Broadway, Los Angeles

Why you should experience Broadway in Los Angeles, California.

Broadway is a storied corridor where Downtown's mercantile character meets the city's earliest civic spine, a dense concentration of twentieth-century entertainment architecture and the commercial street that once drew shoppers from across Southern California.

Running through Downtown between Chinatown and South Park, the central-city corridor follows a north-south line from the Los Angeles River side of Chinatown across the Civic Center, 3rd Street, 7th Street and Olympic Boulevard before continuing through South Los Angeles toward the southern city limits. North of 3rd Street, the route crosses a civic landscape where later government complexes interrupted portions of the nineteenth-century street pattern descending from Fort Moore Hill. The blocks from 3rd Street through Olympic Boulevard tighten into continuous street walls of early high-rises, former department stores and ornate entertainment buildings built close to the sidewalk. South of Olympic Boulevard, Broadway leaves the dense Historic Core for longer commercial blocks and a lower building profile as the route extends toward South Los Angeles. The result is a corridor whose changing scale carries one street from the terrain of nineteenth-century Los Angeles through the architectural concentration of the Historic Core and into the long commercial grid of the southern basin.

What you should know about Broadway.

Broadway is best known for becoming Los Angeles's principal retail and entertainment street after beginning as Fort Street in the first American plan of the city. Lieutenant Edward O. C. Ord laid out Fort Street during his 1849 mapping of Los Angeles, and the road took its original name from Fort Moore, the military position overlooking the settlement from the hill above Temple Street. Los Angeles High School occupied Poundcake Hill beside Fort Street during the 1870s, when houses, churches and open parcels still dominated much of the route. Congregation B'nai B'rith had erected the city's first synagogue near 2nd Street in 1872, and First Presbyterian Church added another prominent spire nearby as religious institutions clustered along the still lightly developed street. Los Angeles placed its third City Hall at 226 South Fort Street in 1888, shifting another major civic institution onto the corridor during the decade when the surrounding blocks were filling rapidly. Merchants and residents subsequently sought a new street name amid confusion between Fort Street and 4th Street, and printer Fred Lind Alles helped lead the campaign for Broadway, selected to invoke the commercial stature associated with New York's thoroughfare. The change became official in 1890. Commercial construction accelerated almost immediately, and by 1910 Broadway had become the city's dominant retail artery. Arthur Letts had opened The Broadway Department Store at 4th Street after arriving in Los Angeles in 1895, building a mercantile enterprise that expanded into one of California's largest retail businesses. Letts then financed manager John Bullock's independent store at Broadway and 7th Street in 1907, creating another department-store anchor whose original building by Parkinson & Bergstrom eventually expanded across six adjoining structures. Broadway's rise from a road beneath Fort Moore into the principal shopping street of a rapidly expanding metropolis compressed Los Angeles's nineteenth-century civic growth and early twentieth-century consumer economy onto the same alignment.

The theatrical building boom transformed the same commercial artery into a nationally significant concentration of performance architecture between the opening years of the twentieth century and the Great Depression. Mason Opera House shifted major theatrical activity toward Broadway in 1903, challenging the earlier concentration of entertainment venues along Main Street. Three major houses followed in 1910 and 1911: Clune's Broadway, the Pantages and the Orpheum, later known as the Cameo, Arcade and Palace. Morgan & Walls designed the 1,400-seat Pantages, where Sophie Tucker appeared during her first West Coast tour and Stan Laurel performed in 1919 before the house became the Arcade in 1928. Oliver Morosco added his namesake theater in 1912, the Rialto arrived in 1917 and Sid Grauman opened the Million Dollar Theatre in 1918 as an early purpose-built movie palace combining cinema with elaborate stage presentation. Loew's State followed in 1921, the Metropolitan in 1923, the new Orpheum in 1926 and S. Charles Lee's Tower Theatre in 1927, whose design advanced the young architect toward a prolific career in motion-picture architecture. Lee returned for the Los Angeles Theatre, completed in 1931 at a cost of $1 million with an elaborate French Baroque interior, followed that same year by John M. Cooper's Art Deco Roxie. Twelve historic theaters survive along Broadway, preserving the principal physical concentration created during the period when vaudeville, legitimate theater and motion pictures competed for audiences within a few blocks. The Great Depression ended the major construction cycle in 1931, yet Broadway's theaters retained another cultural role as changing patronage brought Spanish-language films and variedades to houses including the Million Dollar during the postwar decades. The surviving theater district consequently preserves the architectural transition from live stage entertainment through the emergence of the movie palace and into a later chapter of Latino cultural life in Downtown.

How to fold Broadway into your trip.

Broadway works as the anchor for an architectural outing connecting a Victorian office building conceived around daylight, a century-old public market spanning two early commercial structures and a glass-roofed shopping passage created from one of Downtown's lost pedestrian streets.

Begin at Bradbury Building, commissioned by mining and real-estate investor Lewis Bradbury and completed in 1893 as a five-story office building at Broadway and 3rd Street. Sumner Hunt initially received the commission before George H. Wyman, then a 32-year-old draftsman lacking formal architectural or engineering training, assumed responsibility for the project. Wyman concentrated the design around a soaring interior court illuminated through a glazed roof, surrounding the void with open elevator cages, marble stairs, walkways and intricate cast-iron railings. Edward Bellamy's 1888 utopian novel Looking Backward supplied a significant conceptual reference through its depiction of a vast light-filled commercial hall. Rose and gold glazed brick, pale floor tile and brown marble amplified the daylight descending through the court, producing an interior radically more elaborate than the comparatively restrained exterior. The 1893 building survives as the oldest commercial building remaining in the central city and became a National Historic Landmark in 1977. Continue across 3rd Street to Grand Central Market, which opened in October 1917 across the ground floor and basement of two adjoining buildings linking Broadway with Hill Street. Homer Laughlin, founder of the Homer Laughlin China Company, commissioned the Broadway building in 1897, and architect John Parkinson designed its Beaux-Arts commercial structure. Harrison Albright added the Hill Street building in 1905 using reinforced concrete, creating one of Southern California's earliest major applications of the structural system. The market arrived twelve years later and was promoted as the largest and finest public market on the Pacific Coast, filling the connected lower floors with food merchants serving a Downtown population at the center of a city then ranked tenth nationally by population. Continuous market operation since 1917 has carried the property through more than a century of demographic and commercial change. The paired buildings preserve a physical link between late nineteenth-century Broadway development, early reinforced-concrete engineering and the public-market economy that followed. Conclude at Broadway-Spring Arcade Building, completed in 1924 on the former route of Mercantile Place, a narrow shopping street whose stores had occupied the block for decades. A design competition selected Kenneth A. MacDonald Jr. and Maurice C. Couchot, who received $60,000 for a scheme preserving the pedestrian passage through a far larger commercial complex. Two twelve-story office towers rose on Broadway and Spring Street with a three-level arcade connecting them across the block. The interior passage measures 826 feet by 26 feet, originally contained 61 shops and sits beneath an expansive glass roof patterned after London's Burlington Arcade. Spanish Baroque terra-cotta arches mark its entrances, and the complex later acquired rooftop radio towers after KRKD moved there in 1932. A 2010 rehabilitation converted the towers to residential use while retaining the historic passage between Broadway and Spring Street. The progression moves from Wyman's 1893 experiment with a light-filled interior court through a 1917 market joining two generations of commercial construction and culminates in MacDonald and Couchot's block-spanning arcade, tracing three increasingly ambitious ways Downtown carried public circulation inside Broadway's architecture.

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