never told the kids about the fight, and in the summer of 1963 they packed up for Echo Park.

The house was a bet on the city. Politi's book calls it grandmother's house, but it belonged to Byron and Vaden Bruce, who grew up poor in Kentucky and came west in the mid-1940s. Byron was a musician with limited sight who couldn't drive, so the hill let him walk to downtown's bars and clubs. He scraped together enough to buy a few houses nearby and cut them into apartments.

The year after the family left, Politi published Bunker Hill Los Angeles: Reminiscences of Bygone Days. In 1965, Central Library paid $3,000 for 44 of his drawings and sketches. Collecting art isn't usually this library's job, but librarians decided the record of a vanished neighborhood was worth it.

Some of those pieces ended up in the children's section, which fits. A 1949 article by one of its librarians, quoted by the library, describes Politi's frequent visits to Central Library's children's department, and the library says he sketched the city's kids often. The pictures of the Bruce house, though, sat in Special Collections.

The connection came sideways. For 30 years, Rodriguez has worked as a secretary for a man who lives on today's Bunker Hill, right across the street from the old Bruce lot. He's a neighbor of LAist writer Lisa Napoli, who helped put Rodriguez in touch with the library.

"It blew me away," Rodriguez told LAist. A few days after that first visit, the three women came back so librarian Ani Boyadjian could record their oral histories. Politi drew the last children on Bunker Hill. Now the library has them in their own words.

Source: LAist, retrieved October 10, 2026. Other sources: lapl.org, lapl.org (2).