A key can unlock more than just a door. Sometimes, it can unlock a long-forgotten family history.
Measuring three inches long and attached to an oversized safety pin stamped with the number “15,” the brass key that Cassie Heyen keeps in her Oregon home once belonged to her great-great-grandfather, James Horgan, a resident of Bunker Hill in Los Angeles until the early 1950s.
The door it once unlocked is long gone. So, too, is the neighborhood Horgan and thousands of other Angelenos called home, obliterated by a monumental act of urban redevelopment. So complete was Bunker Hill’s erasure that— aside from a few retaining walls — all that remains are memories, photographs, archival records, and artifacts like Horgan’s key, passed down from generation to generation.
Horgan’s descendants only realized the key’s significance during a Zoom call with planning historian Meredith Drake Reitan, who co-directs the USC-based Bunker Hill Refrain, an ambitious project merging public history, digital experimentation, and community outreach.
Heyen first appeared on Drake Reitan’s radar when she donated a collection of her great-great-grandfather’s photos to the Los Angeles City Historical Society. The images, which offered rare glimpses of mid-20th-century Bunker Hill, quickly drew attention on the society’s Instagram account. Intrigued, Drake Reitan reached out to Heyen to learn more about James Horgan.
Before long, they were talking face-to-face over Zoom, joined by Heyen’s grandmother — and Horgan’s granddaughter — Donna Shelley, who had kept the photos in her attic for decades. Shelley shared what she remembered about Horgan and, almost as an afterthought, mentioned an old key of his. “Instant metaphor,” Drake Reitan thought to herself.
“There’s something so incredibly symbolic about a key — for all the obvious reasons” she explained. “But I also think there’s something to be said for the physical evidence of a life, about these little fragments that live on. I think we get really used to seeing photographs, but there’s something so innocent about a key. It just lived on.”
In a follow-up call, Shelley showed the key to Drake Reitan and two student participants, USC’s Connor McQuaide and Santa Monica College’s Grace Olea-Garfias. She recalled playing with it as a child, and how it rattled like a baby toy. Horgan brought it with him when he left Bunker Hill in the early 1950s to move in with her family in Culver City. For decades, the key remained with the family, its significance only dawning on them during that conversation — it might have opened the door to her grandfather’s long-lost apartment.
After Shelley passed away in September, the key came into Cassie Heyen’s possession. She is now considering donating it to the USC Libraries, where it will sit alongside a collection essential to understanding Bunker Hill’s history — and the genesis of the Bunker Hill Refrain project.
On Monday, May 8, 1939, a Works Progress Administration (WPA) enumerator knocked at unit 55 of the Rowan Apartments at 123 S. Bunker Hill Ave. A sixty-eight-year-old retired wholesale grocer named James Horgan opened the door and proceeded to answer questions for a federally funded housing survey designed to document and improve urban living conditions in Los Angeles.
How much was rent? Twelve dollars a month. Was cooking fuel included? Yes. Was there running water? Yes, but only cold. As Horgan answered, the WPA employee inked his responses on a five-by-seven-inch card.
More than eighty-five years later, that card — along with thousands of others preserved in USC Libraries’ Special Collections and made accessible by the USC Digital Library — became the genesis of Bunker Hill Refrain.
Launched in 2021, Bunker Hill Refrain began as an ambitious effort to mine WPA housing records for insights into Bunker Hill’s social and physical makeup. But once the project connected with the students and staff of USC’s Ahmanson Lab — a unit of the USC Libraries’ Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Study — it grew into an even bolder vision: an immersive, 3D digital re-creation of the lost neighborhood.
This 3D model, still evolving, already allows users to soar high over Bunker Hill’s Victorian mansions or swoop in to a particular address for a more personal experience.
Ahmanson Lab director and Bunker Hill Refrain co-director Curtis Fletcher hopes the digital model will counter the city’s official narrative — a story told by the Community Redevelopment Agency in terms of “slum clearance” and “urban blight.”
“We’re exploding that narrative, the idea that there’s a single way to know a neighborhood,” Fletcher explained. “And what this actually does is flip that entirely. There will be multiple ways you can enter this neighborhood. You can enter it through community stories or individual houses, or by exploring where everybody went afterward. It’s a web of information.”
Bunker Hill Refrain’s ambitious scope is reflected by the project team’s diversity of expertise. In addition to Drake Reitan and Fletcher, project directors include Southern California studies librarian Suzanne Noruschat and visualization specialist Andy Rutkowski of the USC Libraries; interactive media specialist Mats Borges of the Ahmanson Lab; and USC Dornsife professor of history, political science, and spatial sciences Phil Ethington. They’re joined by nearly two dozen USC students who have contributed expertise in genealogical research, 3D modeling, and machine learning.
Even as it embraces cutting-edge technology, a chief goal of the project is to deepen public appreciation for the human side of Bunker Hill. Often portrayed as either a noirish enclave of heartbreak and tragedy or a cautionary yet sterile tale of planning overreach, the neighborhood’s true story is far more nuanced.
“I don't think the story of Bunker Hill as a connected family place has really been at the fore,” Drake Reitan explained. “I think we've talked about it as a neighborhood. We've talked about the lost Victorians. But as a place where people worked and got married and had kids — all of that messy daily human stuff — doesn't often come up.”
The project team is working to incorporate these personal elements into the 3D model, allowing users to encounter “residents” as they go about their daily lives, Drake Reitan said.
“So you could walk around the neighborhood and bump into somebody, an avatar, who’s out there watering their geraniums, or they’re going down Angels Flight to Grand Central, or they’re getting on a bus and going out. There are ways we can start humanizing this in a digital space.”
To gather these personal details and build out what they proudly dub a “rebel archive,” the Bunker Hill Refrain team convened a series of workshops this past summer at the Los Angeles Public Library’s Octavia Lab makerspace, with funding from a USC Arts in Action grant. Over six weeks, seven college and high school students and LAPL librarians joined the project team in interviewing Bunker Hill experts — including former residents and their descendants.
One of these was Gordon Pattison, whose family owned the last two houses atop Bunker Hill, known as the Castle and the Salt Box. Pattison, who lived on Bunker Hill until he was five, left a lasting impression.
“Gordon captivated the students,” Drake Reitan reported. “I think they had more of an emotional summer than they anticipated. They were thinking dry history — look people up in the census or something. And then they met people. And as soon as you meet people, it’s different. History is just different when you actually talk to people.”
Talking to Cassie Heyen and Donna Shelley also highlighted the humanity behind those WPA census cards. Although he called Bunker Hill home, he lived alone in the Rowan Apartments, having separated from his wife. His daughter, Eileen, grew up with her mother in West Adams and later Venice, but sent him letters, birthday greetings, and Christmas cards, which he saved.
Although Horgan’s family life was complicated, the students discovered his joy for capturing L.A.’s downtown with his camera, and the pride he took in visits from his granddaughter, Donna.
They also saw how history can ripple through generations. During the summer of 2024, reminiscing about her grandfather’s long-lost home — the tall flights of stairs, stacks of newspapers — buoyed Shelley’s spirits as she struggled with poor health.
“It was such a treat for my grandma,” Heyen recalled. “It was a huge bright spot for her with all the stuff she’d been going through the last year.”
Shelley especially loved the project team’s plans to include an avatar of James Horgan in its digital model.
“She loved knowing that people are going to see James Horgan,” Heyen said. “In the virtual exhibit, if they click on the Rowan apartments, they’ll learn a little about him. She was so excited about that.”
Shelley passed away in September, but Heyen — who knew little about Bunker Hill before connecting with Drake Reitan — carries on her grandmother’s enthusiasm. Although she lives out of state, she hopes someday to visit Bunker Hill and ride Angels Flight — a funicular railway her great-great-grandfather likely used.
She also hopes others will share their family stories with Bunker Hill Refrain, which continues to seek out descendants as it grows its “rebel archive.” For decades, Donna Shelley held onto her grandfather’s photographs and his key, both relics of Bunker Hill, waiting to be unlocked.
“It makes you wonder — there's probably so many examples of that,” Heyen mused. “So many boxes of photos just sitting in somebody's attic with treasures they don't even know about.”
